Sikka promotes 170 in big push for Vision 2020

Infosys for the second time cut annual forecast in three months on account of uncertain business environment

Infosys chief executive officer (CEO) Vishal Sikka has promoted over 170 top leaders, elevating at least eight to executive vice-presidents as an incentive to push them towards his $20-billion revenue target by 2020.

Earlier this month, Infosys for the second time cut annual forecast in three months on uncertain business environment and sharp drop in volumes in traditional services. While the drop has been substantial, the growth in emerging areas such as automation, digital, and cloud has not been as steep to offset the dip.

At the same time, Sikka, who took over as the first non-founder CEO in 2014, has seen several senior leaders quit, including Infosys loyalists for over two decades such as Samson David, senior vice-president and head of cloud, infrastructure, and security. Seven executive vice-presidents including consulting head Sanjay Purohit, health care, insurance, and life sciences head Manish Tandon, and head of business process outsourcing, Anup Uppadhayay, have left Infosys in the past year.

To stop the exits and incentivise leaders to perform more aggressively in line with Sikka's strategy of selling services with an overlay of software, the chief executive has made efforts to increase employee stock options, salaries, and promotions. Two weeks ago, he offered million-dollar packages to four presidents. He also got eight new executive vice-presidents to take the total tally to 14.

These are Narasimha Rao Manepally, senior vice-president and head of independent validation services, who replaced Samson David as head of cloud, infrastructure, and security; Satish H C, senior vice-president of data and analytics; Ritika Suri, former colleague of Sikka at SAP and now head of large deals; Deepak Padaki, head of mergers and acquisitions; Richard Lobo, senior vice-president and head of human resources; Jayesh Sanghrajka, deputy finance chief; Karmesh Vaswani, head of Europe for retail, consumer packaged goods, and logistics; and Koushik R N, head of procurement.

An Infosys spokesperson confirmed the elevations.