These are significant times when IT innovation will shape not only our business but the future of our world. Start-ups and new age companies are a leading source of innovation beyond many companies own internal initiatives. In early 2015, as part of Infosys Renew-New strategy they established a $500million Infosys Innovation fund. It was mentioned that the capital will be used to invest in companies across the globe innovating in areas such as AI, Automation, Internet of Things, Collaboration and Design. Infosys said they want to amplify the reach of startup companies, bring them to market, help them scale, grow and bring innovation to clients.
Infosys received the Global Corporate Venturing Rising Stars Awards 2016. The benefits that Infosys offers for the start-ups as they create an ecosystem to bring innovation to our clients are many. Their areas of focus are:
- Machine Intelligence
- Big Data & Analytics
- Infrastructure & Cloud
- Collaboration & Design
- Convergence of Industries
- Disintermediation of Layers
- New Business Models
The Benefits to Start-ups: Financial Scale, Technical Scale, Market Scale, Social Impact, Incubation and Customer Validation.
What companies has Infosys invested in?
- Airviz Speck: The indoor air quality monitor empowering you to breathe. Airviz helps to empower everyday citizens to improve the quality of the air they breathe. Speck, a pioneering air particulate sensor can detect PM2.5 particulates and provide insightful analytics on air quality. Airviz is a spinoff from the CREATE Lab at the Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute.
- ANSR Consulting provides strategy and implementation services to help global companies establish Global In-House Centers (GICs) in India. Global companies are setting up GICs to harness new technologies such as social, mobile, analytics and cloud. India has emerged as a unique destination for GICs due to wide access to technical and business talent at a reasonable cost, and the growing ecosystem of successful GICs. ANSR Consulting, which has helped establish several GICs within India, creates joint ventures with companies such as those in the Fortune 500. ANSR Consulting helps the joint venture provide strategic, technology-driven solutions that drive competitive advantage and incremental revenue for the companies involved. This investment from the fund widens Infosys’ reach in the fast-growing GIC market.
- CloudEndure, a startup that provides Cloud migration and Cloud-based Disaster Recovery (DR) software. Many leading enterprises look to Infosys for guidance and implementation services associated with large-scale infrastructure transformation projects. CloudEndure provides enterprise grade cloud migration and cloud-based Disaster Recovery (DR) software that uniquely supports migration and DR for both on-premise to-cloud and cloud-to-cloud scenarios.
- Nova provides image generation capabilities (platform and toolset) as a service, APIs to allow customers to create film-quality 3D assets, video and static advertising imagery enabling the delivery of highly personalized and interactive videos to customers. Vertex
- Ventures is a new, early-stage fund formed by technology veterans Jonathan Heiliger and In Sik Rhee.
- Waterline Data Science, a leading provider of data discovery and data governance software. Waterline Data Science provides data scientists and business analysts with a self-service data catalog to help discover, understand and provision data, and an automated data inventory that enables agile data governance across metadata, data quality and data lineage
- WHOOP, an early stage company offering a performance optimization system for elite professional sports teams. WHOOP’s system includes a device worn by athletes on their wrist that continuously measures key strain and recovery variables, and actionable analytics powered by proprietary algorithms that generate intensity and recovery scores. This enables athletes and coaches to gain visibility into the drivers of high performance, guide training and make optimal game day decisions.
Certainly the ways products are developed has really changed. Before companies would hire a bunch of developers, create a strategy and start building. It looks like the question of buy or build is becoming less and less of a question. The answer in developing new products seems to be trending towards developing starts-ups and then acquiring them, partnering with them and building a more evolved ecosystem. We have seen that for many years, starting with some of the social media monitoring and listening platforms, as well as customer service and marketing applications. The future looks very bright and interesting!
@DrNatalie Petouhoff, VP and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research
