Infosys' two-year transformational process may take at least another two years as the company aims to scale itself to offer high-value services, according to experts who got a chance to interact for the first time with Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director Vishal Sikka at an event in Berlin last week
Even so, analysts who were at the customer event believe that if successful, the country's secondlargest software exporter could see improved margins with a new approach of trying to balance "to-do-same-for-less" contracts with "co-innovate-withthe-customer" type of deals. "Vishal presented a plan to reposition Infosys as a co-innovator for new business logic jointly with the customers," said Stefan Ried, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research.
"Some is packaged in Edge application (products, platforms and solutions or EdgeVerve) or Finacle (core banking product), others are less packaged and customer-specific," said Ried. "Infosys is in a transformational process since the last two years, which may take another two to three years."
The company "will take probably couple of years to be where" it aims to be, Infosys Chief Operating Officer Pravin Rao said at a CLSA conference on September 15.
"Today, when we look at our business, a big part of our business is getting commoditised," said Rao, adding that customers don't see much difference between offerings of leading IT outsourcers.
"So one of the areas we are looking at is how to start looking at some of the delivery service offerings, how to bring in element of differentiation, how to introduce automation and how to be more productive so that we can be more competitive," he said.
For the past few years, Infosys has been lagging behind some of its peers, including the country's leading IT firm, Tata Consultancy Services. When founder NR Narayana Murthy was asked to return to steer the company last June, he outlined a three-pronged strategy to help Infosys.
With Sikka at the helm now, the company is seeking to "transform" itself to be able to deliver innovative solutions. Sikka was a member of the Executive Board of SAP AG before joining Infosys in August.
"Somebody who is just outsourcing infrastructure could ybe replaced after the contract is expired but somebody who helps you architect your company's business logic stay for decades, just like SAP does," said Ried. To offer such solutions, Sikka is looking at ways to reduce costs and help free up budgets for innovation, according to Philip Carnelley, research director, European Software Group at IDC.
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