Tata Consultancy Services has partnered with The Royal College of Art to establish a Design Innovation Lab.
The purpose of the lab is to help foster design and technology innovation in the UK and will deliver joint research projects, with the goal of filing joint patents and publications.
The TCS-RCA lab will act as a showcase centre for leading work from students at RCA and TCS customers and partners, as well as a venue for workshops and industry events.
K Ananth Krishnan, Chief Technology Officer, Tata Consultancy Services, said: "With digital technologies now the default channel for organisations to engage with customers and employees, intelligent and intuitive design has never been more important."
"Partnerships with the world’s finest academic institutions are a key part of TCS’ Research and Co-Innovation strategy and we are looking forward to working closely with RCA staff and students to explore new concepts and ideas that we hope will ultimately prove tremendously valuable for our customers."
The facility will be located at RCA’s South Kensington Campus and will open in September 2015.
Separately, TCS will work with Red Hat providing Network Function Virtualisation (NFV) Orchestration and Test Solutions based on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform.
The collaboration is designed to enable the validation of service design, orchestration, functional testing and the characterisation of NFV services.
It will provide a European Telecommunications Standards Institute and will support components of a telco cloud ecosystem, including existing operational and business support systems.
Radhesh Balakrishnan, GM, OpenStack, Red Hat, said: "OpenStack-powered NFV solutions have facilitated service providers across the globe planning large-scale deployments."
"The combination of consulting services from TCS and production-ready Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform provides an environment where more carriers can realize the potential of NFV and implement an open infrastructure that can scale with their needs."
