Sonal Desai
MUMBAI, INDIA: As Infosys declared a very successful Q22015 today, two strategies came to the forefront.
One SMAC and digital, and the second platform and services.
The company which re-structured its organization and made strategic acquisitions to further its platform and services strategy, saw the dividends of the investments pay-off.
As Vishal Sikka, CEO & MD, Infosys, put it, “We are experiencing a once-in-a-generation opportunity for a services company to help businesses maximize their potential with technology. From automation and AI helping to simplify and enable existing landscapes as well as build intelligent systems that help us solve our most complex emerging problems, to education and design helping us to rethink the human experience and helping uncover our most important horizons, a great services organization can truly partner with and amplify businesses.”
According to Sikka, Infosys is taking steps towards becoming such a services organization, and “I am encouraged by our progress.”
Consider the following strategies and the business outcomes for their customers.
In a bid to strengthen its services offerings in the AI, devops, APIs, cloud, automation-into our traditional engagements in application maintenance, testing and BPO, Infosys launched AiKiDo on August 20, comprising three enhanced service offerings in Knowledge-Based IT (KBIT), Platforms, and Design Thinking .
Zero Distance initiative: Focused on fostering a culture of innovation and bringing value to each project, there are more than 5,600 projects in the Zero Distance program and more than 1,700 of these innovations have been discussed with clients.
A large European turbo-machinery company engaged with Infosys in a complex computational geometry project to develop critical applications for designing, rendering, and generating manufacturing data to reduce cycle and effort by 40 percent, and minimize errors.
In it communiqué to the Bombay Stock Exchange, Infosys said, “We also led a transformational project for a large Canadian oil and gas operator to design a system for assignment of shipper nominated oil commodities to routes on client networks involving knowledge of mathematical models and operations research techniques for optimal cost, quality of delivery and operational efficiency of volumetric engines. This resulted in reduction of costs by 20 percent and increase in overall time efficiency.”
Do or Design Thinking: Infosys has more than 117 Design Thinking engagements with clients, and more than 54,000 employees at Infosys have been immersed in Design Thinking course.
“A large bank engaged us to help improve the often stressful customer experience of buying a home. Using design thinking, we helped to focus attention on the unique needs of a mortgage customer. We quickly prototyped a mobile cross-channel application, which was approved for development. This entire process was completed in 3 weeks,” the company said.
In the second instance, a leading high-tech customer and partner engaged with Infosys to help bring a design-thinking mindset and culture to key business functions within their company.
By conducting design thinking workshops, the ITeS major is helping them create a common innovation vocabulary for managers and employees, training their own trainers, and accelerating their ability to apply the principles to their most important projects and challenges.
“We continue to make changes on our renew-new strategy with focus on improving client relationship management, proposal quality as well as discipline around large deals, pipeline and operational efficiencies. At the same time, we are seeing our clients on a shared path with us to leverage the next-generation of services, in which software, platforms and systems amplify people,” Sikka said.
The Infosys Information Platform (IIP): has over 160 engagements to date with almost 20 in production.
“We continue to add capabilities like Natural Language Processing to IIP. For a leading Australian super market chain IIP helped derive key business insights, like Top 10 categories of products by profit and sales, hourly sales trend, category wise profit contribution margin & sales variance and location wise profit & sales variance in less than four weeks,” the company said.
IIP also enabled real-time prediction for out-of-stock items for a confectionary leader in less than three weeks. “We are starting to see material productivity improvements in our delivery org, ranging from 17-50 percent of effort savings,” the company said.
A payments technology firm chose Infosys as its sole strategic partner for its issuer processing line of business. "We will now be its leading global technology services provider and partner to develop and sell joint go-to-market solutions leveraging our offerings in Finacle, Edge and IIP. In addition, we will be the system integrator for the client’s products and will be collaborating to implement its products for banks and financial institutions globally.
Panaya: Baxters Food Group, a global food company headquartered in Fochabers Scotland, chose Infosys as a strategic partner to upgrade its Oracle e-Business suite for finance, supply chain and manufacturing applications by using the Panaya platform.
Skava: The company is also seeing strong traction and a healthy pipeline for Skava with clients across geographies.
For instance two large retail customers to the latest version of the Skava platform, resulting in better performance and higher client conversion.
Last quarter, EdgeVerve Systems sustained strong momentum with 39 wins and 23 go-lives for both Finacle and Edge suite of solutions. New offerings like Finacle Assure, Finacle Payments Bank and Finacle e -Small Finance Bank solutions have seen good traction among its clients.