Blow to Sikka? Now, Infosys' global head of investment fund quits

In another setback to Vishal Sikka’s digital transformation journey at Infosys, Yusuf Bashir, the company’s global head of the $500 million innovation fund, has resigned. This is the third big exit from Sikka’s core team in the last couple of months after Ritika Suri and Sandeep Dadlani. 

The development was first reported by Times of India. 

Bashir, who joined Sikka’s team in early 2015, spearheaded investments in the emerging technology areas such as artificial intelligence, big data, cloud in firms such as UNSILO, ideaForge, Trifacta, Waterline Data, Cloudyn, CloudEndure, Whoop, Airviz and TidalScale. 

Before joining Sikka’s team, he was vice president, Office of the CTO at SAP and was a member of the core SAP HANA team. 

With Bashir's exit, a large chunk of the 14-odd executives brought in by Sikka from SAP have exited Infosys, India’s second largest IT services firm, said a person aware of the development requesting anonymity. 

Earlier this month, Suri, executive vice president, quit the company. She also looked at mergers and acquisitions initially and was involved in the acquisition of Israeli digital technology firm Panaya. 

Infosys has lost ten key executives ever since Sikka joined in August 2014, indicating the challenge for him in retaining top-level talent in an uncertain environment for the IT services industry.