Infosys's Kakal to join L&T Infotech as COO

BANGALORE: Infosys senior vice-president Chandrashekar Kakal, whose resignation was announced by the company on Thursday, will join Mumbai-based IT services firm L&T Infotech as its chief operating officer (COO), said sources in the industry.

Kakal, who leads the India business unit, will leave Infosys on April 18. He is likely to join L&T Infotech towards the end of April.


When TOI contacted L&T Infotech, the company spokesperson said, "We do not comment on market speculation." Repeated phone calls and a text message to Kakal did not elicit a response.

L&T Infotech, an IT services and solutions company, is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the $14-billion construction and engineering major Larsen & Toubro. The company provides end-to-end solutions and services in sectors including BFSI, energy, utilities, consumer electronics and healthcare space.

IT industry body Nasscom ranked L&T Infotech No 8 among IT services companies in India in 2012-13. That year the company had revenue of about Rs 4,000 crore, with a growth of 22%, significantly higher than the industry average. The company expected to touch $1 billion in revenue this year, but it's not clear if that target would be achieved. It was planning to make acquisitions this year though no acquisition has been announced so far. The last major acquisition was of Citigroup's Canadian IT outsourcing arm Citigroup Fund Services Canada for $40 million in February 2011.

The firm has a dual CEO structure. The joint CEOs Vivek Chopra and Mukesh Aghi have completed 1.5 years at the helm. Former Wipro exec Sudip Banerjee led the company between 2008 and 2011.

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Infosys Profit Beats Estimates

Infosys Ltd. Friday reported a net profit which remained almost the same as a year earlier but was still ahead of market expectations.

It raised slightly its sales-growth forecast for this fiscal year--suggesting some improvement in business momentum.

India's second-largest software exporter by revenue said in a statement consolidated net profit for the three months ended Dec. 30 was 23.69 billion rupees ($434 million) compared with 23.72 billion rupees a year earlier. The result was better than the average 22.10 billion rupees estimate in a poll of 19 analysts. Net profit also remained flat with the second quarter.


Consolidated revenue rose more than 12% to 104.24 billion rupees from 92.98 billion rupees--better than the average 101.66 billion rupees forecast in the same poll. Revenue grew 5.7% on quarter.

The company forecast sales of $7.45 billion for the fiscal year ending March 31, including contributions from Swiss business consulting company Lodestone Holding AG, which Infosys acquired in September. This is a slight increase on an earlier sales forecast of $7.34 billion.


The results are calculated according to international accounting standards.

Infosys shares were up as much as 12.4% on the Bombay Stock Exchange. At 0351 GMT, the stock was trading up 12% at 2,600.00 rupees while the benchmark Sensitive index was up 0.7%. The gains in Infosys also boosted the BSE IT Index--which was up 6.9%.


Last month Bangalore-based Infosys warned its October-December results could be hurt by slow decision-making and shutdowns by clients in the U.S. as a result of Superstorm Sandy in late October.

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Infosys Unveils Self-Service Cloud Hub

Indian outsourcer Infosys unveiled a package of services and technologies that aim to help companies deploying hybrid clouds.

Fragmentation of enterprise workloads across technologies and services running on both private clouds and multiple public cloud services is a key issue for customers, so Infosys is offering customers self-service catalogs of well-integrated business applications, platforms, and other point technologies from its partners, said Vishnu Bhat, Infosys' vice president and global head for cloud. 
 

The Infosys Cloud Ecosystem Hub has what it calls a "smart brokerage" feature, which is an enterprise-wide decision support mechanism to select, compare and deploy cloud services from across providers, Bhat said. Decisions can be based on an evaluation of over 20 parameters such as quality of service, technology compatibility, regulatory compliance needs and total cost of ownership of application workloads, he added.
 

The hub also provides customers with a single-window view of the enterprise cloud system, across private and public cloud and on-premise IT.


Infosys like other Indian outsourcers who are mainly into custom software development and maintenance, are looking at building businesses around customers' adoption of the cloud. It said in July it has 3,000 staff in its cloud practice, and executed over 150 cloud-related projects, including multiple application migrations and re-hosting of mainframe applications to private clouds. 

 
Indian outsourcers can play only a limited role in the cloud market, primarily in systems integration, because they own neither the applications nor the hosting infrastructure, said Sudin Apte, principal analyst and CEO of Offshore Insights, a research and advisory firm. The new offering from Infosys will help it draw attention to its systems integration and other services, he added.

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