Umang Gupta, Who Paved Way for Indian Tech Executives, Dies at 73

Not like most different firms of the period, he selected to run the software program on-line and promote it as a subscription service, a enterprise mannequin that now dominates enterprise computing.

“He was forward of his time in fascinated by the place issues are going and what’s going to occur subsequent,” stated Mohan Gyani, a longtime Keynote board member and pal.

Mr. Gupta took Keynote public in September 1999. In early 2000, he raised $350 million extra in a secondary providing, which helped Keynote trip out the tech bust that quickly adopted.

In 2013, he bought Keynote for $395 million to the non-public fairness agency Thoma Bravo and retired from enterprise software program. However he saved a excessive profile as a philanthropist and by working with a bunch that represented alumni of the Indian Institutes of Know-how (he had attended the campus in Kanpur), stated Kanwal Rekhi, a veteran Silicon Valley tech govt and investor who served on the board of Gupta Applied sciences.

Members of the I.I.T. group included figures from trade, academia and the funding neighborhood who may usually strongly disagree with each other on a variety of matters, stated Gunjan Bagla, the chief govt of the consultancy Amritt, who helped lead the group with Mr. Gupta.

“Umang was an distinctive chief who may deliver a bunch from chaos to calmness,” he stated.

Umang Gupta was born on Aug. 3, 1949, in Patiala, within the northern Indian state of Punjab, to Ved Prakash Gupta, who labored at India’s labor ministry, and Ramnika Gupta, a politician. Umang’s mother and father have been socialists from completely different castes who met on the funeral of Mohandas Gandhi, a departure from a standard organized marriage.

The couple later separated, and Umang was raised with the assistance of grandparents.

He spent 4 years at a army boarding college and was anticipated to affix the Nationwide Protection Academy, a convention in his mom’s household. As an alternative, he selected I.I.T. Kanpur, the place he earned a bachelor’s diploma in chemical engineering in 1971. The campus had a few of the first IBM computer systems in India, and Mr. Gupta gained programming abilities there as effectively.