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Infosys announced its cloud strategy today, as part of its Infosys 3.0
transformation. Categorized into two distinct offerings, services for
the cloud and services in the cloud, the first consists of its
traditional services such as consulting and integration in the cloud
domain, while the second is the actual on-demand offering that it is
building. Its on-demand offering is built around a greater platform
focus, so much so that the whole cloud strategy seems like a carefully
crafted euphemism for what is primarily a platform
strategy—that will not dilute its traditional
“derisking” positioning as a services firm in the
eyes of the analysts while allowing it to move up the value chain
considerably by creating far more IP.
This is also probably the reason why it has decided to stay away from
the most common cloud services today—Infrastructure as
service. “We have traditionally followed the asset-light
model and that will not change,” said Vishnu Bhatt, VP and
Global Head, Cloud for Infosys. He categorically stated that Infosys
will not offer infrastructure as a service—the typical
low-hanging stuff in cloud—unless “it is part of an
end-to-end offering for select clients, who are not keen to get onto
standard public cloud.” In fact, it has Amazon Web Services
as an ecosystem partner in its cloud offering.
It is taking many of its existing platforms to cloud, while working on
about a dozen more. Its popular Finacle core banking software has got a
new version, Finacle Lite, for smaller banks that would primarily be
available on cloud. Then, it has got its mobile applications platform
(App Store) for mobile operator.
While its horizontal platforms are divided into what it calls Digital
Consumer and New Commerce, Smarter Organization, and Emerging
Economies. The first is in the area of sales, marketing and customer
service, where it has multiple platforms; the second is the typical
areas where IT is applied to drive efficiency. It has two platforms
there, one in HR and one in supply chain. It has chosen four verticals
to get deeper into that and build vertical-based solutions. BFSI,
manufacturing, energy, and retail are the areas that it has identified
for creating platforms most of which will be offered on cloud.
Infosys is also trying to sell business-outcome based end-to-end
services leveraging the cloud model. That means a client can buy a
business service from Infosys BPO, which is offered on a point solution
created by Infosys on SAP, run on Amazon Web Services infrastructure.
The client will only pay Infosys based on business outcome and not for
the application or licensing of SAP or for using Amazon
services. Infosys would take care of that in the backend.
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