Nagavara Ramarao Narayana Murthy (born 20 August 1946), commonly referred to

as Narayana Murthy, is an Indian IT industrialist and the co-founder of Infosys,[9] a multinational

corporation providing business consulting, technology, engineering, and outsourcing services.
Murthy studied electrical engineering at the National Institute of Engineering, University of
Mysore,[10] and MTech at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur.
Before starting Infosys, Murthy worked with Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad as chief
systems programmer and Patni Computer Systems in Pune (Maharashtra). He started Infosys in
1981 and served as its CEO from 1981 to 2002 and as chairman from 2002 to 2011. In 2011, he
stepped down from the board and became chairman Emeritus. On 1 June 2013, Murthy was
appointed as Additional Director and Executive Chairman of the board for a period of five
years.[11][12]
Murthy has been listed among the 12 greatest entrepreneurs of our time
by Fortune magazine.[13] He has been described as Father of Indian IT sector by Time magazine
due to his contribution to outsourcing in India.[14] Murthy has also been honoured with the Padma
Vibhushan[15] and Padma Shri awards.[16]
Childhood

 He was born on 20 August 1946, in Sidlaghatta, Karnataka, in a middle-class family.

 His uncle was a civil servant and Narayana’s father wanted him to follow the same route.
But the young boy had other plans; he wanted to be an engineer as that was the “in”
thing in India in those days.
 He appeared for the entrance test for the India Institute of Technology (IIT) after
completing his schooling and cleared it with a high rank and a scholarship. However the
scholarship was not enough to completely cover his educational expenses and his father
could not afford to pay the fees.
 On his father’s advice he joined a local engineering college, the National Institute of
Engineering and graduated in 1967 with a degree in Electrical Engineering.
 He then went to the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur and earned his master’s
degree in 1969. While at the IIT he had a chance meeting with a famous computer
scientist from the US and was thoroughly impressed by the scientist’s talks. This
influenced Narayana to pursue a career in the IT sector in future.
 He was flooded with job offers on completion of his course as at that time there were just
a few computer science graduates in India. He had job offers from HMT, Telco and Air
India, all of them offering high salaries.
 However, he rejected all these offers to take up a job in India Institute of Management
(IIM), Ahmedabad, when one of the IIM’s professors personally came to talk to the bright
young man about an interesting job opportunity at the institute.

Career

 He took up the position of a chief systems programmer at the IIM, Ahmedabad. There he
worked on installing a time-sharing computer system—India’s first, making IIM the third
business school in the world to install a time-sharing system after Harvard and Stanford.
 The work at the IIM was hectic but extremely fulfilling. He used to work 20 hours a day
and learned a lot. Even today Murthy feels that joining the IIM was the best decision he
had ever made in his professional life.
 He worked overseas in the 1970s, and the years he spent in Paris had a deep influence
on him. Initially a staunch leftist who supported Communism, he eventually changed his
views and concluded that compassionate capitalism and the large-scale creation of jobs
was the only practical method of eradicating poverty.
  He learned a lot from the western countries, but ultimately wanted to settle in India and
start a company in his homeland. He started a company called Softronics which failed
after just a year and a half. So he joined Patni Computer Systems in Pune.
 Eventually he decided to become an entrepreneur again and teamed up with six other
software professionals to found another company, “Infosys Consultants Pvt Ltd." (now
known as Infosys Ltd.) with a capital of Rs. 10,000 in Pune in 1981. The company’s
headquarters was shifted from Pune to Bangalore in 1983.
 Murthy became the CEO of Infosys and served in this position from 1981. In 2002, co-
founder Nandan Nilekani succeeded him as the chairman.
 He became the Chairman of the Board in 2002 and the Chief Mentor in 2006. He retired
from the company in August 2011, taking the title Chairman Emeritus.
 He has served as a director on the boards of DBS Bank, Unilever, and ICICI. He is a
philanthropic and serves on the advisory boards and councils of several institutions like
Cornell University, Ford Foundation, the UN Foundation and the Indo-British Partnership.
 The performance of Infosys suffered in his absence and thus he returned to the company
as Executive Chairman and Additional Director in June 2013. He stepped down as the
Executive Chairman in June 2014.

