Infosys Brand Guidelines: Seven Engineers in Pune, a Telex Machine and a 1999 Nasdaq Listing

Seven engineers in Pune.

Infosys began in Pune. English Wikipedia records that it was incorporated as Infosys Consultants Private Limited on 2 July 1981 by seven engineers: N. R. Narayana Murthy, Nandan Nilekani, Kris Gopalakrishnan, S. D. Shibulal, K. Dinesh, N. S. Raghavan and Ashok Arora. The company moved to Bangalore, now Bengaluru, in 1983, and Arora left in 1989, selling his shares to the other founders. The name changed twice: to Infosys Technologies in 1992, and to Infosys Limited in 2011.

Its first decade included a detour into hardware. Speaking at a meetup reported by The Economic Times in July 2015, Gopalakrishnan said the company developed “a replacement for the telex machine using a PC” in 1985. Around that year Infosys set up two hardware units, Infosys Digital Systems and Infosys Manufacturing Systems; the first made electronic telex machines and an electronic keyboard and keyboard concentrator for India’s post and telegraph network. Murthy worked on the design of the concentrator, and Nilekani was the first managing director of the hardware business, the paper reported. The company withdrew from that work in 1989–90 and sold the business to a private company, Gopalakrishnan said.

Its core business became offshore custom software, which grew after India’s economic liberalisation in 1991, English Wikipedia says. Infosys held its initial public offering in February 1993 and listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange that June. In the mid to late 1990s it also incubated software product companies, among them the warehouse-software maker Yantra and the mobile-services developer OnMobile, which were later spun off. In 1999 it started a research and innovation arm, SETLabs, later renamed Infosys Labs.

Nasdaq, Finacle and a campus in Mysuru.

The listing that made headlines came six years later. On 11 March 1999 Infosys became “the first Indian-registered company to list on Nasdaq,” India Today reported in its issue of 29 March 1999, describing it as “the Bangalore-based software trailblazer.” The American depositary shares later moved to the New York Stock Exchange, a change the company announced in November 2012, and it remains listed in Mumbai on the BSE and the National Stock Exchange.

Products grew alongside services. Infosys released the Bancs2000 banking package in 1995 and, in 1999, Finacle, the core-banking suite that succeeded it, English Wikipedia says; Finacle moved in 2015 into EdgeVerve Systems, a software subsidiary formed in 2014. In 2002 the company set up a business-process division called Progeon, now Infosys BPM, and in 2004 a consulting arm, Infosys Consulting. Its current platforms carry short, single-word names: Cobalt for cloud work, Topaz for generative AI and Aster for marketing, alongside Panaya and Equinox.

Several of its purchases were design and creative studios: Brilliant Basics in the United Kingdom in 2017, the American agency WongDoody in 2019, Kaleidoscope in 2020 and Carter Digital in Australia in 2021, according to English Wikipedia’s list of acquisitions. In 2018 it formed Infosys Compaz, a Singapore joint venture with Temasek. Its American business grew through a public-services subsidiary in Rockville, Maryland, set up in 2009, and an office in Milwaukee opened in 2012 mainly to serve Harley-Davidson. In October 2025 the NHS Business Services Authority in England gave it a 15-year contract to replace the payroll and workforce system used across the National Health Service in England and Wales, English Wikipedia says, citing Reuters.

Its training centre is part of its public image. The Infosys Global Education Centre in Mysuru, established in 2002 on a campus of about 337 acres, can train up to 14,000 employees at a time, English Wikipedia says. The company also runs the Infosys Leadership Institute there, which trains senior leaders. Its staff are known as “Infoscions,” and in mid-2015 it dropped the formal dress code it had kept since 2008, allowing casual clothes every day, English Wikipedia says.

How IT services firms present themselves.

IT services and consulting firms sell work that is hard to photograph: software, systems, advice and the people who deliver them. Their identities therefore lean on a small set of tools. Wordmarks are usually set in a confident sans-serif, often in capitals or as a short set of initials, and palettes tend to sit in blues and purples, from deep navy to bright violet, used across websites, reports and event stands.

Their websites follow a familiar structure. Industry pages address banks, insurers, retailers, manufacturers and public bodies one by one, while capability pages cover cloud, data, cybersecurity, AI and consulting. Client case studies carry much of the proof, usually naming the customer and describing a programme of work rather than a product, and many firms publish their own research reports, surveys and indices to show expertise and to be quoted in the business press.

Place matters too. Delivery centres and offices are often photographed as campuses, with landscaped grounds, glass buildings and training halls, and those images recur across annual reports, recruitment material and news coverage. Careers pages speak directly to graduates and early-career engineers, with training programmes, campus recruitment and employee stories, alongside pages for experienced hires and alumni.

The last layer is public commitment. Sustainability reports, community programmes, education initiatives and sponsorships of sport and culture give the brand a presence beyond the client meeting, and in the case of sponsorship can put a company name on a stadium, a team shirt or a city race. The guides that follow look at how each firm uses those tools, and where its own history shows through.

Founders at the top, then a handover.

For its first 33 years Infosys was led by its founders. Murthy was chief executive from 1981 to 2002, followed in turn by Nilekani, Gopalakrishnan and Shibulal, until Vishal Sikka became the first chief executive from outside the founding group in 2014, English Wikipedia says. Salil Parekh has led the company since January 2018, and Nilekani is chairman. In July 2026 the board named Ashiss Kumar Dash, a company veteran of more than 30 years, as chief executive designate, to take over on 1 April 2027 subject to shareholder approval, News18 reported; at the time of writing the handover has not taken place.

Its record includes legal and public-sector episodes. In October 2013 Infosys settled a civil case with US authorities over the use of visitor visas, while denying claims of systemic visa fraud, and in December 2019 it reached a settlement with the State of California in a related case, English Wikipedia says. Government portals it built or took over in India, including the income-tax filing portal launched in 2021, drew complaints about technical faults.

For a design guide, Infosys shows how an engineering company can tell its story through founders, campuses and named platforms rather than a single product. Compare TCS, the older Mumbai firm in the same sector, and Wipro, another Bengaluru IT services company. For this guide we use a campus blue, a deep navy and a sky tone with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Infosys’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.