With outsider Kamath as chairman,Infosys begins a new chapter

Befittingly,the company dispensed with any suffixes to its name and will now be simply called Infosys Ltd.

It has been an action-packed tenure for Murthy who,along with half-a-dozen others,turned Rs 10,000 in savings into a $6-billion,130,000-employee company.

Along the way,Murthy made Infosys a fashionable job-market brand for a whole legion of young Indian engineers. Through his blend of Gandhi and capitalism—in flying economy class and in confessing to cleaning his own dinner plate and even his own toilet—Murthy exemplified the highest corporate governance standards.

Over the years,Murthy and his co-founders had created an immense cachet with both customers and employees. Today,Murthy has been named Chairman Emeritus,Kris Gopalakrishnan has been elevated from CEO to co-chairman and COO S D Shibulal has been named CEO.

In a sense,the founder-leader supply chain ends with Shibulal. That and Murthy’s exit will mean the passing of an era at Infosys.

The founders have done superlatively well for themselves. They are all billionaires or near-billionaires by virtue of their Infosys stock.

With Kamath’s induction into the top job,there are signs that Infosys wants to be more than merely an ‘offshore outsourcing giant’,as it has often been called.

The banking veteran’s entry signals that Infosys is ready to take serious note of India’s growing domestic outsourcing market,the one that its rivals such as TCS and IBM have already made inroads into.

India’s outsourcing market will imminently yield multiple billion-dollar contracts. The well-respected,highly-networked Kamath will be an asset in negotiating and clinching these deals.

Kamath could bring to Infosys a key credential that outsourcing companies covet—a consulting approach.

Kamath has built an institution in ICICI and his experience could be Infosys’s runway into territories such as Africa and Asia-Pacific too.

With BFSI (or banking,financial services and insurance,as the industry acronym goes) accounting for a big chunk of revenues (over a third) in India’s top outsourcing companies, the new leadership team looks set to strengthen that big growth area.

With Infosys sitting on a $3-billion cash nest egg,the banker in Kamath could do wonders if he could tweak its investment potential.

In recent quarters,Infosys’s stock has lost some of the investor sheen after disappointing results in successive quarters,pessimistic forecasts,losing ground to rivals and leadership angst.

The last of these is now in the past. How the new Infosys deals with the rest of the challenges will dictate not just the next chapter but the rest of the Infosys story.