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Infosys reshaping sales team, may go for job cuts

The company is going to get more aggressive with its sales and marketing team: Infosys

Infosys, India’s second-largest IT company, is restructuring its sales and marketing team in India and abroad, including the US, its largest outsourcing market, and that may also involve job cuts.

The Bangalore-headquartered IT major is looking at optimising costs and streamlining its workforce across geographies. ?The company is going to get more aggressive with its sales and marketing team to fetch more deals by laying off underperforming employees and hiring new people for the customer-facing client services group (CSG) group,? an Infosys official told FE, adding that areas with overlaps will also see some job cuts.

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These changes are part of the fresh measures initiated by chairman NR Narayana Murthy to revitalise the company and he is being helped by his son Rohan Murty, designated as executive assistant.

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According to another Infosys official, Basab Pradhan, who was head of global sales and marketing and Sudhir Chaturvedi, financial services head for the Americas, resigned recently from the organisation owing to differences after they were asked to explain the overstaffing of the sales and marketing task-force overseas.

?The company wants to bring synergies across geographies by streamlining the sales and marketing team, which will result in cost-optimisation, ? the official said, adding, ?making it more agile and accountable.?

Sources told FE that Infosys is also looking at bringing about changes in the offshore-onshore mix of its employees. Currently, on an average, the onsite-offshore employee ratio is 35:65, which the IT major is trying to cut down to 10:90. ?There was always a push to optimise the onsite-offshore ratio to 10:90, but now they are making it a must for all projects,? the official said.

For instance, if there are three shifts working on a project, typically two shifts are in India while one is overseas. Now, the company is trying to reduce overseas staff presence to a minimal essential strength and move most of the workforce back to India even for the third shift.

In response to an email query, Infosys spokesperson said, ?We do not comment on queries pertaining to our internal organisation.?

The current multi-layered structure in Infosys is slowing the decision-making process, leading to losing out on contracts to increasing competition.

Though the external economic environment remains challenging with business momentum slowing down, Infosys? performance over the last two years has never really matched that of its peers. Infosys always talked about the tough conditions, but it was clear that internal issues were plaguing the company, with no strong leadership to hold the firm together.

The entry of Rohan Murty, 30, who joined Infosys as his father?s executive assistant on June 1, is one of the moves to strengthen the leadership team. The company said that Rohan Murty’s appointment is yet to be approved by the ministry of corporate affairs. ?His designation in the company will be confirmed once the process of his appointment has been completed,? Infosys said.

In response to a query by FE, Infosys said, ?The company has filed an application under section 297 of the Companies Act, 1956, seeking approval of the government for Rohan?s appointment. The requirement of Section 297 is that any contract for sale, purchase or supply of any goods, materials or services, entered into by the company with either directors or relatives of directors, needs to be approved by the government.?

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First published on: 27-08-2013 at 02:19 IST
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