<img class="gwt-Image" src="/photo/51109185.cms" style="width: 800px; height: 600px;" /> 
 Technology is changing today’s world but <keyword id="6354185" type="ENTERTAINMENT" weightage="100" keywordseo="IT">it</keyword> is happening for quite for a while now. But there is something unique about today’s world and <keyword id="2547679" type="PERSON" weightage="100" keywordseo="Navin-Budhiraja">Navin Budhiraja</keyword> who just joined <keyword id="6354512" type="CITY" weightage="100" keywordseo="Infosys">Infosys</keyword> a year back reveals the secret formula. 
 
“The big difference is the pace of this change. Startups are doing well now as they adapt quickly to change,” said Navin Budhiraja. 
He added that there is a general commodisation happening between hardware and software stack which is driving this fast technological change in the country. 
 And, Infosys being a technological giant of the country cannot be left far behind in the game. If you look at their game closely, they are not that far behind and <keyword id="71487" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="100" keywordseo="open-source">open source</keyword> is their weapon this time. 
 
Open source became huge in 2015 with more consumers adapting it like never before. Though to a layman the quick adaptability will be credited to the ‘free’ aspect of it all, a survey done by Infosys actually contradicts this and brings the real picture forward. 
 
“Previously it was quality first and the security and somewhere down bottom came ‘free’. In 2015 innovation became the topmost reason for using open source platform, ” said Navin for this was great news as he is known as the driving force behind nurturing entreprenurship in Infosys. 
 
He continued to add to this that start-ups will become the new open source pioneers in the country. 
 Navin also said Infosys is betting big on open source AI. With their non-profit initiative called <keyword id="3257678" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="100" keywordseo="Open-AI">Open AI</keyword>, that is funded by the likes of <keyword id="6355315" type="PERSON" weightage="100" keywordseo="Elon-Musk">Elon Musk</keyword>, they are planning to be the game changer of the ‘next big thing after internet (AI)’. 
 
“20% share of Vishal Sikka’s 2020 would come from software and a significant share would be from Open Source,” said Navin. 
 
“Using something new like Open Source requires a lot of cultural aspects to look into like IT, financial, heads should agree upon and work so that the company is not hurt and we can still explore. Traditional Infosys it was difficult to do. We are trying to change a few things,” he said. 
Talking about the main strategy to target the open source market in India, he said Infosys doesn’t really go and sell Open Source. “We are there as the customer demand is there.” 
 
Image credit: Indiatimes

Exclusive: Infosys is using Open Source as its most
lethal weapon yet!

<img class="gwt-Image" src="/photo/52202668.cms" /><keyword id="6354512" type="CITY" weightage="20" keywordseo="Infosys">Infosys</keyword> is creating an army of supercoders for its artificial intelligence platform MANA, and is hiring top talent from <keyword id="6357722" type="COMPANY" weightage="20" keywordseo="silicon-valley">Silicon Valley</keyword>. 
 
India’s second largest software exporter is betting big on artificial intelligence and futuristic products. 
 
Infosys' head of architecture and technology Navin Budhiraja, in an interview to ET, said that the IT company has doubled the size of its special supercoders team under the ‘Expert Track programme’. 
 
"What I see going forward is MANA becoming the centerpiece of all of the automation work that we do. We want to bring AI to the enterprise to solve a set of issues that we see. MANA is a culmination of the work we're doing around the Big Data platform, around the Automation platform, around the knowledge platform," Budhiraja told ET. 
 
Infosys is getting more executives on board who have specialised in futuristic areas and who work on IAP, IIP, IKP platforms. 
 
"The Expert Services team will be run by Samson David who also runs our infrastructure business. He has been instrumental around running a lot of implementations around IAP. He will have the expert services team underneath him which will primarily based out of India," Budhiraja told ET. 
 
When asked about short supply of talent in these skills, Budhiraja said hiring was not easy. 
 
