Infy’s Vishal Sikka Banks On Alliances With Oracle, SAP And IBM

Infosys has come up with a new portfolio for managing alliances with IT majors Oracle, IBM and SAP. S Ravi Kumar, the newly promoted executive vice-president, will steer the company’s global alliances organisation.

According to some experts, this measure bears the stamp of the CEO-designate, Vishal Sikka, as he spent close to a decade at the German software firm SAP.

“Vishal has the vision of how this can be enabled,” said Ray Wang, founder and analyst of Constellation Research, adding that Sikka is “well placed at a leading global tech services firm with a unit that has platforms, products and technologies.”

The move to put one of its executive vice-presidents to run the global alliances will help Infosys in developing its products, IP-based solutions and meaningful partnerships with software vendors. This is likely to help the company in its revival.

“I think TCS, Wipro and Infosys are all looking at building out IP-based and non-services-based revenue. This will be the next battleground,” said Wang.

Although no strategy has been rolled out yet, Ravi will steer the $1 billion Oracle practice across all industry verticals. He will also head the analytics unit, under which data analytics teams across verticals have been put into a new horizontal.