Is Infosys set for a turnaround?

Infosys is working on new technologies around driverless cars and virtual reality for some of its marquee clients like GE, Toyota and Boeing, as it seeks to get back into industry leading growth mode in the 2017 fiscal.

“If you look at some places where we inhabit, cars for example, assistive driving, driverless car infrastructure has become quite commonplace...assistive driving capabilities are there in every car now,” said CEO Vishal Sikka, at a conference organised by Kotak Institutional Equities.

“We do a lot of this work (automation of the driving experience) for companies like Toyota and Boeing and so forth,” he added.

He cited the example of a project with GE on sensors that are being used in aircraft landing gear. Infosys instrumented these landing gears which has around 30 additional sensors, according to Sikka.

This kind of analytics gives companies to understand performance issues, health of the equipment, which can all be a value addition for the equipment maker, said Sanjoy Sen, Doctoral Research Scholar at Aston Business School.

These kind of shifts are being seen in the $143-billion IT industry, which is going through rough weather, with macroeconomic factors playing spoilsport on one hand and rapidly evolving technology on the other, as well as increased competition from start-ups.

It is in this backdrop that companies like Infosys are trying to engage better with most of their clients, which number 1,045 in total.

“What we can think of services that can transcend space and time constraints,” said Sikka. Analysts like Sandip Agarwal, of Edelweiss point to the fact that Infosys will benefit from higher utilisation, higher fixed price projects coupled with automation-based offerings in the traditional infra business as it aims to reach Sikka’s ‘$20 billion in revenues by 2020’ vision.

Through a series of measures that include more productivity of employees through automation, co-innovating with some of its clients (instead of just taking orders) and changing the paradigm of software services through new techniques such as ‘design thinking’ will pave the way forward, according to Partha Iyengar, Gartner Vice-President and Head of Research (India).

Some of these measures have started to resonate with its customers.

For three consecutive quarters, Infosys has posted a strong set of numbers, has beaten analyst expectations, has received order books of $3 billion, and has also revised its annual revenue guidance upwards for this fiscal .