(Born on August 20, 1946)
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Nagavara Ramarao Narayana Murthy better known as N. R. Narayana Murthy is an Indian industrialist and software engineer. He and six other engineers founded Infosys in 1981. Mr. Murthy served as CEO from 1981 to 2002. From 2002 to 2011, he served as Chairman. In 2011, he became Chairman Emeritus.
N. R. Narayana Murthy is the Founder-Chairman of Infosys, a global software consulting company headquartered in Bangalore, India. He founded Infosys in 1981. Under his leadership, Infosys was listed on NASDAQ in 1999.
Mr. Murthy articulated, designed and implemented the Global Delivery Model which has become the foundation for the huge success in IT services outsourcing from India. He has led key corporate governance initiatives in India. He is an IT advisor to several Asian countries.
He serves on the boards of HSBC, Ford Foundation and the UN Foundation. He served as a member of the Unilever board between 2007 and 2010. He also serves on the boards of Wharton School; Indian School of Business, Hyderabad; Rhodes Trust, and International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore.
The Economist ranked Narayana Murthy among the ten most-admired global business leaders in 2005. He topped the Economic Times list of India’s most powerful CEOs for three consecutive years: 2004 to 2006. He has been awarded the Padma Vibhushan by the Government of India, the Légion d’honneur by the Government of France, and the CBE by the British government. He is the first Indian winner of the Ernst & Young World Entrepreneur of the year award and the Max Schmidheiny Liberty prize, and has appeared in the rankings of businessmen and innovators published by India Today, Business Standard, Forbes, Business Week, Time, CNN, Fortune, and Financial Times. He is a Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering and a foreign member of the US National Academy of Engineering.
Early Life:
Born into a Kannada Madhwa Brahmin family in Mysore, Karnataka on August 20, 1946, Mr. Murthy graduated with a degree in electrical engineering from the National Institute of Engineering, University of Mysore in 1967. He received his master's degree from IIT Kanpur in 1969.
Career:
Mr. Murthy's first job position was at IIM Ahmedabad, where he worked as the chief systems programmer. He developed a time-sharing system and designed and implemented a BASIC interpreter for ECIL (Electronics Corporation of India Limited).
After IIM Ahmedabad, he started a company named Softronics in 1976. When that company failed, he joined Patni Computer Systems in Pune. Mr. Murthy met his wife Sudha Murthy in Pune who was an engineer working at Tata Engineering and Locomotive Co. Ltd. (Telco, now known as Tata Motors) at the time.
After settling down in Pune, Mr. Murthy co-founded Infosys in 1981 with an initial capital injection of Rs 10,000, which was invested by his wife Sudha Murty. Murthy served as the CEO of Infosys for 21 years and was succeeded by co-founder Nandan Nilekani in 2002. At Infosys he articulated, designed and implemented the Global Delivery Model which has become the foundation for the huge success in IT services outsourcing from India. He also led the company through several key decisions including its listing on the Indian stock exchange and on the NASDAQ.
He had the executive position of Chairman of the Board from 2002 to 2006, when he became the "non-executive" Chairman of the Board and Chief Mentor. In August 2011, he retired completely from the company and taking the title Chairman Emeritus.