After 45 yrs, Shiv Nadar ends his innings at HCL

After 45 yrs, Shiv Nadar ends his innings at HCL

TIMES NEWS NETWORK

Bengaluru:20.07.2021 

It’s the end of an extraordinary innings for Shiv Nadar. He's called it a day at HCL, which he started 45 years ago and which has now become a $10-billion IT powerhouse. Nadar, who turned 76 on July 14, stepped down on Monday as chief strategy officer & managing director. Last year, he had handed over the chairmanship to daughter Roshni Nadar-Malhotra.The board has designated him as chairman emeritus and strategic advisor to the board for five years. Nadar is among India's richest, with IIFL Wealth Hurun India Rich List estimating his wealth at Rs 1,41,700 crore.

HCL president and CEO C Vijayakumar will hold the additional designation of MD.

Nadar is also a major philanthropist, and as of March this year, he has invested over $988 million through the Shiv Nadar Foundation, impacting over 34,000 students from poor backgrounds. Nadar credits his success to the education and scholarships that he received during his early years.

Nadar founded HCL 45 years ago to make calculators and microprocessors. HCL initially had a hardware DNA, with many firsts in India, including the first Unix operating system, multiprocessor architecture, parallel Fortran, the PC, the first 8-bit microprocessor-based computer in 1978, the first relational database management system in 1983, client-server architecture in 1984.

Nadar started his career at the Delhi Cloth Mills (DCM) as a management trainee. He and five colleagues quit DCM in 1976 to set up a company to make PCs. They started it in a Delhi barsati, akin to a garage startup. They initially floated Microcomp that sold teledigital calculators that would provide enough cash to start the PC business. The founders put together Rs 20 lakh and HCL was born.

HCL pioneered remote infrastructure management, which was instrumental in the implementation and management of the infrastructure backbone of the National Stock Exchange. Nadar steered HCL to create several joint ventures and alliances with marquee partners such as Hewlett Packard, Cisco, Perot Systems, Deutsche Bank, and Toshiba. Nadar also cofounded NIIT in 1981, to deliver low-cost quality technical education. NIIT helped create a large pool of trained experts. Nadar was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 2008.

Vanitha Naryanan appointed to HCL board

Bengaluru:

HCL Technologies has appointed Vanitha Narayanan as an independent director. The Board now includes four women directors. Narayanan last year retired after a career spanning three decades at IBM where she held multiple leading roles across the US and Asia-Pacific, including as MD and chairman of IBM India.

HCL Technologies chairperson Roshni Nadar-Malhotra, said, “She brings rich and diverse experience of navigating organisations through digital transformation journeys. Her deep knowledge and understanding of evolving marketing and technology landscape will be a great asset to HCL’s focus on driving growth.” TNN