Richard Humphreys |
Infosys has been a vertical-focused company since it was founded more than 40 years ago, with its sales, consulting, go-to-market and delivery teams aligning with specific industries.
Sachin Bery, go-to-market head and senior director of client solutions at Infosys, says that, with increased focus on the cloud, the impetus has extended to the application packages space which has shaped Infosys’ vertical-focused delivery units.
How is Infosys unlocking accelerated growth within various industries?
In the Microsoft space, we created a team called Microsoft Business Apps Consulting Community (MBCC), which comprises industry leaders, architects and programme managers. MBCC has helped us bring industry solutions, thought leadership, innovations and new ‘verticalised’ offerings to the market. Many of these are available to our clients on Microsoft AppSource as Microsoft-certified offerings. We are also investing deeply in building industry intellectual property (IP) which can work seamlessly with the Microsoft industry clouds. In the last two years, we have brought more than 30 industry solutions to the market, and we are working with partners, start-ups, independent software vendors, private equity firms and developing local partnerships to seamlessly expand their reach and availability at the points of consumption.
To what extent is Microsoft cloud technology playing a role in industry-led transformations?
The clear focus from Microsoft in the last two years has been an industry-first approach. The integrated cloud approach with data, artificial intelligence and apps, coupled with a low-code/no-code strategy, has led to a clear differentiation in the market. The new applications are more intelligent and intuitive. While some of them have horizontal applications, the industry applications with focused themes for retail, manufacturing and healthcare are being developed over time like Lego blocks. This is evident from the way new workloads are evolving with industry persona becoming a focus.
In what specific areas have these transformations had a demonstratable impact, and how has this been achieved?
With the breadth of solutions and industries in which Microsoft operates, we at Infosys have seen demonstratable success in retail, financial services, healthcare, utilities, energy and manufacturing.
We have been able to drive impact in human experience-led transformation across ecosystems. We’ve also enabled agile and resilient operations in organisations with a connected, responsive and intelligent supply chain. And we’ve enabled new business models that help unlock untapped revenue streams while expanding market reach and customer segments for our clients. This has been possible with very industry-specific solutions that bring together accelerators, consulting frameworks, benefit assessments, design thinking and prototyping approaches into the transformation projects.
How has Infosys improved employee engagement, collaboration and productivity for clients?
With an industry-first approach to all transformations, we have achieved these outcomes by concentrating on three key elements: a focus on experience, early inclusion of all stakeholders into workshops and digital design discussions, and embedding agility as a de-facto philosophy into each and every programme from the first conversation with our client or prospect.
We run ‘joint way of working’ workshops right at the beginning of projects to align teams across business, stakeholders and IT on the initiative while outlining the benefits envisaged to users upfront. We leverage our innovation network (Infosys Innovation Network), digital studios, Infosys Labs, Lex (Infosys’ training and enablement platform) and the Infosys Cobalt Store to ensure we bring together the best of solutions across Infosys for the client. This, therefore, empowers them in all dimensions of a true digital transformation journey and eventual success.
What is next for Infosys in this space?
At Infosys, we believe that active understanding, clear alignment and accelerated responses are needed not only from a technological perspective, but also from economical and environmental perspectives. This has been marked by the changing landscape of the pandemic, with recovery in parts, the rise of the hybrid workforce, rising inflation, geopolitical risks and disrupted supply chains. Our clients need to build this variability into future transformations and that is where Infosys Live Enterprise comes into play.
We have incorporated this into our ways of working internally before we took this to market. We will continue to invest in deeper consulting capabilities, industry solutions and IP-driven transformations, evangelise low-code applications and drive citizen developers, focus on organisational learning, organisation change management, embedded intelligence, smarter analytics, and Web 3.0, including metaverse. By doing so, Infosys will bring new possibilities to clients in the right context, at the right time to the right stakeholders and of course at the right value.
This article was originally published in the Summer 2022 issue of Technology Record. To get future issues delivered directly to your inbox, sign up for a free subscription.