"We've hired a couple of people already, their focus is around AI and natural language processing. This is a hard skill to find. We are hiring key folks both in the US and India. We are also looking for talent in areas such as next-gen apps, apps that are self-healing, etc -that's the kind of talent we are looking for. Also for product management and product marketing,” he said. 
 
(Image: Indiatimes)

Infosys is building an army of supercoders from Silicon Valley to gain maximum from Artificial Intelligence rush

<img class="gwt-Image" src="/photo/50008370.cms" />In a bid to build an internal team of supercoders, <keyword id="6354512" type="CITY" weightage="20" keywordseo="Infosys">Infosys</keyword> is willing to go to any length and this time it is going to Silicon Valley. 
 
Infosys wants programmers who can tackle any software-related challenge and for this, it is going to tap talent from Silicon Valley for the initiative known as Expert Track. 
 
Top top Infosys executives Abdul Razack and Navin Budhiraja had told ET that the company was planning to open up the Expert Track programme for gifted coders from innovation hotbeds such as the Silicon Valley and other parts of the world. 
 
"As of now (Expert Track) looks only in India, but we are going to open it up for the Valley as well. We have set this up to hire people from everywhere, not just India -but from across the world. The assessment process is available to anybody , it's essentially an online assessment process," said Budhiraja, senior vice-president and head of architecture and technology at Infosys. 
 
The technology is changing with new innovations and Infosys wants to move with the pace. IT companies are, therefore, fighting it out to remain at the top and offer services in automation, robotics, etc. 
 
Infosys is also keeping its option of tapping talent from startups. 
 
Meanwhile, programmes like Expert Track are rewarding too. 
 
"Career-wise if you grow, you would become something like a Fellow, yes. But obviously that doesn't mean that everybody here in the programme is a Fellow. The key idea is that you're an individual contributor, your main gift is to be a very very good programmer," said Budhiraja.

Infosys is handpicking ‘gifted coders’ from Silicon Valley who can tackle any software-related challenge

<keyword id="6354512" type="CITY" weightage="100" keywordseo="Infosys">Infosys</keyword> is paying more attractive salaries to its employees in overseas locations than in India. The company has hired and will be hiring highly-paid talent abroad, which could hit its costs. This means, the number of employees earning salaries in crores is higher than in India. As per a report by Economic Times, Infosys is paying over Rs 1 crore to more than 1,800 employees in its overseas locations. In FY17, out of 151, 956, Infosys paid salaries of over Rs 1 crore to only 50 of its India-based employees. The report stated out of 48,400 overseas employees, 1,800 are already crorepatis in rupee terms. The number of crorepatis is likely to go up abroad as Infosys plans to hire 10,000 people in the US - a mix of freshers and experienced people. "The firms are trying to address this to some degree by hiring out of college and these wages will be lower and more in line with the $70,000 for first year workers. But the wages will quickly climb to the market average of $125,000-$150,000 (Rs 80-96 lakh) as these employees gain experience," Peter Bendor-Samuel, CEO of IT advisory firm Everest Research, told ET. "Infosys' hiring overseas in FY17 was similar to FY16, and the average salaries in both years have been consistent. Any potential impact arising out of our recently announced US recruitment strategy has already been factored into our margin guidance," Infosys informed ET. ET reported Infosys' head of digital Scott Sorokin, who joined from interactive agency Razorfish, is paid over Rs 7.3 crore. Abdul Razack, global head of Infosys Platforms, was paid Rs 5.26 crore. Sanjay Rajagopalan, head of design and research, is paid a little over Rs 5.2 crore. Navin Budhiraja, head - architecture &amp; technology, earns over Rs 5.3 crore. Ritika Suri, global head of corporate development, has a total gross salary of over Rs 5.1 crore.

Infosys is paying in crores to more employees abroad than in India. Here are the figures

<img class="gwt-Image" src="/photo/53282962.cms" /> 
A few days back, Indian IT giant <a href="http://www.businessinsider.in/Infosys-relaunches-ESOP/articleshow/53225972.cms">Infosys </a>shocked the stock markets when it posted a weak performance in the first quarter of this fiscal. 
 