Personal life

N. R. Narayana Murthy was born in a 'Kannada Madhwa Brahmin' family in Mysore. He has eight brothers
and a sister. Murthy's father was a school teacher.

Narayana was born into a middle class family in Mysore. Since his father was a high-school teacher, the
financial conditions of the family were not that good.

Narayana attended a government school and pursued his B.E degree from the University of Mysore and
masters from IIT, Kanpur.

Narayana is married to Sudha Murthy, who too is an engineer, an Indian social worker and an
accomplished author.

Narayana's wife being a philanthropist, he too believes in philanthropy. Murthy comes across as a very
social and friendly man. He always raises his voice for various social issues in the country such as
elections, unemployment, poverty etc. He is a cooperative and a good natured person and manages his
company quite well. The recent news of him quitting Infosys has been keeping him in the headlines.

Awards and achivements

Being the 33rd richest man in India, he has a net worth of US $1.8 Billion. He has won a number of
awards, following are some of them:
 The Asiaweek magazine counted him in the 50 top most powerful men in the year 2000.
 He was honored with the Padma shree award by the President of India.
 In 2001, he was awarded the Wharton school's Dean Medal, University of Pennsylvania.
 Narayana was also honored with the title 'Asia's Businessman of the year' by Fortune magazine in 2003.
 In 2008 he was honored with the Padma Vibhushan by the President of India.
 He is associated with important and prestigious organizations. He is the member of the Board of Directors
of INSEAD, the Board of Oversees of the Wharton School Of the University of Pennsylvania, the Board
of Members of School of Management at Asian Institute of Technology.
 He also serves as a Director of the Central Board of the Reserve Bank of India.
Early life of Infosys

But his wife could see his pain and the fact that he wanted to do something with his life, but he
had no money. Hence, she decided to help him out.
She gave him a sabbatical of three years and asked him not to worry of the house, she will take
care of all the financial needs. She also gave him ₹10,000 that she had saved for the off days.
Having that sorted, on a morning of January 1981, he met six of his software engineer friends
in his apartment to discuss on how they could create a company to write software codes.
Soon after that he also decided to leave his job at Patni and began working on his new project.
And after six months of aggressive preparations, Infosys was registered on 2nd of July, 1981. It
then used to be known as Infosys Consultants Private Limited. The company was cofounded
by Narayan Murthy, Nandan Nilekani, N. S. Raghavan, S. Gopalakrishnan, S. D. Shibulal, K.
Dinesh and Ashok Arora.

In 1982, together they moved to Pune and bought a small house on loan. Although, the
company’s registered office was N. S. Raghavan house at Dadar, Mumbai, but the front room
of Narayana’s house was used as their office.
All six of them would operate from there, and sudha was their Clerk-cum-Cook-cum-
Programmer. She had also taken up a job at Walchand Group of Industries as a Senior Systems
Analyst to support the house hold.
Moving on, Infosys moved to Bangalore when it got its first client – Data Basics
Corporation from the United States in 1983. But this time it was only Narayana who had
moved, that too without his wife (because her son had infantile eczema, an allergy to
vaccinations).
Later, after the Murthy’s, Nandan Nilekani and his wife Rohini also moved to Bangalore, but
since they didn’t have a place to stay, they used to stay with the Murthy’s at their home / office.
Slowly, the rest of the team also moved to Bangalore as well and work again began with full
force

Challenges

Around the late 80’s, Infosys got into a Joint Venture with Kurt Salmon Associates, a first of
its kind for them. Gopalakrishnan was made the public face of this JV in America.
But due to unfortunate and unknown events, this joint venture collapsed in a very short span of
time (in 1989) since it started.
This left a huge dent in the company. The company was on the verge of collapse, and looking
at the worsening scenario one of their founders – Ashok Arora, sold his shares (of the unlisted
company) back to the partners and moved out.
Situations were extremely bad for them, none of them had a clue of what to do, how to go
ahead. But it was Narayana’s confidence and courage that helped them out.

