Expanding innovation with Infosys Cobalt Cloud Community

Enterprises have adopted the cloud chiefly to exploit its ability to deliver agility and cost variability to operations. Today, they aim to become a cloud-first business to help boost market responsiveness, drive innovation at scale, enable business resiliency, deliver seamless omnichannel experiences and support cloud-first business models, solutions and products. The cloud journey is not merely about moving “to the cloud,” but about transforming “with the cloud.”

To fully reap the benefits of a cloud-powered transformation, the core must be rejuvenated first, followed by investments in a cloud-first future to generate value and scale businesses. In the process, organizations should convert their IT operations into a highly responsive and efficient landscape by codifying the associated complexity with software and process engineering before utilizing an expert mix of on-premise infrastructure, public, private and hybrid clouds. The focus should be maintained on accelerated workload migration to the cloud, while also simultaneously modernizing applications to make them real-time and digital-ready. Irrespective of the path chosen (or even a hybrid of the two approaches), enterprises must change their mindsets to be able to scale the cloud for driving their digital transformation journey.

Cloud programs are no longer just a CIO prerogative; in fact, CXOs now expect the cloud to deliver value in every business function. For the CHRO, the expected outcomes could include positive employee engagement and experience, apart from adaptive sourcing and management of talent. The CMO can anticipate enhanced customer acquisition and retention and better return on investment on online advertising, campaign orchestration and analytics, leading to superior brand awareness. The cloud empowers CSOs with a scalable and predictive revenue engine and greater management of forecasts and contracts. For the CFO, expected outcomes include cost optimization and increased profits.

Today, enterprises look to the cloud to help elevate their business - the cloud empowers telemedicine and connected health devices, smart grids for utilities, edge computing on 5G, IoT-enabled shop floors, contactless retail, drone-powered delivery, networks on the cloud, autonomous and driverless cars. Enterprises are at the tipping point to scale their cloud-powered transformation and becoming a cloud-first business. It is now no longer about adopting the cloud, but capitalizing on it to enhance business outcomes. But for enterprises to pivot cloud transformation towards solving real business challenges instead of technology problems, they need to focus on -

Talent – Invest and deploy the right mix of talent through a blend of industry and technology experience that is equipped with the right skill sets, all the time
Security and compliance – Ensure regulatory and security compliance, along with technical and financial governance on every single piece of the IT landscape on the cloud
Speed to market – Ensure business resiliency and speed to market by doing things faster without compromising on costs, performance and compatibility

What is the Infosys Cobalt Cloud Community?

The Infosys Cobalt Cloud Community aims to be the world’s largest enterprise cloud community to help enterprises drive innovation at scale. This community comprises proficient business and technology practitioners across Infosys. This community works from the grassroots level upwards across industries, organizations, functions and technologies to develop reusable cloud assets that can be applied to solve everyday business challenges securely. These assets, including solutions, platforms, knowledge and accelerators, not only assist enterprises in moving to the cloud, but also successfully navigate a hybrid multicloud environment to help solve business problems and accelerate their cloud journey. Based on the complexity of the business problem, assets can be enabled either as standalone or as a combination that best help address the business problems. The community will curate and finetune assets daily to make them available for use by enterprises.

The community will gradually extend outside of Infosys to include a larger ecosystem of clients, academia and partners. This move will enable and enrich each ecosystem’s assets to solve challenges.

How does the Infosys Cobalt Cloud Community help?

Enterprises can access an ever-growing catalog of over 300 industry cloud-first solution blueprints, curated from more than 35,000 cloud assets.

The Infosys Cobalt Cloud community focuses on the expanding store of cloud assets, classified into four broad categories, which can be consumed by members under different models.

Business assets - platforms, services and solutions focusing on industry verticals and sub verticals, horizontal business capabilities, cross-industry business assets
Engineering assets - frameworks, platforms, services, AI/ML models, BOTS, code snippets which can be utilized to create a higher level solution on a cloud ecosystem
Knowledge assets - frameworks, solution capability models, reference architectures, process models which can be utilized for project implementation
Learning assets - methodologies, approaches, best practices curated based on technology, hyperscalers and business solutions

The highlights of the community include -

Assets will be continuously made available on the Infosys Cobalt Store, a one-stop-shop for platforms, IP assets, offerings, solutions and other components. The repository will host assets and solutions that benefit clients. It works on a marketplace model where clients can add their assets too and solve their specific business problems.
The multi-tenant store is managed in a layered manner based on user persona, enabling better search, usage, standardization and reuse. The assets are calibrated against three levels of maturity: labs, incubate and graduate that ensure only top-notch and high-quality IPs are retained.
A central team at Infosys will govern the compliance and quality of the assets. Each asset goes through stringent checks with 25 point parameters covering engineering conformance, availability of various collaterals, compliance approvals, user ratings, adoption and revenue generation. It has features like micro stores, preconfigured dockets, ability to demonstrate the platform or solution, show relevant assets, enhanced search and assistance by a bot.
Powered by telemetry, and available on the cloud, the Infosys Cobalt Store enables continuous improvement of the platform as well as the user experience.

Enterprises can also take advantage of the infrastructure available through Infosys Cobalt Labs and Playground at Infosys global digital centers to rapidly prototype and co-create new cloud-first solutions. They can lean on Infosys Cobalt’s polycloud platform to help optimize cloud investments, efficiently subscribe to new services and deliver a seamless user experience in a hybrid cloud environment. Businesses can also draw from the robust Infosys partner ecosystem to preconfigure partnerships that transform specific domains.

Businesses can also draw from the robust Infosys partner ecosystem to preconfigure partnerships that transform specific domains.

What makes the Cobalt Cloud Community unique?

The Cloud Community is a revolutionary way to democratize the ecosystem by bringing together relevant entities, building innovative assets to solve business problems and innovating to help businesses perform. In addition to Infosys’ experts, the cloud community will comprise experts from our clients, partners and academic institutions to take advantage of the collective infrastructure to research and build a repository of digital solutions to solve everyday business challenges. Over time, this cloud community engine will expand to include clients (and their organizations), partners, academia, startups, gig workers and citizen cloud developers.