Infosys Cloud Strategy: Platform at the Center

So when Infosys called a press conference in Delhi to announce its cloud strategy, many assumed that it would be accompanied by some customer win or something specific for the Indian market. But there was nothing like that and it was a presentation of its cloud and platform strategyattended mostly by the trade press. The executivesVishnu Bhatt, VP and global head, cloud and Samson David, VP and global head, business platforms, actually went deeper and deeper into the strategy and plans with both real-life (what it is doing) as well as hypothetical (shape of things to come) examples, without the usual sprinkling of operating metrics.

It seems to be a good beginning for Infosys 3.0Infosys brand new strategy to move up the value chain. As part of this transformation, Infosys had identified 7 key themesdigital consumers, emerging markets, sustainability, smarter organizations, new commerce, pervasive computing, and healthcare economy. At least 4 of them are tightly integrated with the cloud strategy that it announced.

Categorized into 2 distinct offeringsservices for the cloud and services in the cloudthe first consists of its traditional services such as consulting and integration, but in the cloud domain; while the second is the actual on-demand offering, the real cloud services.

What is noteworthy is that its on-demand offering is built so much around platform focus that the whole cloud strategy seems like a carefully crafted euphemism for what is primarily a platform/product strategythat 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 todayInfrastructure as a Service. We have traditionally followed the asset-light model and that will not change, says Vishnu Bhatt, VP and global head, Cloud. He categorically stated that Infosys will not offer infrastructure as a servicethe typical low-hanging stuff in cloud, unless it is the 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 operators. Interestingly, a major focus in platforms is on the digital consumer and new commerce side, which are for the sales and marketing functions in an organization. Built with social media capabilities, these are a good way to break away from the earlier IT for efficiency regime that most services firms operated in. However IT continues to remain a big driver for efficiency, especially in mature markets. Just that in the new Infosys, it has got a more catchy namesmarter organization.

Another change that most service companies including Infosys and Wipro are talking aboutTCS has already done that to a great extentis combining business services based on differentiated platforms. Cloud actually makes that a real possibility. Infosys is 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.