Even though the last few quarters saw the company impressing one and all with its <a href="http://www.businessinsider.in/Infosys-posts-13-4-rise-in-net-profit-misses-estimates/articleshow/53222425.cms">performance</a>, everyone was shocked when it lowered its full-year guidance from April’s 11.5-13.5% April to 10.5-12%. 
 As reported earlier, CEO <keyword id="6369763" type="PERSON" weightage="100" keywordseo="Vishal-Sikka">Vishal Sikka</keyword> has said that this poor performance was the result of an <a href="http://www.businessinsider.in/Infosys-CEO-says-low-performance-in-Q1-a-result-of-execution-failure/articleshow/53265955.cms">execution failure</a>, and he has started to take <a href="http://www.businessinsider.in/Disappointed-Vishal-Sikka-re-jigs-top-order-after-dismal-Q1-another-key-executive-quits/articleshow/53278154.cms">remedial actions</a> for the same. 
 Sikka has written a detailed e-mail to all <keyword id="6354512" type="CITY" weightage="100" keywordseo="Infosys">Infosys</keyword> <a href="http://www.businessinsider.in/Infosys-to-allow-employees-to-switch-job-profiles-using-an-internal-platform/articleshow/53005186.cms">employees</a>, announcing the changes and confessing that he himself was "disappointed" with the performance. 
 
Here's the letter (verbatim) that company's <a href="http://www.businessinsider.in/Infosys-Comfy-app/articleshow/52972236.cms">employees </a>received from Sikka. 
 
Friends, 
 
The first quarter of our new financial year was a revelation in many ways. I view the reaction by the markets and the media as a clear sign of the high standards our company is held to, the expectations we carry, even though everyone understands that a 90 day cycle means little on a long journey. I am disappointed. Disappointed that our revenue performance was not what we could have delivered, but even more so, that this overshadowed the many strong strides we made on executing our strategy. 
 
Our revenue growth of 2.2% to $2501M, included a shortfall in consulting revenue, some declines in package implementations, and small declines in our India business and Finacle. But at the same time, we made great progress in both, renewing our core, AND in the new areas of our business, as well as in our culture of enabling this continual renew-new improvement. Our core business, delivery, under Ravi's great leadership, grew by 3.4%, improved its utilization, lowered its dependence on subcontractors, delivered ever higher benefits from automation, and derived tangible gains from both Zero Distance and Zero Bench. 
 
Equally importantly, if not even more so, our New business grew extremely well, under Sandeep's stewardship. Gains in our newly introduced Mana, as well as in Skava, EDGE, design services and other new areas, accounted for more than a fifth of our growth! On Mohit's watch, large deal wins crossed the $800M mark in TCV, our top 5, top 10 and top 25 clients, all grew faster than the company, the number of our $100M clients grew by 3 to 17, and we added 95 new clients. 
 
Ranga and his amazing finance team, helped improve the overall health of our company's profitability and financials. We are close to 100k Infoscions having been exposed to design-thinking, the number of ZD ideas crossed 11k, and more than 5k of these have been discussed with clients, and the first ones already monetized, thanks to a simple new process Ravi and Ranga have enabled, and ZB now has more than 20k jobs, and, in a year since its launch, this initiative got us to the point that more than 99.5% of the bench colleagues have been engaged, thus helping them deliver value and break the cycle of being on the bench not helping them gthe experience they need to get off the bench. And there were many others. 
 
Reflecting on this on my trip back home, mainly I learnt this: those areas which receive "the flame of our attention" in Jiddu Krishnamurti's words, show progress. And when running an operation as large and complex as ours, we must attend to each cog, every piece of our spectrum, to prevent a few negatives from overshadowing the many great positives. We cannot take our eyes off any important aspect of our business, each area of our large and diverse portfolio of services, products and platforms. In Q2, and beyond, we must accelerate our work in all the key strategic aspects of our work, AND we must address the weaknesses of Q1. 
 
