Sikka bets on open source platform to tap new business for Infosys

Taking his much-talked about ‘Renew and New’ strategy forward, Vishal Sikka, CEO of Infosys, and his team are working towards, what he calls “the next big platform technologies” that will offer next generation solutions to new business problems for clients.

“At present, there isn’t a great platform solution in the enterprise world anymore. I believe the next big platform technologies will be based around open source components and assembling them. We have our first step in the platform direction going on with the Infosys Information Platform (IIP). This is our open source platform for big data analytics,” he told BusinessLine .

Investing and building enhanced capabilities in IIP aligns with Sikka’s ‘new’ part of the strategy that will garner new business opportunities for Infosys. The company will build customised big data platforms, leveraging IIP, for enterprises to realise and maximise value from their data lakes. Currently, Infosys has 80 ongoing client projects in IIP and a few dozen Artificial Intelligence projects that solve complex kinds of problems for customers.

However, as Sikka pointed out, these are just 200 ‘new’ projects that Infosys has been working on over the last five months, and are much smaller in number compared to 23,000 ongoing client projects that constitute Infosys’ traditional business, where most of its revenues are being generated.

Analysts say, these ‘new’ kinds of projects, including IIP, will take some time to mature and generate revenue streams for the company.

“As I see it, Infosys will not sell IIP as a solution in itself but will use it to generate significant, incremental revenue streams. They will do this by building IIP capabilities into future versions of their software-based solutions to clients,” said Sanjoy Sen, former senior director, Deloitte and also currently a doctoral researcher in strategic governance for IT/ITeS and outsourcing organisations at Aston Business School, UK.

Sikka is making a lot of changes to regain Infosys’ lost bellwether status in the industry by taking calculated risks to provide strategic transformation solutions to clients, of which IIP is one, said Sen.

Since he took over as CEO, 7 months ago, Sikka has met with 500 clients to understand what exactly they want out of IT services providers. On being asked about other innovative customer solutions that he has introduced, Sikka said “In our $700-million BPO business, we do procurement BPO where we do management of systems and combine it with our Procure Edge product which dramatically simplifies the procurement landscape of our customers.

“For instance, where we do the procurement services for our clients, about $100 billion of purchases flow through our teams every year. I tell my team, you have visibility into $100 billion of purchases by these great companies of the world, how can we reduce the complexity in the procurement landscape for them; how can we innovate so that their procure process improves. Why don’t we also do forecasting and simulation?”

Last month, Infosys offered its first forecasting and simulation add-on package to its procurement clients. The package allows customers to know not just what happened in the past but also how procurement will evolve next week, month, quarter or year, Sikka said during the Morgan Stanley investor conference at San Francisco, earlier this month. “We have to start these new themes, design-thinking, investments in the open-source platform. But, those are small today and will become bigger over time,” he said.