BENGALURU: After declaring that Infosys aims to be a $20-billion company by 2020, Chief Executive Vishal Sikka has started laying down a blueprint towards achieving that goal. Plans include heavy-mining the company's top 100 clients with dedicated partners for each, driving up margins through automation, squeezing higher share of revenues from services such as consulting, and acquisitions.

Sikka, attempting to orchestrate a turnaround in the fortunes of Infosys, is personally spending more time with the company's top 100 customers such as Bank of America and Apple. He has made it a top priority for the company's senior management to help mine these accounts, according to three people familiar with the developments.

Infosys, the country’s second largest information technology services company, will now have to find a successor for K V Kamath, its non-executive chairman, now president-elect of the New Development Bank being set up by BRICS nations.

In making the announcement, Union Finance Secretary Rajiv Mehrishi said the appointment would be effective when Kamath got free from current assignments. Kamath is also non-executive chairman at ICICI Bank.

Bengaluru: Infosys Ltd, which will turn 34 this July, is banking on its $500 million innovation fund to tap into the start-up ecosystem from Silicon Valley to Bengaluru. The motive: To remain relevant for the next 34 years.

For now, India’s second largest software services exporter has started building a team to identify, evaluate and invest in start-ups focused on new technologies.

The two-year old Bengaluru-based price comparison site, BuyHatke has raised $1 million in its first round of funding from Infosys Co-founder S Gopalakrishnan along with Japanese company Beenos. The new funding will be used by the startup for marketing the site and on working on new products, besides expanding the team.

S Gopalakrishnan has invested money in his personal capacity while Beenos has infused funds as a company.

Between Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Wipro and Infosys, the three bigwigs of the Indian IT space, it seems that that employees are jumping the ship at a rate faster than ever.

The annual attrition rate at Infosys stood at 18.9%, Wipro average at around 15% and TCS shed nearly 48,000 employees last year, averaging at 14.9% in the last quarter of fiscal year 2015.

Infosys co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan has invested an undisclosed amount in Chennai-based speech recognition solutions company Uniphore Software Systems in a Series A round of funding.

The funding will fuel Uniphore’s global expansion and product and core technology development plans.

Indian multinational corporation, Infosys is looking to evaluate six early stage startups in India for investments that focus on ares such as decision science and artificial intelligence. The company has allocated $250 million capital from its $ 500 million Innovation fund for investments in the range of $10-25 million per startup.

“The discussions are still at a very early stage,” said one of the persons directly familiar with the matter. “Most of the startups that companies like Infosys are looking to tap are incorporated in India, with their founders based out of the Silicon Valley.”

IT major Infosys has asked the West Bengal government to either give SEZ status to the company’s proposed software development centre at Rajarhat or repay the money it has given in advance for the land.

“We have told the state government that it should either give us the SEZ status or pay back the money which was advanced to get the land,” a senior Infosys official told PTI.

V Balakrishnan, former chief financial officer and board member of Infosys Technologies, has invested in CannyKart, a marketplace which only deals with the Internet of Things (IoT) devices, products and solutions. This is his first investment in e-commerce.

IoT refers to transfer of data over a network without requiring human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction.

In line with the company's newly laid strategy that underscores the importance of 'design thinking', Infosys, India's second largest information technology services company, has hired Jason Wolf, a former creative director at SAP Labs, the research and development arm of German software maker SAP, as the Bengaluru-based company's Global Head of Experience Design.

In his previous role, Wolf, a design expert and alumnus of Stanford University's Design School was responsible creative design at the office of the CTO, chairman's project at SAP. After assuming the charge of CEO & MD at Infosys in June last year, Vishal Sikka has roped in experts at Stanford University's D school to train design thinking to employees internally as well as to the clients.

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