Our stock incentive rewards program, back after 13 years, is a great celebration of our people, our potential, and our commitment to recognize performance, and to have us participate in our collective work, and its outcomes, for Infosys is no more and no less than us, each one of us, and all of us. To help us lead from the front, Pravin and I are making some changes to the team. In Consulting, we had already announced that Rajesh Murthy would take over going forward. 
 
Reporting to Rajesh, Michael Pesch will continue to run Europe, LATAM and APAC, and Kenneth Toombs, who recently joined Infosys, will run North America and India. Sanjay Purohit will join Pravin to work on strategic initiatives in bringing Design Thinking to our clients at scale. Ritika Suri will take over our large deals work, including SGS, from Anup Uppadhayay. Anup has decided to leave Infosys, and I would like to thank him for his tremendous loyalty and service to Infosys over the last 23 years. I have been privileged to work with Anup since I started my journey almost two years ago, and we wish him all the best. 
 
Ritika brings a strong background in sales, particularly in driving large deals for products and platforms, and this is exactly the kind of experience we need to help transform our large client engagements with a focus in our renew-new strategy. M&amp;A will move to Deepak Padaki, while Ritika continues to lead the Innovation Fund and our work with startups. She will continue to report to Ranga and Mohit will continue to sponsor our large deals work. In CIS, we will focus on renewing the existing business and bringing Mana to every aspect of it. 
 
This will be led by Narry (Narsimha Rao) who will take over from Samson David. Narry has been with Infosys for 15 years, and has been running IVS for the last 1.3 years with great success and excellence. Narry and the entire delivery team under Ravi's leadership, will work closely with Navin Budhiraja on the Mana platform. I am very happy that Sudhir Jha has joined us from Google to help with product management and product marketing for Mana and for bringing a product discipline to all our work. 
 
We thank Sam for his great work in growing the infrastructure business over the last few quarters, and his great contributions to Infosys for more than two decades, and wish him the best of luck in his future endeavors. Our success will be the result of our endeavor. The work of our people. The amazing individuals I meet every single day. I learnt that a million folks wanted to join the Infosys family last year! Our people focus will continue, and will be at the core of all that we do. 
 
My belief in each one of us was redoubled last week, when I spoke to a few PMs at Bangalore. One Infoscion from Chandigarh, with her zeal and her team's proactive ZD ideas for banking, represented the vision of unleashing the innovator within each of us, more than any words can express. But it will take the very best of the very best in us. At a time when the world around us seems ever more influenced by the baser instincts and tendencies, we must bring the best of our intentions, and the best of our imagination, our knowledge and our conviction, to all that we do. 
 
When Krishnamurti spoke of the flame of attention, he spoke of a compassionate attention, to what matters, to the long-term, purposeful, vision, to a fun, rewarding journey along the way. Over the weekend, a friend of mine wrote to me, asking me to "stay healthy, stay in the moment, focused on your actions, even as you work hard to let your achievements outshine your aspirations...". 
 
Here's to a strong Q2, and a strong remainder of the year, one that not only exceeds the high standards we are held to, but does so purposefully, in moving forward on the long haul, one that shows what we as Infoscions are capable of. Here's to our actions, our flames of attention, outshining our aspirations and others' expectations. 
 
Let's do it! 
 
Best, V 
 
<a href="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/idGDFItGn7o/maxresdefault.jpg">Image source</a>

You Searched For "Navin Budhiraja" and got 5 results

Exclusive: Infosys is using Open Source as its most lethal weapon yet!

Usha Rani Das

Infosys is building an army of supercoders from Silicon Valley to gain maximum from Artificial Intelligence rush

BI India Bureau

Infosys is handpicking ‘gifted coders’ from Silicon Valley who can tackle any software-related challenge

BI India Bureau

Infosys is paying in crores to more employees abroad than in India. Here are the figures

BI India Bureau

Here’s the letter Vishal Sikka wrote to Infosys employees after disappointing Q1 performance

BI India Bureau