Phaneesh Murthy@60

Just a few months ago when Phaneesh Murthy celebrated his 60th birthday at his new palacious house on the 6th floor on Old Airport Road, he was pleasantly surprised at the warmth extended to him by his decades long friends. Many of his childhood friends with whom he had played tennis ball cricket 50years ago were present taking him back to his Malleswaram days when he was a high flying student at Bishop Cottons. Phaneesh has been a very people friendly guy right from his young days and this occasion was a particularly memorable one for him for it indicated the strong bonding he had forged with several hundreds of them over the years that had stood the test of time. 

Over a decade ago when soon after achieving his stated goal of taking iGATE to a billion dollar firm, he quit, it looked that there would be no coming back of Phaneesh a third time. Most had written him off. But interestingly, he has just completed the happiest decade of his life taking great satisfaction from mentoring Indian founders of IT firms in the US and helping them achieve their dreams. He has been behind the turnaround in fortunes of close to ten firms in recent years and made big millionaires of  these IT founders by devising a growth strategy for them.

Soon after landing at the new international airport in Bangalore on Thursday morning, he drove straight to the cricket match organised by Sai Madhusudhan, who he has been supporting in recent times in a strategic advisory role. Later in the evening, an hour after returning from the match, he sat around with this writer to recount the years after his exit from iGATE “I had CEO offers from Indian companies including listed firms but by then I had become fully engrossed in this new unexpected role of mentoring firms and Indian IT founders.”

Indian founders of IT firms were going through a challenging phase. Phaneesh finds an interesting variance in the mindset of the Indian founders based in India and those in the US ‘In India, they are apprehensive as to what their life will look like after a successful exit.For long they had come to be identified with the company they founded and they feared losing that identity in life. “

Contrasted with this, the Indian founders in the US were happy to grow the firm and exit at an appropriate time to hand it over to another to take it into the next phase of growth. Phaneesh understood the aspirations of these Indian Founders in the US and has been devising a specific strategy to help them in their journey towards achieving their goal "I see myself as a person enabling the founder’s aspiration. Most of these firms were over five years old and had reached a point of stagnation. They did not know what to do next and reached out to me to change the orbit of margin and revenues, he told this writer on Thursday evening in Bangalore.

He says he has surprised himself with the level of happiness he has achieved over the last decade after his exit from iGATE. For 25years in his career, he had been part of individual IT firms and had played a role in building a global brand for these Indian firms. In the late 1980s, it was Phaneesh who built brand Sonata. As he looks back at his first job soon after he graduated from IIM -A, he is proud at what he learned and achieved at Sonata Software "Instead of opting for lucrative MNC offers that came my way, I took to software products. It gave me a phenomenal experience of managing and marketing an Indian software product. It was such a fascinating experience that I went back and wrote a case study for IIM on ways to market an Indian software product.”

For a brief period a few decades ago this writer worked on the PR for Sonata Software at a time when B Ramaswamy, who passed away recently, was at the helm. It was he who hired Phaneesh soon after he graduated from IIM in the late 1980s at a time when Indian Software Products were struggling to find its feet. He saw the genius in Phaneesh and picked him up without flinching an eyelid "Not many IIMians chose a software products company but Phaneesh was different. He always chose an innovative path and strove hard to succeed at it. Within a year, he helped turn around the company with a product that had not gained acceptance till then", Ramaswamy once said crediting Phaneesh with the early success of the company.

By the turn of that decade, he had built Sonata into such a brand that when Infosys offered him a job in the early 1990s, his appa, who passed away recently, was apprehensive and not keen for him to join “Sonata had become a popular IT brand while Infy was completely unknown at that time. But I told my appa that if I could create a brand out of Software Products at Sonata, I was confident of selling software services globally and build the Infosys brand as well. I managed to convince my appa and accepted the Infy offer.”

And sure he did. He wanted to be a winner all the way and would not take no for an answer. He went about achieving the seemingly impossible. Hourly rates shot up after he managed to convince the global firms of the merits of outsourcing. By the end of the 1990s, he had become the blue eyed boy of Infosys.  He was the cynosure of all eyes. He was instrumental in taking Infosys from a $2million company to over $500million in revenues in the decade that he was with them. Though this writer had heard this several times over during the PR engagement with him, Phaneesh is all excited to narrate, just one more time, the model he used to win over global corporations “India was completely unknown on the Global Map. My first slide to the US CIOs in those early years was always on India and its location on the map. The slides about Infosys and its capabilities came much later. I had to sell India and Bangalore first, then the Outsource industry and finally convince them that Infy was the right choice for them."

"I was the only Board member outside of India at Infy. I did almost the entire groundwork in the US on the Nasdaq listing. It was very fulfilling", he says proudly of how the 20th Century ended for him.

He was destined for higher glory at Infosys but had to face an unceremonious exit. He founded Quintant, an iTOPS (integrated tech and ops) start up that was acquired within the first year by iGATE. From the top of the IT world at Infosys, he was now with a firm that was struggling  to find its feet having seen multiple CEO exits in the period leading to Phaneesh's appointment. Despite his exit from Infosys, he remained a favourite with the media. He had that X factor in him that attracted everyone towards him. The intensity of his engagement was seen even in his early morning stint at the shuttle court. He wanted to win hands down even when he was playing with a neighbour or a colleague. He remained supremely fit and maintained a lean frame through those iGATE years but the early phase was not easy and he had to scale a mountain “When I became the CEO of iGATE, it was quite a hostile environment there. Everyone expected me to follow in the path of my predecessors who had all quit in frustration one after another. It was a big challenge that I had not face until then in my career. It was an interesting phase where I had to tell the employees that I was there to stay!!!”

