Infosys Birthday and the Seven Founders

Now that Infosys is celebrating 25^th anniversary, what is Infosys’s actual date of birth?

In an interview with Narayana Murthy, in rediff.com, he says “it was a wintry morning in January 1981 when seven of us sat in my apartment, and created Infosys.”

From a case study about Infosys Technologies Limited prepared by The Wharton School:

On July 2,1981, seven engineers working for Patni Computers, decided to start their own company. Thus Infosys Technologies was born.

I think, the discussions of forming the company and the initial steps were started in January 1981 and was registered as a private company on 2 July 1981 and became a public limited company in June 1992.

The seven founder members of infosys are N R Narayana Murthy, Nandan Nilekani, N S Raghavan, S Gopalakrishnan, S D Shibulal, K Dinesh and Ashok Arora. See the rare picture of Infosys Founders.

Ashok Arora left Infosys in 1989 to join a US-based software company. About Ashok Arora, from Economic Times:

One has always wondered what Ashok Arora feels like today. For those not fully clued onto the Infosys saga, he is the man who missed out on one of biggest payouts in Indian IPO history, and of course the satisfaction of having built a truly global Indian enterprise.

One of the founder members of Infosys, Arora worked for the company for about 7/8 years before deciding to bail out. He sold his shares in the then unlisted company back to the others and moved to the US where he now works as a consultant. Infosys chairman N R Narayana Murthy says he was the best programmer that he had ever come across.

N S Raghavan retired in 2000 as Joint Managing Director. He is currently the Chairman of Advisory Council of N S Raghavan Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning (NSRCEL) of IIT, Bangalore. He mentors aspiring entrepreneurs and is on the Boards of many companies.

Ideas man in High Life column in News Insight by Vir Sanghvi about the blossoming of a tech genius called Nandan Nilekani

Of the defectors from Patni Systems, there were six South Indians including Nandan and Murthy and one Punjabi, Ashok Arora.

Nandan bristles at the suggestion that Infosys represented the revolt of South Indian Brahmins against the north Indian banias who dominated Indian business at the time. “South Indians are not a monolith,” he says. “Three of us were from Karnataka, two from Kerala, one from Tamil Nadu and anyway, Ashok Arora was a Punjabi.”