PHANEESH MURTHY

Phaneesh Murthy did the classic IIT-then-IIM route, mechanical engineering at IIT Madras and management at IIM Ahmedabad. He started at Sonata Software in 1987 and joined Infosys around 1992.

By 1995 he ran worldwide sales. This is where the legend comes from.

He built the sales engine that took Infosys from $2 million in revenue to roughly $700 million in under ten years, and he made the board. He left in 2002 after a lawsuit.

He then founded Quintant Services, which iGate bought in 2003, and he climbed to become iGate's CEO. In 2011 he led iGate's $1.2 billion takeover of the larger Patni Computer Systems.

Infosys is where he made his name, running global sales and marketing and sitting on the board. Quintant Services was the company he founded after Infosys, which iGate acquired in 2003.

iGate is where he became CEO and pulled off the Patni deal, briefly turning a mid-size firm into a billion-dollar player. Today he runs Primentor, a consulting outfit that mentors executives chasing fast growth.

He also advises IT services companies like CriticalRiver, InfoBeans, and Covasant.

Murthy is not a fund manager. He is a builder and a closer.

His whole bet, across every job, has been on relationships over transactions. He famously said he does not sell projects, he sells relationships.

He also pushed the IT industry away from billing by the hour and toward pricing tied to business results, which was a genuinely bold idea at the time. As an advisor now, he backs IT services firms and helps them scale their sales the way he scaled Infosys.

The headline win is the 2011 Patni acquisition. Murthy had iGate, a roughly $300 million company, buy Patni Computer Systems for $1.22 billion, the biggest takeover in Indian IT at the time.

It was the smaller fish eating the bigger one, funded with a $700 million loan and backing from Apax Partners. Overnight the combined company had 25,000 employees and was knocking on the door of $1 billion in revenue.

Before that, his real masterpiece was quieter, taking Infosys sales from $2 million to $700 million.

The same mistake, twice, and it ended both his biggest jobs. In 2002 he left Infosys after his executive secretary Reka Maximovitch filed a sexual harassment and wrongful termination suit.

Infosys settled it for a reported $3 million. He always denied the allegations.

Then in 2013, as iGate CEO, he was fired after another subordinate filed a complaint and an internal probe found he had failed to disclose a relationship with her. Two of the best runs in Indian IT, both cut short by the same kind of scandal.

The lesson is brutal and obvious. Talent does not buy you a pass on judgment.

Sell the relationship, not the project. That is the core of it.

Murthy believed a client who trusts you will keep buying for years, while a one-off project ends. He also championed outcome-based pricing, charging for the business result a client got rather than the hours worked.

The logic is simple. If you are confident you create value, tie your pay to that value.

It is a riskier way to charge, but it lines up the vendor and the client.

Murthy keeps his personal life out of the headlines, which, given his career, is understandable. He is based in the United States.

Public profiles describe a man who spends his time away from work on temple visits, travel, and sport. After two very public storms, the low profile looks deliberate.

The work and the comeback are what he wants people talking about.

Murthy went to Bishop Cotton Boys' School in Bangalore, then earned a mechanical engineering degree at IIT Madras, then an MBA from IIM Ahmedabad. It is the most elite education combination India offers.

The twist is that a mechanical engineer became the greatest software salesman the country produced. He never really sold machines.

He sold trust.

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