Infosys has announced major enhancements to its Infosys Equinox platform. The company say it helps enterprises securely deliver hyper-segmented, personalised omnichannel commerce experiences for B2B and B2C buyers.
Enterprises can pick and choose out-of-the-box microservices and pre-built experiences. Furthermore, organisations can build curated digital journeys that enhance digital commerce or launch it grounds-up in a matter of weeks. Infosys Equinox also brings together service, product, platform and industry capabilities from Infosys, and its partners, in an integrated ecosystem. This delivers end-to-end commerce-as-a-service for enterprises to drive results, throughout the purchase lifecycle, that shoppers care about.
Speaking to Enterprise Times, Karmesh Vaswani, Executive VP & Global Head Consumer, Retail & Logistics, Infosys says the platform’s architecture offers unrivalled flexibility. The company recognised that before an organisation starts to scale its business, it needs to configure operational issues. How will it integrate with its evolving supply chain? How will it effectively manage to price or effectively support cross channel marketing promotions?
Providing agility and adaptability
Vaswani says, “The number one challenge, Infosys set out, two years ago, was to create a solution with the same agility as enterprise SaaS platforms. At the same time, ensure it provided adaptability. Adaptability in pricing or promotions, digital marketing or traditional marketing interventions. A solution that would support the launch of subscriptions services or integration with third-party logistics providers. If a business wanted to expose its assets to channel partners, the leading hypermarket chains, or required seamless access into the channel partners eCommerce sites.”
Infosys Equinox helps businesses transform their digital commerce across marketing, merchandising, eCommerce, store operations, supply chain and customer service. This is achieved through its four offerings:
- Infosys Equinox Microservices
- Infosys Equinox Commerce
- Infosys Equinox Experiences
- Infosys Equinox Marketing.
According to Vaswani, “Infosys Equinox enables a hyper-personalised seamless experience across all current channels of engagement and future untapped channels. The current channels include the website, apps and instore. The future will include emerging new app channels, marketplaces, social, live streaming, gaming.” The enhanced solution delivers:
Customer experience excellence
Infosys Equinox facilitates closer consumer-brand interactions by enabling brands to deliver unique customer journeys. Particularly customer experiences that take advantage of emerging social, chat, voice, and augmented reality commerce channels. The platform blends digital experiences with physical ones to deliver more effective physical and contactless shopping. Creating multi-sites adapted for multiple languages and currencies, with deeply localised features. Real-time promotions are available with the platform’s simplified business user tooling and workflows. It requires no changes to the application code or configuration.
Scale and flexibility to match shopper demands
The platform offers a repository of mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive microservices. These microservices can integrate with an existing or new platform to deliver headless commerce capabilities. These microservices enable various commerce models used by enterprises including B2B, B2C, B2B2C, D2C, C2M, online marketplaces and digital malls. With its technology architecture, this ‘any-cloud’ platform builds upon leading open-source technologies. Infosys says it is designed for high performance, availability and security that is best-in-class.
Relevance through innovation
Infosys Equinox’s ecosystem of capabilities, spanning from experience to operations, lets enterprises deepen customer relevance throughout the commerce value chain. Ranging from perceptive experience design by WONGDOODY, to optimised retail execution with Infosys TradeEdge. The platform puts the shopper at the centre of the enterprise’s commerce strategy. With Infosys Equinox, businesses can also deploy segment-specific, user experience innovations on-demand.
The Kraft Heinz Company was an early adopter of the solution. Eric Nelson, Chief Information Officer North America, The Kraft Heinz Company says, “Infosys Equinox serves us as a digital hub. It supports over 250 of our global brand sites, B2B ecommerce and recipe sites, as well as direct-to-consumer (D2C) initiatives. We are able to launch new brand sites in as little as 3 to 5 days. The platform also supports our hyper-personalisation initiatives and distills real-time insights for our marketing programmes. With Infosys Equinox, Kraft Heinz is set to offer richer, more personalised, and meaningful experiences to our consumers.”
Vaswani concludes, “The customer experience landscape is evolving every week. Companies can’t afford to get into a ‘set it-forget it’ mode. It will take embracing a human-centric approach to create distinctive shopping experiences that match the pulse of consumers. Infosys Equinox provides the perfect balance between agility and adaptability. It is a great way for leaders to cement their advantage and for challengers to up their commerce play.”
Enterprise Times: What this means for business?
B2C and B2B enterprises face a multitude of challenges to succeed in today’s digital economy. Customers’ expectations are sky-high, eCommerce competition is fierce. Furthermore, an explosion of commerce channels and touchpoints have all raised the bar on omnichannel experiences for every online merchant. The COVID-19 crisis has also accelerated the shift of transactions from offline to online.
Infosys has sensibly spent the last two years updating its API-first, microservices-based, headless, cloud-native platform which evolved from Skava Commerce. The platform was architected cloud-natively as a headless commerce platform. Its key purpose is supporting B2C and B2B businesses to overcome the challenges of modern commerce and grow. Already the platform is used by several leading global enterprises in retail, CPG, telecom, manufacturing, automotive and media. Infosys indicates this helps drive $15B+ in annual eCommerce gross merchandise value (GMV). This may be relatively small change compared to the GMVs of Shopify, Salesforce or Magento. However, it has the edge with its Headless, API first architectural structure. This should help brands and online retailers deliver more engaging commerce experiences across every channel and touchpoint for customers.
