Infosys makes new moves with ‘Aikido’ service lines

Infosys has launched three new service lines, which are enhancements of its existing offerings in design thinking, platforms and knowledge-based IT, as it strives to get higher margin deals.

These new services are called Aikido, which was announced by CEO Vishal Sikka. Aikido is a combination of three words — Ai, Ki and Do, which in Japanese mean combining, spirit and path/way.

‘Ki’ and ‘Do’ service lines will be offered by Infosys consulting team, headed by Sanjay Purohit, Sikka said, adding that ‘Ai’ will be an Artificial Intelligence (AI) offering based largely on open source technologies.

These new offerings are a continuation of Sikka’s new and renew strategy, which aims to improve existing service offerings (which are getting commoditised) and venturing towards newer disruptive tech areas. In line with this, ‘Ki’ aims to help enterprises architect legacy mainframe applications run by large banks in such a manner that it can connect with modern day systems and using automation where required.

The second service line — ‘Do’ refers to services based on principles of design thinking that involves a framework for finding, understanding and defining the problems involving clients and their businesses.

The third service line, ‘Ai’ refers to platform and platforms-as-a-service to build new-gen solutions. “This will include the Infosys automation platform, Panaya and other offerings in the engineering services, BPO and testing. Mobile platforms based on Skava also come under this new service,” said Sikka.

Sikka in his address pointed out that a lot of this is coming from talking to clients who are grappling with large and complex IT systems that needs maintenance.

Industry watchers pointed out that while this looks good at a conceptual level, the real challenges are in getting all these three services offerings together. “Still hazy on the details and yet to figure out how platforms (such as Edge) figure in this,” said an analyst from a brokerage house.

Infosys’ margins have been coming under pressure and Sikka believes that these steps will help Infosys achieving industry leading margins by 2020.

These announcements came after market hours and Infosys stock closed at ₹1,138, or 3.1 per cent lower when compared to the previous day's close at the Bombay Stock Exchange.

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