Vishal Sikka - A CEO in India to watch out

Infosys is one of the popular faces of Indian IT services for more than Two decates. When started in 1981 by seven friends with an initial capital of Rs.10,000, even the founders wouldn't have expected that the company will reach such big heights.

But it's been downslide for Infosys since 2012. More about the beginning of downfall here. From 2012, every quaterly update from company recited again that the company is in downfall. Situation went so worse that the even called Mr.N.R.Narayana Murthy, their legendary CEO and one of the founders, back on board for some fruitful results. He reduced the downfall speed but even he couldn't stop it.
Stock prices went down. Hike / Benefitiaries for employees are reduced. Layouts happened. Many employees volunteerly left the company.

Then came Mr.Vishal Sikka. Founder of iBrain and Bodha.com, SAP's former CTO, stepped into CEO shoes in Infosys by June 2014.

It's been more than an year now for Sikka as CEO and it is clearly visible that he indeed did his job well.
Including Q4 2015 results (which came out in March 31, 2015), it has been increase in stock price as well as profit for Infosys in every Quater since his entry as CEO. After 2014, there was no layout in Infosys and there are incidents where employees got 100% hike! (I wouldn't have believed that if I haven't spoke to my friends who are in that list)

Even today (August 20, 2015), Vishal Sikka announced 3 new services that will be provided by Infosys to their customers. This 3 service bundle has been branded as ' Aikido ', which is also the name of a Japanese Martial Art. The 3 services are Platforms (Ai), Knowledge-based IT (Ki), Design thinking (Do). Platform services includes Panaya which has been acquired by Infosys earlier this year for $200M.

By ensuring growth in all sectors, including the services provided by the company, Vishal Sikka is trying to take Infosys to bigger heights. With what he had accomplished over past one year, he is surely a CEO from who we can expect more in near future.

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Mozilla loses its head

Mozilla is getting an internal hit again. This time is the resignation of their CTO, Andreas Gal.

 
Andreas Gal is the man responsible for Mozilla's big projects - Firefox browser and Firefox OS. He is an expert in JavaScript programming language which plays a major role in Web Programming. He joined Mozilla in 2008, made his way through the organization and became CTO back in April 2014.

Gal is moving out of Mozilla to start his own company. He is in plan for a IOT (Internet Of Things) startup along with two of his Mozilla colleagues. 

Previously Brendan Eich, co-founder of Mozilla as well as creator of JavaScript programming language moved out of Mozilla last year(2014). He moved due to political issues caused because of his donation to an anti-gay marriage cause back in 2008. Chris Beard was appointed as CEO after Eich. It was Eich who appointed Gal as CTO.

This is a big hit for Mozilla as they have lost two of their big fishes in two consecutive years. With competitors coming up everyday, tough time ahead for Mozilla.

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Pilotless Flight

Yes.. That is what Google want to do. One more crazy idea from Google X.

Self-driving cars are not the only thing that Google has been working on automation in transport. Project Wing of Google Inc. experiments the same thing with air vehicles. This project has been around for more than two years now. Last year, a testing on single-wing drone has been done in Australia. Though it passed the test of delivering packages to farmers, the design was scrapped. But that didn't stop the experimental cargo-drone team from working furthur.

Recently Dave Vos, head of Google's Project Wing, stated that they want to go beyond drones. Their vision is to automate planes (even commercial passenger planes). 

So if the self-driven cars hit the road and become success, experts say we can expect self-driven flights in next 6 to 8 years.

Though experts believe that self-driven flights will be available within the above mentioned time window, I guess it will take some more time than that.

The self-driven cars of Google are not into market completely. Currently only four states in U.S allow driver-less cars to enter their streets for testing. Google haven't released the fully functioning car yet. So it will take some time for self-driven cars to root well among us. If things go well with cars, then flight idea will be easy for them. If not, then they will have a hard time convincing people about autonomous products.

Moreover the risk is greater in space than in roads. Road is just two dimensional. It's been almost 7 years now (self-driving car project started in 2008) and Google couldn't come up with the product yet. This explains the complexity in work. Now comes space, which is three dimensional. So it will take more time to deal with the increased complexity. 


According to me self-driven flights will be my kids' transport medium. The next generation will use this tech, if things go good :)

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