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Infosys stepping up consulting presence
R Raghavendra in Bangalore |
March 25, 2004 10:26 IST
Infosys Technologies is gradually increasing its presence in the consulting space and currently offers not just a working "blueprint" for a company's IT architecture, but also solutions for managing and operating this architecture.
Progeon, the BPO subsidiary or Infosys, is able to actually manage the IT processes of companies. So consultants at Infosys are upbeat about this advantage that they can bring to clients by not just being able to plan and solve companies' IT requirements but also to manage the IT processes.
Consultancy accounted for only 3.6 per cent of Infosys' revenues for the quarter ended 31 December 2003. But sequentially (Q2 to Q3), consulting revenue grew by 15 per cent compared to overall revenue growth of 9 per cent.
It is also widely acknowledged that over and above direct consulting revenue, consulting helps generate other businesses for a software company.
Explaining the company's growth path and its current offerings, Subrahmanyam Goparaju, associate vice president and head, Software Engineering and Technology Labs, said, "Gone are the days when a company like ours were approached by clients to just develop software for specific application.
"From there, we migrated to project management in a pilot phase. This evolved into business engineering and problem solving. Today, our team at SET is proactive in nature. We talk in terms of end-to-end process handling solutions."
The SET division of Infosys recently launched the fifth version of InFlux, which is a methodology for running business processes. This is applied to clients' varied business process in order to achieve higher efficiency and better decision making.
"We intend to standardise this methodology as some of our clients have found that it has increased their business efficiency and also benefited their IT integration process," Goparaju added.
In the last three years, SET Labs has handled over 100 projects in verticals like banking, capital market, insurance, automotive, retail and manufacturing and distribution. Goparaju, however, declined to name the clients.
On the receptiveness of clients to prescriptions for changing their IT architecture, Goparaju said, "Companies define their entire processes based on IT. Over 80 per cent of re-engineering and business process management is to do with IT. Today, IT not only enables automation in companies, but also defines its processes."