Umang Gupta, who paved the way for Indian tech executives, dies at 73

Unlike most other companies of the era, he chose to run the software online and sell it as a subscription service, a business model that currently dominates enterprise computing.

“He was ahead of his time thinking about everything that was going to happen and what was going to happen next,” said Mohan Gyani, a longtime Keynote board member and friend.

Mr. Gupta took Keynote public in September 1999. In early 2000, he raised another $350 million in a secondary offering, helping Keynote weather the technology crash that soon followed.

In 2013, he sold Keynote for $395 million to private equity firm Thoma Bravo and retired from business software. Kanwal Rekhi, a veteran Silicon Valley investor and tech executive who attended the Indian Institute of Technology campus (he attended the campus in Kanpur), said He has always been considered a philanthropist. Board of Directors of Gupta Technologies.

Gunjan Bagla, chief executive officer of the consulting firm Amritt, who helped lead the team with Mr Gupta, said members of the IIT team include figures in the industry, academia and the investment community. .

“Umang is an outstanding leader who can take a group from chaos to calm,” he said.

Umang Gupta was born on August 3, 1949, in Patiala, in the northern Indian state of Punjab, to Ved Prakash Gupta, who used to work at the Indian Ministry of Labor, and Ramnika Gupta, a politician. Umang’s parents were socialists from different walks of life who met at the funeral of Mohandas Gandhi, a departure from a traditional arranged marriage.

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

He spent four years at the military boarding school and was expected to join the National Defense Academy, a tradition in his mother’s family. He chose IIT Kanpur instead, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering in 1971. The campus had some of the first IBM computers in India, and Mr. Gupta also gained programming skills there. .