Infosys Technologies Rolls Out Offerings for the ‘Business Cloud’ 
Infosys Technologies Ltd. is embarking on a three-pronged approach to extend the business value of the cloud by offering users collaboration, analytics and support for better leveraging customer care to retain and generate revenues. These solutions, based on Infosys’ long association with salesforce.com, will drive what company execs call ‘the business cloud.”
Infosys Technologies Ltd. is embarking on a three-pronged approach to extend the business value of the cloud by offering users collaboration, analytics and support for better leveraging customer care to retain and generate revenues.
These solutions, based on Infosys’ long association with salesforce.com, will drive what company execs call ‘the business cloud.” “Our concept is to transform the cloud to a next generation of solution to meet CEO and business owner needs,” Atul Chandra Pandey, Infosys Technologies’ Industry Head of Enterprise Application and Integration Solutions (EAIS) told IDN.
The company’s latest solutions leverage existing IT investments to provide analytics, BI, business agility and other business benefits. “We are catalyzing the cloud journey, taking it to the next level for business users looking for business outcomes,” Pandey said. “As it gets easier to get data into the cloud, and ensure data quality, business users are starting to drive cloud projects.”
Inside the Infosys ‘Business Cloud’ Solutions:
This shift in emphasis for cloud projects drove a lot of features in Infosys’ latest rollout of three business cloud solutions, Pandey added. The Infosys cloud solutions include:
- Next Gen Customer Care. A solution that focuses on expanding profitability for emerging customer buying patterns. The approach is driven by “business value frameworks,” which support specific use case “themes” that can probe for information across various aspects of the business and can impact customer care and customer satisfaction, Pandey said.
“As we entered the [economic] downturn, we observed everyone was cutting on spending but the key problem was why customers were deserting us,” Pandey said. “So, that trend was prompting us to ask new questions and develop new methodologies: How can customer support and customer service can help in the downturn?” With this solution, Infosys will allow users to mine structured and unstructured data and content for better analysis, metrics and support for meeting KPIs, he added.
The Infosys business value framework brings together internal business operations; partner, supplier and customer communications; and marketing insights.
The frameworks drive data and questions from various “themes,” including: retail operations center, interactive voice response (IVR); unstructured data management; deep analytics for customer assessments; and alignment, among others, Pandey said.
- Strategic Analytics. Rather than focus on “business intelligence (BI) in the cloud,” the Infosys approach offers BI applications or “business insights” in the cloud” to business customers, Pandey explained, adding there is a need for advanced analytics at the SaaS level.
"While salesforce.com offers dashboard capabilities to track KPIs, we see increasingly that our customers want to look at decision-making that also leverages applications beyond salesforce.com,” Pandey said. Examples include connecting sales and marketing, campaign management and other revenue-generating opportunities.
Infosys also sees significant opportunities for enabling cloud-based apps and databases to be integrated across business silos and partners. “So, the concept here would be to bring an advanced level of analytics to decision-making by connecting them across many different systems and applications,” he added.
- Line-of-Business (LOB) Collaboration. Infosys is also providing a set of vertical business collaboration offerings based on salesforce.com’s Chatter cloud-based private social network. Infosys’ collaboration solution are built on salesforce’s Force.com cloud platform and let business users across an organization connect to multiple social and collaboration applications, including email. ”We see collaboration as a key area, and so we are looking at a set of what we call ‘collaboration accelerators,’ between marketing, sales, customer support and even product design and manufacturing,” Pandey told IDN. For go-to-market, Infosys is considering two options: a pre-packaged offering available through salesforce.com’s AppExchange; or a bolt-on for existing apps.
The Architecture and Future of
Infosys’ ‘Business Cloud’ Approach
Infosys started supporting the cloud with its salesforce.com practice four years ago, Pandey said. Over the years, the company’s work has focused on ways to eliminate many of the complexities, and included core functionality for data, such as management, integration and migration.
“Companies are more and more looking at how the cloud can preserve and grow revenue, retain customers and upsell them – not just cut costs."
Atul Chandra Pandey
Industry Head -- Enterprise Application Integration and Solutions (EAIS)
Infosys Technologies Ltd.
Notwithstanding the focus on benefits from a “business cloud,” Pandey said the underlying SOA-based architectures are keys to delivering those benefits. “Unless you have a standardized method for creating reusable components, it will be very difficult to reliably exploit or scale the cloud for business uses,” Pandey said. “So for us SOA will continue to play a major role in the cloud journey.”
Architecturally, the Infosys approach to “business cloud” is based on two core principles:
- SOA and composite approaches, which reduce upfront costs through reuse and modularity; and
- Pervasive performance methodologies, which allow users to dynamically consolidate various data sets, and apply business templates to the business-critical data companies already collect and store.
“In this next-generation of cloud, people won’t be talking as much about SOA basics anymore,” Pandey said. “Instead, we’ll be hearing a lot about how services, reuse, integration and interoperability provide crucial support for delivering business value. That discussion is where the really exciting opportunities will appear, and where we intend to play.”
Infosys’ customer research suggests some factors that will drive the continuing evolution of “business cloud” solutions in 2011 and beyond. Among them:
- Best practices to handle the transition phase from 100 percent on-premise to data and applications fully in the cloud, or integrated between cloud(s) and on-premise.
- Decision-making factors to adopt a single instance vs. multiple instance strategy for cloud solution implementation and roll out
- Experiences, concerns and views on data privacy on the cloud
- Strategies to leverage Force.com platform across business functions and other clouds
“The biggest cloud opportunities for us are and will be at the business level,” Pandey said. “Companies are more and more looking at how the cloud can preserve and grow revenue, retain customers and upsell them – not just cut costs. Using the cloud to accomplish all this will drive a greater focus on data, application and user collaboration -- and better visibility, analytics, data and data mining. It’s going to get very interesting and exciting,” Pandey added.
