Vishal Sikka talks about Infosys’ ups ahead of a crucial meet

Ahead of Infosys’ annual shareholder meeting on Monday, the first non-founder chief executive officer, Vishal Sikka has highlighted some of the biggest achievements of the country’s second-largest software exporter during the past one year, in his blog. He also paid tribute to outgoing non-executive chairman KV Kamath, according to an Economic Times report.

Sikka spoke about some of the big bets Infosys has made, including what the company internally calls 'Zero Distance'. He said the company started the Zero Distance initiative as part of an internal push to infuse innovation into each of the company's existing client projects. The company currently has about 23,000 projects with customers.

Twelve months after being named as the CEO of Infosys, Sikka said in the internal company blog on Sunday: "I write this onboard a beautiful Lufthansa Boeing 747-8, the latest incarnation of the magnificent plane that was born around the same time I was, and has evolved through these decades in a timeless manner. It makes me even more proud that a brilliant team of Infoscions helped design many key parts and systems of this amazing machine."

He further said the company had made a five-point template internally to improve the quality of each customer project. Infosys has even formed Zero Distance groups on Yammer and on the company's intranet Sparsh.

"Then we rolled this template out to a 1000 projects and their leadership, and a few weeks later, to all our projects....Projects covering more than 68k delivery colleagues at Infosys, that is more than 70% of our delivery strength, are participating and more than 500 client conversations relating to the improvements and innovations in their projects have already happened," he said.

The Infosys CEO said the company had so far trained over 35,000 employees in design thinking, of which more than 21,000 have been trained from the delivery organisation. The company has also conducted over three dozen design thinking workshops till date.

The company has rolled out its Infosys Information Platform (IIP) to more than 100 customer projects. It is the company's flagship big data analytics platform and the platform's development is being overseen by platforms head Abdul Razack, a key Sikka lieutenant.

"Under Abdul and Samson's leadership, our work in IAP is already resulting in substantial savings due to automation in the routine, mechanizable areas like parts of infrastructure management. And we now have more than 100 commercial IIP engagements, including many that have already produced breakthrough results. Panaya's adoption is underway, and is picking up steam. We've crossed 12 Panaya wins done by the Infosys CSG teams," Sikka said.

Meanwhile, Sikka paid tribute to Kamath and said new chairman R Seshasayee had "become a mentor" to him. "(KV Kamath) is an amazing man, a natural leader, a unique combination of spirituality and practicality, of great vision and dreams, and great execution and discipline. As happy as I am to see him lead this great new institution for humanity, I will really miss him," he said.
(Image: Reuters)