Silicon.de: Cognizant’s Vice President and Global Head of Markets for Infrastructure Services Says Convergence of Infrastructure is a Key Enabler for Innovation to be Successful

“Digital transformation is driving innovation at an unprecedented rate,” says Venugopal Lambu. “However, all industries face the same challenge: keep up or risk falling behind. This is equally valid for decades-old traditional players as well as new web-era ventures.” Excerpts:

“The convergence of infrastructures is a basic but key enabler for innovation to be successful, as it frees potential value such as business insights or service innovations currently locked in organisational silos. In order to get this right, businesses need to develop new skills and work processes.

A new digital experience and expectation seems to appear every day; however, the real hero in the race to become fully digital is the underlying infrastructure services, often overlooked, the backbone and driver of today’s virtual marketplace.

Be it real-time coupons in retail, rapid credit scoring based on Big Data, or pay-as-you-drive business cases in the insurance industry, what they all have in common is accelerated time-to-market and contribution towards revenue generation due to the infrastructure powering this growth.

Companies unable to keep up with the pace of change are likely to struggle: just think of some of the once major names in the photography or music industry, which haven’t survived the digital disruption and got lost at the crossroads. In addition, the Internet of Things (IoT) would not live up to its true potential without digital infrastructures.

The drivers for this rapid progress towards a digital economy are infrastructure transformers such as mobile or cloud computing. They form the engine of digitization, or essentially its data “motorway”. And the expectations are high: infrastructures are expected to be engines to predict change before it happens, act even more quickly than the speed of thought, and even help put a smile on the faces of users.

Infrastructures must be ready for a digital tomorrow. Take retail sales, for example. When sales orders peak at certain times, such as festive seasons, the system needs to be able to provide a flexible way of fulfilling the demand, and with the knowledge database use the right processes linked to the right infrastructure, so that there is no impact on the business. Or when traders start working at 8 AM and encounter issues with their reports, there needs to be someone with a total overview of the service and with the skills to fix any issues quickly; there has to be end-to-end accountability, underpinned by a digital infrastructure, otherwise potential hiccups affect the whole business.

Businesses have to be able to deliver services in a business context and—through progressive convergence—unlock value that currently may be trapped in siloes. Only then do infrastructures become the true accelerators for business growth and innovation in the digital age.”

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