Vishal Sikka's 'Indian IT' obituary

The 50-year-old was a rank outsider to the Indian IT industry when Infosys appointed him CEO. Sikka's style of working and areas of expertise were unlike those of the other bigwigs in the sector. Sikka holds a PhD in artificial intelligence from Stanford University. He joined SAP in 2002 and was appointed its chief technology officer (CTO) in March 2007. Three years later, he became a part of its executive board and managed up to $8 billion of its revenues. He is known as the "father of HANA," SAP's fastest-growing product ever - in 2014, this platform was generating over $1 billion in revenue. In November that year, I first heard Sikka talk about the Indian IT industry. In a video address at an industry event, he vehemently voiced his displeasure at what he saw: "I was not deeply familiar with the services industry until recently. I find all of us in the industry on a downward spiral.. It's like a treadmill of increasingly lower cost, hiring people faster and faster, from more and more mediocre places, training people less and less, putting them into (a) job faster and faster. I think that is a wrong direction." More here.

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