It has been a long journey since 1981, when seven professionals N. R. Narayana Murthy, Nandan Nilekani, S. Gopalakrishnan, N. S. Raghavan, S. D. Shibulal, K. Dinesh and Ashok Arora pooled in Rs 10000 (US $250) and started Infosys. By 1999, it had been named by Forbes as one of the 20 Most Promising Small Companies in the world and today, it is the bellwether of IT in India and present in 61 major cities across 25 countries.
Headquartered in an 80 acre campus in Electronics City, Infosys defines, designs and delivers IT enabled business solutions for its clients to win in the flat world. It believes that four mega forces (rise of emerging economies, global demographics shift, technology ubiquity and regulations) are flattening the business world. To succeed in such an environment, companies will need to shift their operational priorities. Infosys brings together its expertise in Consulting, IT services and BPO to create solutions that allows its clients to make money from information, to increase their customer loyalty through faster innovation, to restructure their cost base so that cost becomes a fuel for their growth and helps them win in the ‘turns’ of business cycles.
The company is built on a value system which says “The softest pillow is a clear conscience”. Its founders decided that the company would aim to earn the respect of stakeholders (clients, partners, employees, investors and the society it operates in). Forbes magazine has called it a “model of transparency for companies everywhere” and according to Fortune magazine, Infosys is the only company in the world to publish its financial statements in accordance with the GAAP of eight different companies.
Infosys has employees from 66 different nationalities and believes that to win in the knowledge economy, an organisation has to be able to attract and retain the best global talent. In 2007, over 1.5 million people applied for a job with Infosys; roughly about 1 in 100 is selected. Its Global Education Centre at Mysore, a residential campus for over 10000 trainees, was called the “Taj Mahal of training centres” by Fortune magazine. Its global internship programme, InStep, attracted over 12000 applications from 80 of the top universities in the world in 2007.
Commemorating its 25th anniversary, Infosys became the first company to remotely ring the NASDAQ opening bell from India on July 31, 2006, S. Gopalakrishnan, CEO an occasion at which NASDAQ CEO Robert Greifeld said, "Infosys has defined what it means to be in a flat world. It is the global transformation partner of choice."
This company believes that what cannot be measured cannot be managed or improved. This is encapsulated in an Infosys adage, “In God we trust; everyone else must come with data.” The company has been designed to function in a way that the best data wins. Clients trust Infosys predictability, which has a 90 per cent record of on-time and on-budget delivery of projects.
Infosys has changed the way IT services were delivered by pioneering the Global Delivery Mode (GDM). GDM is about sourcing capital from where it is cheapest, sourcing talent from where it is best available, producing where it is most efficient and selling where the markets are, without being constrained by national boundaries. Given that Infosys has been doubling in size every two years on an average, it nurtures and improves its powers of innovation, speed of response and execution excellence.