 "Infy top management churn continues, senior VP Chandrashekar Kakal latest to quit")
The top-management churn continues at India’s second largest IT-services firm Infosys with Chandrashekar Kakal, senior vice president and member of the executive council, resigning from the company on Thursday.
Since NR Narayana Murthy’s returned to Infosys last June as its chairman, the Bangalore-based IT major has witnessed at least eight high-profile exits. These include V Balakrishnan, former CFO and board member, Ashok Vemuri, who joined iGate as CEO, Stephen Pratt, executive council member and Basab Pradhan, head of global sales and marketing.
“On March 19, 2014, Chandrashekar Kakal, senior vice president and member of the executive council conveyed his intention to resign from the company effective April 18, 2014,” Infosys said in a filing to the BSE.
As part of its ongoing restructuring, early this year, Infosys discontinued its executive council. The council was a forum of senior employees within the firm that Murthy expanded in October last year, adding 12 new members to the council to introduce fresh faces among the senior management. Kakal was one of the key members of the executive council.
Kakal, who joined the IT firm in 1999, played a key role in the company’s entry into the package implementation and related services market. In 2004, he was appointed global head of enterprise solutions business, which grew to over 25 percent of the company’s total service revenues. He was also on the board of Infosys BPO. Last year, he was given additional responsibilities of heading the overall consulting and system integration verticals, a high-margin business, which was earlier headed by Stephen Pratt.
Internally, Infosys has seen a management transformation in the last several months. The IT firm also realigned its business portfolios under its two newly appointed presidents, BG Srinivas and UB Pravin Rao who would be reporting to CEO Shibulal, a move widely seen as the start of a two-horse race for the corner office.
Recently at an investor call Murthy pointed out that he is ’not happy’ with the performance of the company over the last two years. “In the financial year 2012-13, our growth rate was about 5.8 percent compared to the 11 percent of the Indian software industry,” he said at the call, adding that the second area of concern for the company has been the declining operating margin, which was 29.5 percent in FY11 compared to 23.5 percent for the current year
Shares of the Bangalore-based IT firm were marginally up 0.96 percent to close at Rs 3303 on the Bombay Stock Exchange on Thursday, while the sensitive index, Sensex, ended the day flat, down 0.4 percent. ?