Indian IT major Infosys has deepened its partnership with Microsoft to speed up Azure-based and other digital transformations for clients.
The expanded partnership is also aimed at simplifying and automating migration to Microsoft products for clients. Infosys will increase the number of dedicated Azure consultants to 5,000.
Both the companies will address a range of migration and implementation issues to offer the benefits of cloud to clients rapidly and easily.
The enhanced partnership builds on Infosys’ longstanding relationship with Microsoft as a Global Managed Alliance Partner, said the Bengaluru-based firm in a statement.
Earlier this year, the two software majors announced a similar collaboration to support digital transformations of companies in the healthcare sector.
Microsoft North America president Judson Althoff said: "We are working closely with Infosys in North America and other markets around the globe to help our customers in their digital transformation journey.
"We are excited about the accelerated Infosys investment in building a global pool of resources together with a range of industry applications.
"Our efforts will allow both companies to meet the explosive demand of a new generation of solutions powered by Microsoft Azure, Office 365 and Dynamics."
Under the partnership, Infosys will offer a range of solutions to accelerate the adoption of Azure, Analytics and SQL Server 2016. It will also increase the number of products available on Azure to clients, apart from Finacle.
Both the companies will work together in building design tools, solution frameworks and accelerators for clients to migrate to Microsoft products easily.
Infosys president and head of Americas Sandeep Dadlani said: "Microsoft products, especially Microsoft Azure, are proving to be among the most compelling enterprise-grade solutions for cloud.
"Our longstanding relationship with Microsoft and decades of co-development for our mutual clients gives us the knowledge and insight to help clients migrate and take advantage of the platforms Microsoft offers."
The companies will also set up a global Azure Innovation Center to assist enterprise clients in utilising the potential of the Microsoft cloud platform.
Separately, Infosys launched an artificial intelligence platform, Mana, to help businesses to automate their processes.
Mana, which is part of the Infosys Aikido service offerings, claims to reduce the maintenance costs sharply for both physical and digital assets and fragmented and complex systems.
Infosys CEO and managing director Vishal Sikka said: "Purposeful AI is about leveraging technology to amplify people.
"We can automate the repetitive, mechanizable tasks; we can capture the knowledge and know-how across people and long-lived systems and bring this knowledge back inside the systems to drive more value; and in doing these things we can free people to put all of our creativity, passion, and imagination into thinking about the bigger opportunities ahead of us.
"The word mana, from the Polynesian word for a pervasive spiritual force, and similarly used in many languages and cultures around the world, is an excellent inspiration for our endeavor to bring this purposeful AI to the enterprise."
Infosys said that one of its clients with a large fleet of field engineers was able to increase individual productivity by around 50% by making use of the self-learning capabilities of its AI platform.
