Infosys has started taking its Mana machine learning platform to its top 50 clients as it seeks to up the ante in automation and Artificial Intelligence, areas which CEO Vishal Sikka believes will drive both growth and margins, going forward.
Talking to BusinessLine , Samson David, Senior Vice-President — Global Head Cloud, Infrastructure & Security (CIS) & Global Head - Mana, said the company has already started to deploy Mana in its top 50 clients and will take this to all clients going forward. Infosys counts companies such as ConAgra Foods, Kraft and others as its customers. Currently, Infosys has about 1,000 clients.
Mana was launched in April at the company's annual conference in San Fracisco, to drive automation and bring in innovation amongst businesses.
Mana, along with the Infosys Aikido services, aims to lower maintenance cost for both old and new systems; captures the knowledge and know-how of people, and fragmented and complex systems; simplifies the continuous renovation of core business processes; and enables businesses to bring new user experiences leveraging technology.
As IT companies are faced with margin pressures due to the fact that clients have started to demand more from outsourcers than mere labour arbitrage.
David said that Infosys clients are seeing the benefit of using Mana. “One of the leading telecom companies in the US is using it and has seen time taken to complete orders reduced to 2 days from 5 days earlier,” he said.
These developments come on the back of Infosys COO U.B. Pravin Rao, in a recent meeting with analysts said that spending by clients remains volatile and may hit profit margin in the short term. However, he added that for the year Infosys is confident. Analysts seem to like the initial cuts that they have seen from Mana. “It will help them maintain client stickiness,” said Urmil Shah, Analyst with IDBI Capital.
He however, added that it would take a substantial amount of time to become a revenue contributor.