Indian IT major Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) to create a standalone product brand for its artificial intelligence product Ignio. According to a report in Economic Times, TCS has hired people to drive sales for Ignio.
Ignio will have a separate website, minimal TCS branding. ET reports that Digitate, the unit that houses Ignio, is only once referred to as a TCS venture.
Harrick Vin, global head of Digitate, told ET that with TCS as a service brand being humongous, to be able to sell Ignio as a product, a product brand has to be created.
“We have to make sure that the product can stand on its own. It is deeply embedded in TCS, but from sales and branding perspective, you have to create an identity,” he added.
The idea is reduce uncertainty that clients initially has whether they would be locked into a services contract if they chose to use Ignio.
TCS has created a sales organization that is driving direct product-led sales for the AI product. “We are going to customers where there is no service–RFP and where TCS is not a service provider. We are entering those organisations with Ignio,” Vin said.
Currently, there are around 10 sales executives from US product companies at Ignio.
The company will also look at patents to drive valuation. It has filed 80 patents globally, which according to Vin, is a strategically important thing to do.
TCS will be the first IT company to sell its AI platform as a standalone product.
ET reports that the unit is also in the process of making Ignio a cloud-based product, which will be sold on a software-as-a-service model.
“When we put Ignio on cloud, we are also opening up ‘Ignio studio’, using which you can build apps for Ignio and make it do different things. We will open everything up. It will become much of an open platform,” Vin told ET.
Analysts say TCS will have to better explain its vision for Ignio, even though it ranks among the top of the industry as they often struggle to articulate the value of their platforms and align them to real business needs.