Former Infosys President Ravi Kumar S to join Cognizant

Ravi Kumar S

Former Infosys President Ravi Kumar S, who resigned from Infosys last week, will join Cognizant on January 16, 2023, as President of Cognizant Americas.

Infosys announced last week that President Ravi Kumar S had resigned. "The Board of Directors placed on record their deep sense of appreciation for the services rendered by Ravi Kumar S. for his contributions to the company," Infosys had said in a filing with the stock exchanges.

Sources Moneycontrol spoke to suggested that Ravi Kumar's appointment as President could be a precursor to becoming Cognizant CEO in the future. Moneycontrol could not independently verify this.

“Kumar, who has over 20 years of experience in the consulting, process and technology transformation space, joins Cognizant from Infosys where he was previously President,” Cognizant said.

Ravi Kumar was formerly the company’s Deputy COO, and at the time of his resignation, led the Infosys Global Services Organization across all industry segments and drove digital transformation, consulting, traditional technology, engineering, data and analytics, cloud and infra services.

A large number of Cognizant's employees are in India, and while it used to be the barometer of growth for Indian IT, the company's attrition figures have been climbing and it has been losing market share in key accounts.

In an earlier interview with Moneycontrol, Wedbush Securities Managing Director of Equity Research Moshe Katri had said that the company's underperformance had warranted action from the Board.

Katri said it feels like the company was without "any sort of sponsorship or authority, or some sort of an authoritative body to kind of examine and assess or reassess the performance of this leadership." He contrasted it with companies like Infosys and Wipro, where the management team was tweaked until the right leader was found to run the business.

Along with Ravi Kumar, Cognizant announced the appointment of Prasad Sankaran as the new head of the Software & Platform Engineering practice area. He joined on November 1.