Vishal Sikka is the new chief executive officer and managing director of IT services vendor Infosys. The Bangalore-based company is set to look for a new life after the exit of co-founders NR Narayana Murthy and Kris Gopalakrishnan.
Vishal resigned on 4 May 2014 as the member of the SAP Executive Board – Products & Innovation, SAP AG.
He is the first non-founder of Infosys to head the IT services company.
He is a product and innovation person.
He was heading all SAP products and innovation. Sikka had global responsibility for development and delivery of all products across SAP’s product portfolio including applications, analytics, cloud, database and technology, and mobile.
Sikka is also responsible for leading the design and end-user experience for SAP and for driving all innovation globally.
Sikka has led the development and delivery of SAP’s in-memory platform SAP HANA. He was driving HANA as the foundation and platform for SAP’s entire portfolio as well as the company’s broader ecosystem of customers, partners and developers.
He was responsible for SAP’s technology platform, cloud operations, partnerships, customer co-innovation and development, SAP Ventures, and incubation of emerging businesses. He has global responsibility for research, and academic and government relations.
Sikka is the author of Timeless Software, which represents the renewal of products without disruption to customer environments, and this underpins the SAP architecture and innovation strategy.
Sikka holds a doctorate in computer science from Stanford University in California, and his experience includes research in artificial intelligence, intelligent systems, programming languages and models, and information management and integration – at Stanford, at Xerox Palo Alto Labs, and as founder of two startup companies.
On May 4, SAP said: “No company in the industry can do what SAP can do in the cloud with the SAP HANA platform today. I would like to personally thank Vishal for his contribution to take SAP to this stage. We will remain friends as he pursues the next step in his journey,” said Hasso Plattner, Chairman of the Supervisory Board of SAP AG.
SAP now has more than 3,200 SAP HANA customers since market launch in June 2011 and close to 1,000 customers for SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA, which was launched just one year ago. SAP HANA is also evolving into the leading technology platform: there are more than 1,200 startups from 57 countries building applications on SAP HANA.
