Sharad Hegde, now 59, had been asked by N R Narayana Murthy to join as a co-founder at Infosys. They were colleagues at Patni Computer Services (PCS), as were the other six young engineers including Nandan Nilekani and S Gopalakrishnan, who founded Infosys in 1981.

Hegde declined it to pursue his Master’s, and, after his studies, joined Infosys in 1983 as its first employee. For more than two decades, he worked on most technology projects at Infosys to become its chief technology officer and credited in building the architecture for Finacle, Infosys core banking solution ...