BANGALORE: Global software major Infosys Ltd. aspires to be the "bellwether of the Indian IT industry once again", said its first non-founder chief executive Vishal Sikka.

"We aspire to be the bellwether of the Indian IT industry once again in the next 18 months," Sikka told IANS in an interview in Bangalore.

It's been just over two months since 47-year-old Sikka took charge Aug 1, succeeding last co-founder S.D. Shibulal.

Sikka has got cracking to renew the $8.3-billion company's efforts to catch up with the industry's revenue growth in double-digit (13-15 percent) from seven-nine percent projected for this fiscal (2014-15).

"Over the last two months I have been the CEO, I have had an opportunity to interact with a few dozens of our partners, about 100 customers and tens of thousands of our employees in India and other parts of the world," Sikka said.

"We have been in the past a next-generation software firm and defined many dimensions of being a top services' company. I believe we will get back to that and go beyond that to lead the industry again while maintaining our profitable growth," he asserted.

Noting that the world was dramatically being reshaped by software and software-defined technologies, the former SAP executive said there was a great opportunity for every business to simultaneously achieve a duality by renewing its systems and processes to derive more efficiency out of them and to instrument them for analytics, mobility, social media and sensors as well as re-platforming them for the cloud to achieve better economy.

"The purpose of this great renewal the world over is to make the systems and processes relevant to the modern world and the emerging world and derive operational efficiencies from that," Sikka said after piloting the company to a robust growth in second quarter (July-September) of this fiscal (FY 2015) and beating market estimates in topline (revenue) and bottomline (profit).

Call it the 'Sikka effect', the city-headquartered company Oct 10 reported a robust net profit and revenue growth in rupee and dollar terms for the quarter under review (Q2) year-on-year and sequentially, fuelling its blue-chip scrip to soar seven percent in trading on bourses last Friday.

"We had a very good quarter sequentially, with 3.1 percent revenue growth and 26.1 percent operating margin, though our banking product (Finacle) business did not have a great quarter. We believe the best is yet to come and we are looking forward for the company to scale new heights in the ensuing quarters," Sikka affirmed.

Observing that each business complimented this renewal with a new set of offerings for achieving new customers and growth, Sikka said every company achieved transformation on the basis of education, learning and training their employees.

Admitting that the same framework of culture and learning applied to Infosys as well, Sikka said the company was renewing every service line and everything it offered on the basis of innovation, automation and artificial intelligence.

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