U.B. Pravin RaoChief Operating Officer
and Whole-time Director
U.B. Pravin RaoChief Operating Officer
and Whole-time Director
Letting go of the familiar, to navigate to the next, is not always easy. But so often it’s inevitable. As inescapable for naturals like the Arctic terns – those ambitious navigators that chart their migratory flight from the North Pole to the South and back – as it is for enterprises that must learn to steer through the turbulence of digital disruption to find their future.
Incumbent companies – often large and successful businesses that thrived for decades before the emergence of this pervasive digitalization – can sometimes feel like they must fight the winds that seem to be propelling everybody but them forward. Yet, we believe that incumbents too can adapt, and leverage the resources they have – a strong brand, significant capital, longstanding customer relationships and decades of institutional knowledge – to find and take advantage of opportunities amidst the disruption.
We also know that being digital means making far-reaching changes that go beyond simply investing in the latest digital technologies. It means reimagining operating models, considering how best to refactor and invigorate talent with digital skills, and looking afresh to engage in ways customers find valuable. Today, we are well on our way to executing our strategy to accomplish exactly that. In fact, our promise to our clients is to be their navigator as they chart their path to a more digital future. The strength of our conviction comes from the fact that each tenet of the strategy we recommend for them, is already working for us.
We are navigating, step by step, towards new digital opportunities while smartly leveraging our traditional strengths – our core services. In the past three years, we have embraced artificial intelligence based automation techniques and software automation platforms to boost the productivity of our core service delivery. Infosys Nia®, our next-generation intelligent automation platform, and AssistEdge®, our Robotic Process Automation platform, have been key to bringing machine learning and automation together with deep knowledge of our business to industrialize our core landscape. Simultaneously, through Project Infynity, we are also transforming our delivery practices in a holistic modernization journey that will bring the agility we seek to our processes.
“These strategic initiatives – energizing our core, scaling Agile Digital, re-skilling our people and expanding our localization – are helping us find our next. So we can look forward to an opportunity-filled future.”
These productivity and efficiency gains are enabling us to make targeted investments to accelerate our Agile Digital business. We are boosting our digital delivery capabilities and priority services, including customer experience amplification, data analytics, product engineering, cloud migration, cyber security, automation and platform-based business process management. We are applying these first to our own context. For example, today, Infosys hybrid cloud enables on-demand self-service provisioning, while doubling capacity, without increasing costs. We are beginning to manage our unstructured data with Penny-a-GB (PeG) – our peta‑scale, software‑defined storage. Mobile‑first solutions drive all our critical business, learning and collaboration processes. Our Information System processes are simplified, reducing cumulative effort for critical processes by up to 80%. We have made significant progress in our workplace transformation journey as well, even as proactive cyber defense nurtures the digital trust we need to continue to push through to the future.
We are also incubating new offerings in areas such as blockchain, Augmented Reality / Virtual Reality and speech, vision, video and image intelligence, in collaboration with universities, research organizations and our innovation ecosystem.
Yet, we understand that each of these separate initiatives must come together seamlessly to turn it into a balanced, integrated program of change. It’s only our people who can ‘glue’ it all together. But only when they develop a deep appreciation for the digital culture. We nurture this by driving talent re-skilling at scale for our employees in the new areas of digital services. In many ways, this comes naturally to us because teaching and learning has always been our lifeblood. Whether it’s our investments in our Global Education Center at Mysuru, India; in advanced, anytime-anywhere learning systems such as our Lex platform; or our relationships with universities around the world to curate specific curricula, in areas such as creative design skills, machine learning, autonomous technologies and blockchain, our enthusiasm for lifelong learning remains unrivalled.
We are also investing in localizing our workforce in the geographies we work in, because we believe that the benefits of digital transformation are often better realized contextually. We have announced the setting up of four delivery and innovation centers in the US. The first of these is already active in Indianapolis, while three others – in Connecticut, Rhode Island and North Carolina – are well on the way to becoming operational. We are also recruiting locally from universities in the US. We aim to scale this effort to include our key markets in Europe and Australia as well.
Much like the Arctic terns do. Their migratory patterns allow them to experience two summers in one year, every year – and that’s more than most other creatures in the world can hope for!