Cognizant's Malcolm Frank may be in race to join Infosys as its CEO

Malcolm Frank, Executive Vice President of Strategy at software services company Cognizant, may be in the race to become Infosys's first non-founder CEO, according to a report published in the Thursday morning edition of Hindustan Times. The report said global headhunter Egon Zehnder, engaged to find external candidates for the Infosys top position, had suggested Frank's name. The newspaper did not name its sources for the news.

Business Today could not independently confirm the news but Frank's candidature for a tech services CEO position is strong. Well-respected in tech circles, Frank impressed delegates at a closed-door session at industry lobby Nasscom's India Leadership Forum in February this year. CEOs who attended the session said it was a "stand-out" presentation with rare clarity of thought backed by rich data.

On Wednesday evening, soon after Infosys announced B.G. Srinivas, board member and CEO-hopeful was quitting, Business Today Managing Editor Josey Puliyenthuruthel tweeted: "Big question is who's the outsider CEO? My bet: Malcolm Frank".

Cognizant is reluctant to talk about the Frank being in the running for Infosys's CEO slot. A spokesperson said Frank is still very much with Cognizant and its unfortunate that Cognizant has got dragged into the internal affairs of another company.

Frank, 47, has been with Cognizant since 2005 and has played an important role in the company's meteoric rise - in these years, Cognizant has moved from being the fourth player in the Indian IT industry's pecking order to being the second behind Tata Consultancy Services. It has displaced  rivals Infosys and Wipro and has now widened its revenue lead over them substantially. Frank, a key lieutenant of Cognizant CEO Francisco D'Souza, made $2.83 million in fiscal 2013, according to data from Bloomberg Businessweek.

Frank, born to archaeologist-doctor parents, is an entrepreneur at heart. Before he joined Cognizant, he founded or co-founded three companies - CXO systems, Nervewire Inc, and Cambridge Technology Partners. Read a January, 2011 story on him in Business Today here.

In interactions with this reporter, the Yale-educated Frank came across as articulate, someone who knew exactly where his closest rivals were faltering. In an interview in November 2013, he spoke to Business Today about the divergence in growth between Cognizant and the rest of the industry. "I have seen this for the last three decades in our industry. Services companies are run by smart people. We are all in the market, we are all talking to clients and vendors and spend time in the Silicon Valley. So we all see the same trend, but in our industry, the issue is what do you do about that," he said, in response to a question on how Cognizant was winning with its 'SMAC' (short for social, mobile, analytics, cloud) strategy.

Cognizant had then moved to a three horizon strategy. 'Horizon 3' comprises newer technology architectures (SMAC), newer markets and industries, and newer delivery models.

"We felt that SMAC was important in the marketplace. But we have a different operating rhythm, enterprise applications for example --- different methodologies, different price points, different delivery models. So to try to get somebody who is running a scale business in enterprise applications to then do that with some SMAC approaches, you start to get into the Innovator's Dilemma. At least for us, the three horizon model helped us through that. We can continue to deliver on more traditional outsourcing and yet bring that innovation to the marketplace. That has been our construct --- seeing this opportunity but then truly operationalising that with scale," he added in the interview.

Infosys badly needs an articulate strategist like Frank to pull itself out of the quagmire it finds itself in. Former employees doubt if anyone from Cognizant would be willing to join Infosys. An executive, who was a CEO contender himself a while back, said, "They (Cognizant executives) make good money. Why would they come to Infosys?" The best case scenario for Infosys would be to convince Nandan Nilekani to join back, he added. The internal leadership pool has depleted but even so, he sees resistance to an outsider taking charge.