Infosys Plans To Move Employees...

Infosys Plans to move 150 of its executives with technical background to sales

Infosys is concentrating on strengthening its commitment with clients by arraying delivery side employees to sales, in what is to be one of the first measures being put in place by new chief executive Vishal Sikka. The country's second-largest software exporter, which seeks to reclaim the IT bellwether's tag, will deploy 150 executives with technical background currently working at the delivery side at Infosys's client locations, said a senior executive of the company.

"Yes, we have identified specific people from our delivery organisation to be positioned at our client locations in order to strengthen our relationships with them," said UB Pravin Rao, chief operating officer. "These individuals are primarily from technical backgrounds, have good knowledge of the client background and have been involved in successful delivery of on-going projects."

Some experts believe this initiative, though in the right direction, is more about the company trying to keep up with its rivals, including Mumbai-based Tata Consultancy Services and Nasdaq listed Cognizant. "As for the sales push, it is critical to make Infosys less dependent of discretional spend and gain a larger share of comprehensive outsourcing deals to secure recurring revenue streams," said Tom Reuner, an analyst at Ovum, a London-based IT research firm.

"While the company has won some remarkable deals of late such as the Daimler deal, its sales engine is far from optimized. This was recognized by Murthy and Sikka is now continuing this push." Rao said this is a company-wide initiative across regions and business units and will help Infosys to develop existing engagement with clients by adding incremental value to ongoing projects.

"As this effort is aimed at increasing value delivered to our clients, we believe it will result in better revenue growth from existing client relationships," said Rao. This measure by Infosys comes under after the company recorded a flat growth in revenues for the first quarter ended June, leading many analysts to question if Narayana Murthy's measures to boost sales were giving desired results.

BG Srinivas, who quit the company in May, told that Infosys was then instigating a wide-ranging plan to improve sales efficiency, predicting that the benefits of these measures could start showing up before the third quarter of 2014-15. Two of the measures that Srinivas then highlighted were stepping up hiring overseas and enhancing training for all client-facing executives.

The company also re-structured its "go-to-market" in particular verticals where it wanted to expand its presence, including in insurance, life sciences, healthcare, energy & utilities. "This does not mean we will not be continuing with our earlier announced initiatives," said a senior company executive. "This is just one more step we thought we should handle upon as we seek to mine and farm more business from our clients (existing)."