SAP's tech head of security likely to join Sikka at Infosys, says report

Gordon Muehl, a veteran at SAP where he joined as a developer in 1998, was a direct reportee of Sikka in his previous role

One more senior executive of SAP is joining Infosys, the Bengaluru-based information technology (IT) services company headed by Vishal Sikka, a former executive board member and chief technology officer at the German enterprise software company, global wire agency Bloomberg said on Tuesday.

Quoting unnamed sources, the report said SAP’s chief technology officer for security, Gordon Muehl, was leaving to take an executive role at Infosys.

Muehl, a veteran at SAP, had joined as a developer in 1998. At Infosys, he is expected to become a vice-president, with focus on business development and customers’ technology projects, based in Germany, the report added.

“For seven years at SAP, Muehl reported to Vishal Sikka, who took over as Infosys’s chief executive officer (CEO) in August 2014. Hiring Muehl is a further move by Infosys to inject software know-how into a company best known for contract programming and technical support,” the report said.

Infosys declined to offer any comment for this story while SAP could not be reached. But a spokesperson of the company had declined to comment on Muehl’s plans for the Bloomberg story.

After Sikka joined Infosys in June last year, a few of his former colleagues have followed him to the Bengaluru-based company in leadership roles. Michael Reh, a former executive vice-president at SAP, joined Infosys soon after Sikka assumed the role of the CEO and managing director. He is heading the product and platform businesses of Infosys, including banking solutions Finacle and Edgeverve, which focus on products and platforms.

Abdul Razack and Ritika Suri, both joined Infosys from SAP, are now heading the big data and analytics practice, and mergers and acquisitions (M&As)’s initiatives, respectively. The other SAP executives in charge of critical roles include Sanjay Rajagopalan and Navin Budhiraja.

In an earlier interaction with the media during the company’s second-quarter earnings’ press conference, Sikka had downplayed these movements.

“Well, a few of my friends and colleagues have joined. But also many colleagues have joined from outside,” he had said.

“I would not read anything great into it. It is a relatively common thing when a senior executive leaves the company; they have several people who then decide to come and work with them again and so forth.”