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Indian services giants target emerging technologies with PaaS plays

Infosys and Wipro bet that makers of metaverses and cloudy cars want ready-to-roll platforms

Two of India’s global service giants have announced platforms on which to build emerging technologies, continuing their move towards acting as software vendors.

Bangalore-based Wipro's new product, unveiled during Mobile World Congress Barcelona, is a "Cloud Car ecosystem". The platform tweaks the company's existing cloud services to offer a platorm automakers can use to distribute and maintain software deployed in vehicles.

"By decoupling the auto software from the hardware in this way, the vehicle can receive software updates as time marches on. Any software failures can be addressed 'over-the-air,' without needing a physical recall," Wipro asserted.

The firm thinks its approach will see in-vehicle software updated more often.

"Today, most software-defined-vehicles (SDVs) come with pre-set features that are difficult and time-consuming to upgrade, rendering them outdated as new technologies come to market," said Wipro CTO Thomas Mueller in a canned statement. "Our goal is to make it possible for automobile manufacturers to deliver vehicles that get better every day, so both they and generations of owners can drive better return on investments."

Drive ROI. Geddit?

But we digress. Mueller reckons this is the way of the future, claiming that by 2030, most new vehicles will be SDVs kitted out with AI and ML that will pave the way to autonomous operations.

Rival services giant Infosys has cooked up a platform on which to build virtual and/or augmented realities, and dubbed it a "Metaverse Foundry". Infosys's angle is that virtual worlds are best built on an elastic platform, rather than carved afresh from bespoke code.

The company said it will provide over 100 ready-to-use cases and templates. Two examples were retail, using an immersive shopping experience, and a pharmaceutical company lab digital twin that enables external researchers to access vaccine data. The company billed its product as a potential "makerspace to bridge the physical-digital worlds."

India's services giants increasingly see building platforms and vertical apps as a way to engage new clients for the long haul.

Buyers, of course, are wary of lock-in. Perhaps more so for markets like cloudy cars and metaverses that are in their early stages of development. Which is, of course, exactly why they appeal to Infosys and Wipro. ®

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