Indian IT company Infosys has gained or expanded a number of partnerships recently, including infrastructure vendor Huawei and Microsoft, and is increasing its focus on cloud and the data center.
Infosys has had three major partnership announcements in recent days, including:
- Partnering with Huawei to jointly develop IT solutions that rely on Huawei’s cloud infrastructure, plus service expertise from Infosys. The two companies also plan to jointly develop architectures and standardized solutions for big data platforms on Huawei hardware. They’re also setting up a joint lab in China.
- Expanding its decade-long relationship with Microsoft. Infosys said it is one of Microsoft’s leading systems integration partners and will expand its abilities to help customers transition to Microsoft Azure and hybrid cloud environments, and also will build predictive analytics offerings using Azure Machine Learning, as well as “accelerate its efforts to design frameworks, tools and accelerators to improve end-user productivity for the digital workforce on Microsoft cloud platforms,” including Office 365 and Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM Online.
“Our partnership with Microsoft will allow us to tap the versatility of the Microsoft Azure platform, including Azure Machine Learning and other services to offer enterprises simplified predictive modeling tools that turn data into insights. This collaboration offers enterprises easy access to an analytics platform without the need for big investments and extended time-to-market,” said Vishnu Bhat, SVP and global head at Cloud Infosys.
- Building on its partnership with Hitachi Data Systems for the data center, including a joint center of excellence to create pay-per-use offerings aimed at reducing infrastructure and data center management capital expenditures for businesses who can put that money into operations, according to the company. Again, the collaboration focuses on developing joint reference architectures and speeding up private cloud deployments. Infosys said its first-of-its-kind Cloud Ecosystem Hub will integrate with Hitachi’s Unified Compute Platform and reduce time to market and enterprises’ transitions to virtualized environments. The partnership also includes cloud applications for customer relationship management and others to be delivered as-a-service, and working together on deploying SAP HANA.
Infosys has been working to turn itself around and compete on higher-revenue offerings for some time now. The company has a new CEO, Vishal Sikka, who came to Infosys from SAP. Earlier this year, Infosys told investors that it would be increasing its investment in cloud computing and mobile apps and try to win more high-value outsourcing contracts. The recent announcements seem to follow through on that strategy, although analysts reportedly expect efforts to gain ground and transform the company to take at least two more years.
Infosys’ shares have seen substantial gain since Sikka took over, and its revenues continue to grow modestly. However, the company has been struggling with workplace retention rates. In its most recent quarterly call, for example, Infosys reported that it had added 11,500 employees in gross numbers, but net employee adds were 879. Then-CEO S.D. Shibulal — who stepped down in late July and was one of the company’s founding members — told investors that Infosys had put in place a quarterly promotion cycle, given timely compensation increases and increased its variable payout over the previous few quarters in hopes of stemming employee losses, but noted that “our attrition continued to be a matter of concern.”
Reuters and other outlets reported today that Sikka is going to start allowing employees to use personal social media such as Twitter and Facebook from work in the coming months as part of efforts to increase employee satisfaction.
Image courtsey of Infosys
