Having taken over a year to agree a buy-out price with the minority shareholders in Mumbai-based IT/BP services firm, Patni (see here), its California-headquartered but very much India-centric parent, iGate, is dropping the Patni brand.
The company was founded by the brothers Patni back in 1988 when its activities were centred around ‘computer time rental, the resale of imported computer hardware, and software exports’. Over subsequent years, the company spun out its hardware resale and maintenance activities, and by 1994 Patni Computer Systems was pretty much an IT services play. Patni IPO’d in 2004. Ironically, it was at Patni that most of the founders of Infosys first met; the rest, as they say, is history.
Though a well-established name in the Indian IT scene, Patni’s latter years had not been without controversy. The ‘de-branding’ should remove any perceived tarnish to the iGate brand.