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Business Standard: Cognizant Leadership Talks About the Company’s Approach to Incubating Employee Ideas Into In-House Startups

“Cognizant has devised an innovative way to create start-ups within the organization,” writes Business Standard, referring to the company’s program focused on incubating employee ideas into in-house start-ups. “The company says 30 such ventures have been funded and some of these solutions—such as Cloud360 and TruMobi—have already been deployed at some clients.”

“We at Cognizant have realized we will never be smart enough to figure it out all by ourselves, so we have to democratize it,” says Malcolm Frank, Executive Vice President of Strategy and Marketing.

“For those ideas that go on to become their own offerings, the founder often becomes the leader of that offering,” says Sean Middleton, Chief Operating Officer of Emerging Business Accelerator at Cognizant. “We make that career opportunity available to every one of our people today.” Middleton adds that in a number of cases, ideas such as Cloud360, TruMobi or assetSERV spawn new business offerings that generate revenue streams. “In other cases, those ideas become sources of continuous improvement...In other cases, a thought leading idea might prove infeasible but by sharing it with a client, we deepen our relationship and give birth to a new idea.”

Citing the example of Cognizant’s Cloud360, the paper writes that Ramesh Panuganty, now Venture Leader of Cloud360, stumbled on the idea of creating the product when he realized back in in 2008-2009 that the sector was moving toward fluid computing models and infrastructure was becoming available as a service. “The word ‘cloud’ did not exist at the time but it was clear the economics of scale could not justify legacy infrastructure models,” says Panuganty. He compares the idea to the emergence of railroads in America, which connected the fertile agricultural land in the Midwest to the barren one in the west. “Cloud360 is what we call the railroad helping our customers adopt cloud computing.”

Around 50 organizations have adopted Cloud360, which helps to lower the cost of managing applications and improving their performance. “It manages applications across private, public and hybrid clouds and makes it easy to scale systems up or down, based on real-time needs,” the paper writes.

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