Unlike most other companies of the time, he chose to use and sell the software online as a subscription service, a business model that now dominates corporate computers.
“He was ahead of his time in thinking about where things are going and what’s going to happen,” said Mohan Gyani, a longtime board member and friend of Keynote.
Mr. Gupta floated Keynote in September 1999. In early 2000, he raised $350 million more in a secondary offering, helping Keynote overcome the technical failure that soon followed.
In 2013, he sold Keynote for $395 million to the private equity firm Thoma Bravo and retired from business software. But he remained known as a philanthropist and by working with a group representing alumni of the Indian Institutes of Technology (he had visited the campus in Kanpur), said Kanwal Rekhi, an experienced Silicon Valley technical director and investor who served on the board. from Gupta Technologies.
Members of the IIT group have included figures from industry, academia and the investment community who often disagreed strongly on a range of issues, said Gunjan Bagla, the chief executive of the consultancy Amritt, which, along with Mr. Gupta, group helped lead. †
“Umang was an exceptional leader who could bring 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 worked in the Indian Ministry of Labor, and Ramnika Gupta, a politician. Umang’s parents were socialists of different castes who met at Mohandas Gandhi’s funeral, a departure from a traditional arranged marriage.
The couple later broke up and Umang grew up with the help of grandparents.
He spent four years at a military boarding school and would attend the National Defense Academy, a tradition in his mother’s family. Instead, he chose IIT Kanpur, where he obtained a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering in 1971. The campus had some of the first IBM computers in India and Mr. Gupta also acquired programming skills there.