He told all the partners that if they wished to leave, they happily can and that he will buy back
all the shares from them. But he will keep the company running. But the other partners decided
to stay.
So they decided to buck it up and face the challenges. To begin with, they divided all the tasks.
Narayana always had an eye for talent and a talent for dividing labour, hence he handled the
management. Nandan was asked to take control of sales, Kris and Shibu managed the technical
end, Raghavan was asked to handle people, and lastly, Dinesh was assigned quality.
Their pace was such that, the company went on to open their first international office in Boston,
US in a matter of no time.
What helped them the most was liberalization of Indian economy in the 90’s! Since then the
company has made sure to never have to look back.

The Rise of Infosys..!

Narayana very well knew that image was everything and hence, he smartly on the sidelines
worked on creating an image for Infosys as well. He invested heavily into creating huge and
world class campuses. This was literally bigger than any other company’s headquarters in
India. It helped them show their global customers feel like they were in a global office.
As they grew, unlike many other big businesses who used to play dirty, Narayana brought in a
‘no compromise policy’ on getting ‘under-the-table deals’ and doing ethical business.
And thus began the ultimate rise of Infosys!

In 1993, Infosys apart from acquiring the ISO 9001/TickIT certification, took the biggest leap
since their initiation and went public, and soon after the IPO the company also decided to share
a portion of their equity with employees. This move of theirs greatly helped them retain the
talent and also gave the employees a sense of ownership as well.
And in the next two years, the company had opened global development centers in Fremont,
Toronto, and had also opened their first European office in the UK.
If this was huge then in the year 1999, they company grew by manifolds when it announced
that it had touched revenues worth $100 million and had also got listed on NASDAQ. What
was even more commendable was that at that time, Infosys was known to be amongst the 20
biggest companies by market capitalization on the NASDAQ.
This was the time when the Infosys began their massive worldwide expansion plan and went
on to open a list of offices in different parts of the world including Germany, Sweden, Belgium,
Australia, and two development centers in the US. Additionally, they also launched their
Business Consulting Services as well.
In 2002, after taking the company to revenues worth $500 million Narayana decided to take
the back seat, and Nandan Nilekani took over the position of CEO, whereas Narayana became
the Chairman and Chief Mentor.
From then onwards, the company has grown drastically from over ₹6,000 crores (in assets,
including surplus cash) and 50,000 employees in 2005, to becoming India’s second largest
software exporter and then crossing a $6 Billion revenue mark and 125,000 employee base.
This is when Narayana decided to completely move out of the day-to-day functioning of the
firm and handed over his Chairmanship as well to K.V. Kamath, although he still acts as the
Chairman Emeritus to the firm. Additionally, in the next two years, they also began trading on
NYSE Euronext London and Paris markets as well.
More recently, Dr. Vishal Sikka has taken over as the new CEO and MD of the firm, while it
is at revenues worth ₹50,000 crores, and the company also has announced a $250 million
‘Innovate in India Fund’ to support Indian start-ups. Presently, the company also accounts for
more than 950 clients who are spread across 50 countries.
They have also become the sixth largest publicly traded company in India and told account for
more than 187,976 employees as well. In a total, the company has proudly given away stocks
worth more than ₹50,000 crores to employees in the form of ESOP.
Since their inception, the company has also made a range of acquisitions which include –
Expert Information Services ($23 million), McCamish Systems ($38 million), Portland Group
(AUD 37 million), Lodestone Management Consultants ($345 million), etc. More recently, the
company has also acquired Panaya, Inc, and Skava as well.