Phaneesh survived that initial phase and announced an ambitious goal of touching $1billion in revenues something very few gave a chance at that time especially since he was banking completely on his pet iTOPS (charging for results as against the hourly rate model that he himself had popularised at Infosys in the previous decade) taking off in a big way. iGATE's revenues had come down drastically to just over $200m when he joined the firm. “Given where iGATE was at that time, not many were convinced that I could transform a struggling firm into a $1billion IT company”, he said.

At the turn of that decade, he went after India’s oldest IT firm, Patni Computers “The brothers were not talking to each other and I had to convince them that it was good for their company’s sake to sell off at that time to take the firm into the next phase of growth. There comes a time in every company’s evolution when it becomes a good thing for the original owners to let go and sell off for the next management to take over. Else they would be causing more harm to the company that they had founded with great passion once upon a time.”

Though it took a very long time for Phaneesh to bring the brothers together on to the discussion table, he finally managed to acquire Patni, one that helped him achieve his billion dollar target for iGATE. But soon after disaster struck once again. In 2002, he faced the axe at Infosys just at the time of his peaking after having been with them for close to a decade. And destiny played out a second time. At the peak of his glory having achieved what he set out to – The $1 billion target of a struggling iGATE- Phaneesh once again had to face the sack. 

The media that had showered their love on him over the previous decade were taken aback at this misadventure. He was completely written off and for a large part he has been a forgotten man over the last decade. But Phaneesh has shown great resilience to 'stay alive' and bounce back every time he has been down. Most in the world may have succumbed after a fall from glory not once but twice. But not Phaneesh. He gathered himself back including from an unsuccessful attempt to try a revolutionary idea in the healthcare industry soon after his iGATE exit, one that did not take off resulting in burning of cash. With the idea of improving the health care offering in the country, he founded ZIGY, a health exchange, with the former marketing head at iGATE as the CEO. 

He credits this mental strength to his amma Parvathi “During my school days at Xaviers Ranchi, she inculcated in me the importance of work ethic and discipline. She would always be with a ruler to get me to do the homework on time and to do things as per schedule. That strict upbringing helped me understand the importance of sticking to timelines.”

After his appa moved to a new job in Calcutta, Phaneesh and his sister came back to Bangalore to be with their grandparents in the old Brahmins colony at Malleswaram. He was a top ranker at Bishop Cottons for successive years topping all subjects except arts. It was also a phase where he became very close to his elder sister, one that has remained so till this day.

He was keen to become a doctor in that phase and recounts as to how he got into Management and Business when his life goal during his teenage phase was to serve the patients and save lives of people “At that time, one could join IIT after Class XI while one could take to medicine only after Class XII. Just for experience sake, my appa wanted me to write the IIT entrance exam. But as it turned out, I was offered a subject of my choice and IIT of my choice. My mind was still firm on becoming a Doctor and serving the society but each of my friends found this decision to refuse IIT maddening.  Not many stood where I was to choose a subject and an IIT and peer pressure led me to move to IIT Madras.”

He was still keen to pursue medicine after his IIT and got a seat for a Doctoral degree at Harvard “It was very expensive to study in the US and we could not afford it at that time and that’s how I ended up at IIM-A. In that phase, my mind automatically shifted from serving the patients to getting into management.”

In the period leading to his appa’s death, Phaneesh engaged in intense debate with him on traditional values of Indian firms and dharmic people from the Mahabaratha taking big learnings from the great epic turning a bit philosophical. He finds Gandhari as the one extraordinary character in the epic for sacrificing her entire life for her husband.

Phaneesh has always been a people friendly person. In his new role as a mentor at IT firms, he has initiated some interesting philosophical thoughts into the Indian founders “I have insisted for the founders to allocate 15% of their wealth to the employees and another 5% for a charitable cause of their choice.”

It has been a very fruitful and fulling last ten years for Phaneesh though he has been away from the media limelight that had been so integral to his life over the previous decade. He says it has been intellectually challenging and stimulating working with passionate founders at multiple companies and has taken great satisfaction in enabling Indian IT entrepreneurs in the US overcome a challenging phase and transforming the companies into successful ones in the process creating several middle class Indian multi -millionaires. 

Three decades after his great experience of working at Sonata Software, he had an opportunity to engage with them again recently when he worked closely with them on an acquisition. It was kind of a happy 2nd home coming for Phaneesh at this old world IT firm whose late founder Ramaswamy he particularly liked and had respect for.

There is one unfulfilled dream remaining in Phaneesh’s life that of pursuing Medicine. When his two sons were growing up into young teenagers, he had threatened that he would go to the medical college with them leaving them puzzled!!! Now, he is telling his daughter that he might do medicine  and take to college education alongside her!!! He is hoping  that one day he will get to do Medicine. For the moment, he is focusing on working closely with Sai Madhusudhan who is offering free education in Medicine. Phaneesh believes that this initiative is all about inclusiveness of a mega kind and this will ensure that service minded people will take to medicine. 

Personally, the decade gone by has been quite rewarding for the 60year old Phaneesh Murthy - mentally, financially and emotionally. The ever-cheerful IIM A grad continues to make new friends in his life’s journey.  Two childhood tennis ball playing friends are trustees at the Sai foundation and Phaneesh sees a role for himself in helping them scale this healthcare initiative into great heights. In the two and half decades of his working engagement in Indian IT firms, he had always been seen as one who worked with great intensity. These days, he seems to be at peace with himself in his new role as Mentor and has even surprised himself in the way this role has turned out for him and his happiness.

He has always been very closely attached to his amma. On Thursday, she has been waiting patiently for his long day one of his latest trip to Bangalore to end to chat with him. And finally late into the evening Phaneesh sits next to her and gets into a conversation with the lady who he credits for his mental strength and resilience in life.