IP creation big growth strategy for Infosys

BANGALORE, INDIA: So what if the Indian government does not believe in awarding patents for software? It does not deter companies like Infosys, who are investing in building Intellectual Property. In fact, IP creation and commercialisation is a big non-linear growth strategy for the IT services giant.

“Intellectual Property creation and commercialization is a big non-linear growth strategy, so anything that is people intensive is a linear mode and at our size now, non-linear growth strategy is a big focus,” said Subu Goparaju, Head, SetLabs, talking to CIOL.

The research arm of Infosys, SetLabs, was recently awarded US patents for Holography and Mobile Communications. In fiscal 2008, Infosys generated over 102 invention disclosures and filed an aggregate of 10 patents in India and the US. Some of its main areas of research include: areas of software engineering, high performance and grid computing, convergence technologies, information management, Web 2.0 and knowledge engineering, business process management, enterprise mobility, etc.

Infy has been working on these technologies for two to four years, and believes that these are areas where the applications will keep increasing and hence, present a big opportunity.

Driven by a need to protect its Intellectual Property, the company set about actively focusing on identifying all its intellectual assets and protecting it through patents.

“Once you have a focus on IP, it is important to make sure that you protect it, you make sure that others don’t infringe on that, similarly you don’t infringe on other's intellectual property, so you need to have a very clear intellectual property protection strategy,” says Goparaju.

So, what is driving such a dedicated approach to creating IP?  “First of all it clearly differentiates our services when we are actually talking about it, even the regular IT services whether it is in the system development or main domains or package implementation or any of those things, it is our research and IP clearly differentiates and the clients refer different kinds of value whether in terms of how fast we deliver it or the quality we delivered," he states.

Generation co-creation is another concept that Infy conceived, wherein it collaborates with its partners/clients to co-create products, while combining intellectual properties.

On building products

Infosys is also seriously focusing on commercializing some of the IP and is simultaneously looking at  India as a non-linear growth model.

In response to a query on whether there is conscious shift in strategy from a services provider to a products company, Goparaju said, “We will continue to be a IT solutions organization or business IT solutions organization, but in some cases if we need to productize some of our more mature IP we are pretty open to that and probably products also.”

Some of the areas that could be chosen as a product strategy are enterprise mobility, convergence technologies and some business areas like analytics. Yet, Goparaju insists that it will not be a significant move from being a services organization to a products organization.

"We will continue to be a services and solutions company, but if for a particular piece of intellectual property if we feel that a product model is more suited then we are open to that.  So we will see some products also from Infosys, like for instance we have Finacle today, so in future we may have more such products, but as I said we will continue to be mainly an IT solutions organization and if a product model is more suitable for one of the things we are open to that," he adds.

MConnect, a mobility platform, Infosys Gradient, a real-time data integration tool, Magicmirror and ShoppingTrip360 are solutions that the company is trying to productize. “When they (the solutions) reach a particular stage, we may actually try to kind of take them out and make them into full-fledged products.  Some of these things are being done within specific business units today,” he adds.

Infosys is also looking to grow its business in the domestic market. It has set up a business unit for India and will be working with Indian clients. As far as products for India is concerned  Goparaju says, “We are consciously looking at India as a market, we are working with one of the India business units.  To start with we are actually trying to leverage our existing intellectual property in the Indian context. We actually see good opportunities for most of our IP in the Indian context and there are also some areas where we are actually trying to build new stuff and modify the existing thing for the Indian companies, especially in the wireless mobility security areas.”

Beyond global delivery 

What is the future of the global delivery model? The next-generation software engineering model is something that Infosys has been working on and plans to revamp. The current focus is on four significant research areas: automation, collaboration, assembling and simulation.

“We actually focus our research around these four themes (automation, collaboration, assembling and simulation ) a lot to really change the way we are doing software designing today.  So, we are actually trying to research and innovating around these four things to really define that next generation software engineering models,” says Goparaju.