Cognizant incubates employees' ideas for in-house start-ups

Cognizant finds it pays to give staffers their head and funds to pursue it

Cognizant Technology Solutions, one of the country’s largest information technology service companies, has devised an innovative way to create start-ups within the organisation.

Considered a front-runner in evolving for technologies of the future such as social, mobility, analytics and cloud (SMAC), it has been encouraging employees who come up with innovative ideas for specific client needs or which set the stage for the future. Once the ideas clear a feasibility test, the staffers are taken off their  job and asked to dedicate themselves to the project. Cognizant also provides the needed resources and funding for the idea to incubate.

The company says 30 such ventures have been funded and some of these solutions— such as Cloud360 and TruMobi — have already been deployed at some  clients. “We at Cognizant have realised we will never be smart enough to figure it out all by ourselves, so we have to democratise it,” Malcolm Frank, executive vice- president of strategy and marketing, told Business Standard.

LOOKING INSIDE

• Cognizant says 30 such ventures have been funded and some of these solutions have already been deployed at some clients
• This comes at a time when the $100-billion software export sector is trying to regain its entrepreneurial spirit after decades of capitalising on lower costs and cheaper labour
• Google allows its employees to spend 20% of their working time on a project of their interest
• Google says some of its most innovative and successful platforms, such as Gmail, have emerged from this

This comes at a time when the $100-billion software export sector is trying to regain its entrepreneurial spirit after decades of capitalising on the lower costs and cheaper labour in this country. As it battles challenges such as emergence of SMAC, saturation of traditional IT spending, regulatory hurdles for offshoring and the rise of artificial intelligence, the sector needs to move up the value chain through intellectual property creation.

Ramesh Panuganty of Cognizant stumbled on the idea of creating a product called Cloud360 when he realised the sector was moving towards fluid computing models and infrastructure was becoming available as a service. This was in 2008-2009. “The word ‘cloud’ did not exist at the time but it was clear the economics of scale could not justify legacy infrastructure models,” says Panuganty, now venture leader of Cloud360 at Cognizant.

 He compares the idea to the emergence of railroads in America, which connected the fertile agricultural land in the midwest to the barren one in the west. “Cloud360 is what we call the railroad helping our customers adopt cloud computing.” According to the company, at least 15 organisations have adopted Cloud360, which helps to lower the cost of managing applications and improving their performance. It manages applications across private, public and hybrid clouds and makes it easy to scale systems up or down, based on real-time needs.

“For those ideas that go on to become their own offerings, the founder often becomes the leader of that offering,” says Sean Middleton, chief operating officer, Emerging Business Accelerator, Cognizant. He adds the company's chief executive, Francisco D'Souza, was once part of a team of folks with an idea. "We make that career opportunity available to every one of our people today."

Google Inc allows its employees to spend 20 per cent of their working time on a project of their interest. The company says some of its most innovative and successful platforms, such as Gmail, have emerged from this.

Middleton of Cognizant says in a number of cases, ideas such as Cloud360 or TruMobior assetSERV spawn new business offerings that generate revenue streams. "In other cases, those ideas become sources of continuous improvement...In other cases, a thought leading idea might prove infeasible but by sharing it with a client, we deepen our relationship and give birth to a new idea.