HFS Highlight: Infosys establishes its role as a partner helping clients succeed in their growth journeys

As the world experiences the impact of COVID-19, businesses are struggling to sculpt their way forward and do whatever it takes to stay relevant and plan for growth. Businesses are rewriting their strategic growth equations that need to factor in bending their cost curves and improving experiences across their value chains with the appropriate digital programs. In the middle of this tough business climate, we attended the Infosys APAC Confluence 2021, an annual event that brings together the company’s leaders and clients to share their perspectives on the current affairs in the business world and how Infosys has responded strongly to enable its clients to navigate through the challenging times with accelerated digital programs. Led by the strong revenue growth in Q3, FY2021, Infosys’ digital revenue has crossed 50% of its total revenue in FY 2021, with over 30% year-on-year growth. As clients started transitioning to the work-from-home model, increasing demand for digital technologies has helped Infosys post a robust digital business growth. Additionally, the company signed a large deal with Daimler in December 2020 for driving hybrid cloud-powered innovation and IT infrastructure transformation in Daimler.  

Infosys has blended the right mix of digital and talent management levers to help clients in their transformation journeys towards growth

Infosys brings the right mix of digital capabilities such as Agile, DevOps, Automation and AI to the table, along with its One Infosys approach to accelerate the digital initiatives in its client organizations. Swift response to client’s needs enhances the customer experience, critical to a business’s growth. Following are the vital aspects that Infosys leverages to drive growth in client organizations by improving their digital maturity:

• Scale digital capabilities: Infosys has a robust set of offerings armoured with solutions and services built around its experience, data skills, cybersecurity, cloud and IoT, which act as five pillars. The company launched the Cobalt solutions portfolio in August 2020 to accelerate cloud adoption in the aftermath of a pandemic shock. Infosys Cobalt provides access to over 200 industry-specific solution blueprints to enterprises, along with the option to co-create new cloud solutions with Infosys Cobalt Labs.
• Leverage the “power of AND” in technology investments – Recognizing the power of AND in leveraging AI, automation and analytics, Infosys has been investing in artificial intelligence (AI), automation and machine learning capabilities to help accelerate its customers’ digital transformation journey. Infosys had launched applied AI in November 2020 that converges the power of AI, analytics and cloud to deliver new business solutions and perceptive experiences.
• Talent re-skilling – Infosys Lex Platform houses 270,000 resources and 1200 courses, which has helped Infosys create a continuous learning culture among its employees to make them future-ready. Lex is a mobile-first learning platform that can be accessed anytime, anywhere and suggests learning paths based on employees’ skills. Strategic alliance with Purdue University and Cornell University has helped Infosys in external content integration on the Lex platform. 
• Glocal expansion/localization – Infosys has developed a clear localization strategy driving significant investments in nearshore and onshore delivery options. The company hired 1800 professionals in Australia and 13000 professionals in the US. Infosys plans to hire over 12000 professionals in the US by 2022. The fact that Infosys runs eight innovation hubs across the US and UK, nine digital studios across the globe, one 5G lab in Melbourne and seven cyber defence centres across the globe speaks for its focus on grooming talent across emerging technologies.

Infosys’s growth tenet revolves around helping clients accelerate, scale and improve the maturity of their digital initiatives

Infosys has converged its emerging technologies to connect and engage meaningfully with customers, partners and employees. With increasing connectivity across the world, businesses are opening up to the possibilities of embracing digital capabilities that improve operations’ velocity and enhance the human experience when tasks are accomplished. Cloud helps firms optimize and simplify the underlying process and support systems 24/7, anywhere globally, thus improving the customer experience.

Following are some interesting client journeys where Infosys has helped its clients on a successful cloud journey with the Cobalt:

Kmart cloud journey: As part of Kmart Australia’s plan to rebuild or replace the mainframe applications, it first virtualized the mainframe to run on the AWS cloud and used the freed-up capacity to modernize its core merchandising system. According to Kevin Love, GM Products Technology, “We believe we are one of the first retailers globally to migrate mainframe applications to the cloud 100% remotely. With a cloud platform’s agility, we are in a prime position to innovate and optimize customer experiences rapidly and at scale. I am happy to say that Infosys has been a true partner in our modernization journey by bringing in automation tools from its modernization suite and a great team of mainframe, cloud modernization experts.”

Multi-access edge computing for a large telco: One of Infosys’ clients looked for a strategic partner to provide multi-access edge computing and validate the enterprise use case. Infosys created the solution in its Melbourne 5G lab leveraging edge computing, 8K streaming, virtual reality and augmented reality. The client was able to validate the technology, leverage edge computing and quantify the business potential.

Bottom Line: Infosys cannot shine unless its efforts culminate into enhancing the customer experience and the employee experience

A resilient business model and malleable operations will be critical to enterprises’ success in the future as the world wades through COVID-19. All the digital transformation efforts will result in a fiasco if a business cannot focus on improving the experience of its employees and customers. In turn, the enterprises will operate in a networked ecosystem with boundaries between front, middle and back offices becoming meaningless. Technologies are here to stay and evolve based on the growth trajectories of the companies. Given this situation, a strong focus on building digital talent combined with the continued focus on technology investments to enable the client organizations to bend their cost curves and simultaneously accelerate their digital initiatives will be critical to Infosys’s success.

“My focus at Infosys is much more on what clients want and making sure we do that.”

Salil Parekh, Infosys CEO