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Currently, both companies use their skilling platforms – Infosys’ Lex and TCS’ Ion — to train over 700,000 employees, as they look to reskill their workforce.
“If you take the Wingspan-Lex story, there is a very small amount of work to be done to make it a consumer platform-….We are not blind to it,” Salil Parekh, CEO of Infosys, told ET in a recent interview. “Our main focus is still the large enterprises, but we are looking at some of these things which might morph into it over time,” he said.
The company’s mobile-based skilling platform – which measures the time spent by an individual in learning a new software programme, identifies gaps and prods further learning — has been rebranded as Wingspan to sell it to its existing enterprise customers.
The plan is to now explore options beyond to create a consumer-facing business, top executives said.
Industry leader Tata Consultancy Services, which employs over 487,000 people, is also looking to make its learning platform available to consumers at large. In 2019, it opened up the platform to students who had failed to make the cut on the national qualifier tests that it conducts while hiring freshers.
Hot Topic in India
“The opportunity is there to… open it up to others, beyond the talent pool and the supply chain that we have,” Ganapathy Subramaniam, chief operating officer, Tata Consultancy Services told ET.
Skilling is a particularly hot topic in India. The National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom) estimates that a tenth of the users on skilling platforms globally are from India. As technology becomes an increasingly key part of all industries, the demand for skills has sky-rocketed.
The reskilling and certification market in India was estimated to grow to $500 million by 2021, according to a 2017 report by Google and KPMG. It accounts for a quarter of the $2.1 billion online education market.
Experts are of the view that IT services companies will likely require a different group (of executives) to run a consumer-facing business.
“They would need a separate subsidiary in order to focus on consumer needs or license out a joint venture,” said Ray Wang, founder of Silicon Valley-based Constellation Research.
Infosys has a team working on a consumer strategy for Wingspan-Lex and a commercial model.
Typically, consumer-focussed edtech platforms are venturecapital funded and are initially unprofitable as they spend money to scale. That is not a model that Infosys will consider, Parekh said. “We are not in the business of scaling things by making huge losses. That is not something we are good at. So we are looking at different ways of scaling it,” he said.
TCS has been in talks with publishers and IIT professors to host content on the platform and is looking at building a payments layer on top of the skilling platform, ET had previously reported.
Though it is not yet clear whether the platforms would focus just on India or other markets as well, IT consultants said the companies would have to consider different strategies to run a consumer business.
“Their challenge is to uncouple them from their internal operations and make them standalone. This presents challenges in both developing better and more resilient UX capabilities as well as developing a new commercial operating model which fits the learning and development market place,” said Peter Bendor-Samuel, CEO of Everest Research.
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