Nagavara Ramarao Narayana Murthy is an Indian billionaire businessman. He is the founder of Infosys, and has been the chairman, chief executive officer, president, and chief mentor of the company before retiring and taking the title chairman emeritus. Murthy was born and raised in Shidlaghatta, Karnataka.
Mr. Murthy founded Infosys in 1981. Infosys is, today, a highly innovative software services global company listed on NYSE in the US and on the Bombay Stock Exchange in Mumbai.
Narayana Murthy was born in Shidlaghatta, Chikkaballapura district, Karnataka into a middle-class Madhwa Brahmin family. After completing his school education, he went to the National Institute of Engineering and graduated in 1967 with a degree in Electrical Engineering. In 1969 he received his master’s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur. Murthy first served as a Research Associate under a faculty at IIM Ahmedabad and then later served as the chief systems programmer. There he worked on India’s first time-sharing computer system and designed and implemented a BASIC interpreter for Electronics Corporation of India Limited. He started a company named Softronics. When that company failed after about a year and a half. During the 1970s he worked in Paris, where, among other projects, he helped design an operating system for handling air cargo at Charles de Gaulle Airport. Returning to India, he accepted a position with a computer systems company in Pune, but eventually he decided to launch his own company. He co-founded Infosys with six fellow computer professionals in 1981.
Mr. Murthy conceptualized, articulated, and implemented the Global Delivery Model (GDM) which has become the backbone of the Indian software industry. GDM is based on collaborative distributed software development principles and has resulted in the delivery of superior quality software to global customers delivered on time and within budget. Mr. Murthy also introduced the concept of a 24-hour workday, to the world.
Under Mr. Murthy’s leadership, Infosys became the leader in innovation – in technical, managerial and leadership training, software technology, quality, productivity, customer focus, employee satisfaction, and physical and technological infrastructure. He has been described as the “father of the Indian IT sector” by Time magazine due to his contribution to outsourcing in India.
In 2014, Mr. Murthy was ranked 13th among CNBC’s 25 global business leaders and listed among the ‘12 greatest entrepreneurs of our time’, by Fortune in 2012. He has received Legion d’honneur from France, CBE from Britain, and Padma Vibhushan from India. The Economist ranked him among the 10 most-admired global business leaders in 2005. He is the first Indian winner of Ernst and Young’s World Entrepreneur of the Year award.
Currently, Mr. Murthy serves on the boards of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, New Jersey, and the United Nations Foundation. He has served on the boards of Ford Foundation in New York, HSBC, and Unilever in London.
He is also a Trustee of the Infosys Science Foundation, which governs the Infosys Prize, an annual award, to honor outstanding achievements of researchers and scientists across six categories.
He is married. His wife, Sudha, is a well-known author. They have two children. He is the father-in- law of Rishi Sunak, the British MP and Chief Secretary to the Treasury.