A month and a half after Vishal Sikka took over as CEO of Infosys, two more of his key team members at SAP Labs India have quit. Ganapathy Subramanian, Vice-President of the Customer Engagement and Strategic Projects team, who is also a member of SAP’s extended global leadership team, and Sudipto Shankar Dasgupta, Chief Development Architect, are both serving their notice periods right now.
These two exits come just a month after two other members of Sikka’s former team – Michael Reh, Executive Vice-President, Business Information and Technology, at SAP AG, and Sanjay Rajagopalan, head of design and special projects, both quit SAP to join Infosys to lead the Indian IT major’s product strategy.
Dasgupta left IBM Global Services, where he was a Technical Consultant, to join SAP Labs India in 2004 as Solutions Architect at SAP Custom Development. He became Development Manager in 2009 and remained so until March this year when he was promoted to Chief Development Architect. Subramanian joined SAP Labs India in 2000 as Development Project Manager from IMR Global, where he was software engineer, and over 14 years moved up from Development Lead, Program Director, Development Project Manager to Vice-President SAP In-Memory (HANA) Applications.
According to SAP insiders, Dasgupta, who has logged 10 years at SAP, will be joining Sikka’s team at Infosys. However, it is not clear if Subramanian, who has been at SAP for 14 years has quit to join Infosys. In response to BusinessLine ’s query about Dasgupta’s and Subramanian’s exits, the company spokesperson said, “As a policy we do not comment on any speculation about our human resources developments.”
Subramanian’s profile seems to be the perfect fit for Sikka’s new strategy – design thinking. Right after Sikka took over as CEO of Infosys on August 1, he has expressed his desire to embrace and practice design thinking and innovation to help Infosys’ global customers transform themselves and be relevant to the times. Given that Subramanian’s main responsibility was towards app development built on SAP’s technology platform using design thinking principles, he seems a natural fit for Sikka’s new strategy, say industry observers.