TCS AI Platform Ignio Tops $60 Million Revenue Mark

TCS’ artificial intelligence platform Ignio has crossed $60 million in annual revenue and India’s largest IT services company is doubling down on the product strategy it has created for the unit, the company’s top executives said.

Five years ago, Ignio began as a platform that was closely integrated and sold with the company’s services offerings but two years ago, TCS began to take it down a product path. ET had reported that the company hired a chief marketing officer and an analyst relations head to carve out a product-niche.

TCS hopes to make Ignio the fastest software product to reach $100 million in revenue. TCS CEO Rajesh Gopinathan said that FY19 revenue had topped $60 million. Ignio earned $31 million in FY18, TCS had disclosed. The FY19 figures and growth rate imply that TCS should reach its $100 million goal by the end of this year. “We have started to go and appoint channel partners so that it can be pretty much sold by third parties, and the third parties themselves can go provide services around it. So, I think we have started that journey, and in the last quarter, appointed about 4 or 5 channel partners,” NG Subramanian, chief operating officer at TCS, told ET in a recent interview. “It’s a new way of working for us. Traditionally, we have been implementing our products ourselves.”

Subramanian said that the product would continue to be embedded in the company’s offerings but that channel partners would help accelerate growth.

“The real kick is to reach out to the larger ecosystem and appoint digital mid-channel partners and empower them to implement it. I think it’s on the right track,” he said, adding the channel partners had been picked in Europe and North America and were specialised players in the business.

The Mumbai-headquartered company has already begun replicating the Ignio strategy with a second product, Jile, a platform that allows customers to develop software in an ‘agile’ framework.―Newsfeed