Infosys Limited

Overview

Infosys Limited sells technology work rather than technology products: custom software development, application maintenance, independent validation, consulting, systems integration and business process services for large organisations, most of them outside India. It is grouped with Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro, HCLTech, Tech Mahindra and LTIMindtree as one of the Big Six Indian information technology companies.^[1]

The company employs more than three hundred thousand people, most of them in India, and delivers their work from development centres across the country, a model the industry calls offshoring, with sales and client facing teams close to the customer.^[1]

History

Infosys was founded by N. R. Narayana Murthy, Nandan Nilekani, Kris Gopalakrishnan, S. D. Shibulal, K. Dinesh, N. S. Raghavan and Ashok Arora with an initial capital of about 250 US dollars. It was incorporated as Infosys Consultants Private Limited in Pune on 2 July 1981 and moved to Bangalore in 1983. Arora left in 1989 and sold his shares to the other founders.^[1]

In the 1980s the company briefly made hardware, including electronic telex machines and keyboard concentrators, before settling on offshore custom software development. That business grew quickly after the 1991 liberalisation of the Indian economy opened the door to export work.^[1]

In February 1993 the firm launched its initial public offering at an offer price of ₹95 a share. The issue was initially undersubscribed, and the American investment bank Morgan Stanley price stabilised it by taking a thirteen per cent equity stake; the shares opened at ₹145 in June 1993.^[1]

Product work followed: the banking automation package Bancs2000 and the middleware product Entark in 1995, the year 2000 toolset In2000 a year later, and in 1999 Finacle, a core banking suite developed as Bancs2000's successor. Software product subsidiaries incubated in the late 1990s, including the order management firm Yantra and the mobile services developer OnMobile, were later spun off and divested. The research arm began in 1999 as SETLabs, later renamed Infosys Labs, and formed an intellectual property cell in 2004.^[1]

In March 1999 Infosys listed American depositary receipts on Nasdaq, the first Indian company to do so, and was then among the twenty largest companies on that exchange by market capitalisation. The listing later moved to the New York Stock Exchange to give European investors better access.^[1]

Milestones

1. 1981Seven engineers incorporate the company in Pune with 250 dollars of capital.Incorporated on 2 July.
2. 1983The company moves to Bengaluru, then the centre of India's public sector electronics and research base.
3. 1991Economic liberalisation opens the export market that the firm's model depends on.
4. 1993Listing in India at ₹95 a share; the price opens at ₹145 in June.
5. 1999Nasdaq listing through American depositary receipts, a first for an Indian company; Finacle is released.^[1]
6. 2002The Mysore education centre opens, later the largest corporate training campus in the world.
7. 2014Vishal Sikka becomes the first chief executive from outside the founding group.^[4]
8. 2017Sikka resigns after a public dispute with the founders; U. B. Pravin Rao becomes interim chief executive.^[4]
9. 2018Salil Parekh is appointed chief executive and managing director from 2 January.

Services and products

• Infosys Consulting, the consulting arm, covering digital experience, cloud, data and analytics, artificial intelligence, engineering and sustainability.
• Infosys BPM, which runs business processes for clients in finance, procurement, customer service and human resources.
• Finacle, the core banking suite that grew out of the Bancs2000 work of the 1990s.
• Panaya, the application delivery platform acquired in 2015.^[5]
• Platforms for digital commerce (Equinox), workplace (Meridian) and customer engagement (Cortex), and service offers branded Cobalt for cloud, Topaz for generative AI and Aster for AI driven marketing.^[1]

The acquisitions of the mid 2010s were part of a push into higher value work: Panaya in Israel, reported at about 1,200 crore rupees, the digital commerce firm Skava for about 120 million dollars, and Noah Consulting, a data management consultancy for the energy industry.^[5][6][7] They also became a contested subject inside the company during the leadership change that followed.^[4]

Scale and geography

As of 31 March 2024 Infosys ran ninety four sales and marketing offices and one hundred and thirty nine development centres, spread across India, the United States, Canada, China, Australia, Japan, the Middle East and Europe. In the 2023-24 financial year about sixty one per cent of revenue came from North America, twenty five per cent from Europe, three per cent from India and eleven per cent from the rest of the world.^[1]

The company's continued presence in Moscow after the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 drew scrutiny; it said it had no active business with Russian firms, and by November 2022 only administrative staff remained, handling the transfer of contracts.^[1]

The largest single training site is the Infosys Global Education Centre outside Mysore: a campus of about 136 hectares with four hundred instructors and more than two hundred classrooms, opened in 2002, which had trained around one hundred and twenty five thousand engineering graduates by June 2015 and can hold fourteen thousand trainees at a time. The Infosys Leadership Institute, on the same campus, trains about four thousand people a year.^[1]

People

Every chief executive from 1981 until 2014 was a founder, with Narayana Murthy leading the company for its first twenty one years. Vishal Sikka was the first outsider, serving about three years before resigning in August 2017; U. B. Pravin Rao held the role in the interim, and Salil Parekh took over on 2 January 2018 and continues in it.^[1][2][3][4]

As of 31 March 2024 the firm employed 317,240 people, known internally as Infoscions, of whom 39.3 per cent were women and about 85 per cent were based in India. A formal dress code, including a tie for men twice a week, was dropped in mid 2015.^[1]

Listing and shareholding

Infosys shares trade on the BSE, where the company is part of the Sensex, and on the NSE, where it is in the NIFTY 50; American depositary receipts trade on the New York Stock Exchange. Promoter shareholding has fallen steadily since the first listing in June 1993, a decline that started with the employee stock option scheme of 1993 and continued with the depositary receipt listing in March 1999.^[1]

Criticism and disputes

In 2011 the company was accused of visa fraud for using B-1 visitor visas for work that required H-1B work visas. The allegation came from an internal complaint by an American employee who then sued for harassment, and although the suits were dismissed, the claims reached United States authorities and produced investigations by the Department of Homeland Security and a federal grand jury. In October 2013 Infosys settled the civil case for 34 million dollars without admitting guilt, saying it wanted to avoid prolonged litigation. In December 2019 it reached an 800,000 dollar settlement with the State of California over five hundred employees who had worked in the state on B-1 visas between 2006 and 2017, which had allowed it to avoid payroll taxes including unemployment and disability insurance.^[1]

Government platforms built by the company have also attracted criticism. Technical problems appeared after it took over the MCA21 corporate affairs portal in 2013 and again after a migration in 2016; in 2020 the finance ministry identified glitches in the GST network portal and summonsed Infosys executives, and in 2021 the new income tax portal was unusable for months, which forced an extension of the filing deadline.^[1]

Employee facing disputes have been smaller but recurring: in late 2013 a plan to install software tracking the time staff spent on their computers caused resentment, and in July 2026 the regional labour authority for Île-de-France fined the company 175,000 euros over its working time recording system.^[1]

Why it matters

Infosys is one of the reasons the phrase Indian software exports means something. The firm demonstrated that an Indian company could sell services to American and European clients at scale, list its shares in New York, run its own training university and be judged on margins and governance like any other global technology company. Later Indian technology businesses, including several of the companies on this directory, were financed by people who had worked there.^[1][8]