Infosys is a company that began working on information systems during the first years of modern computing. At the time they were a blue ocean company because they were in an industry that had a very small competitive base and a very large potential segment of customers. However, as the company grew and the market became more dense with other companies, it became necessary for Infosys to look for other methods of growing the company. The original core businesses were not going to sustain growth, so Infosys had to move up the value chain if it was going to continue to thrive.
Basically the company leaders realized that the competitive ocean in which they now existed was turning deeply red and they needed to find blue water for the company to thrive. The blue ocean strategy is exemplified in a company that either creates a completely new market, or one that finds a new niche within an existing market (Kim & Mauborgne, 2004). The second strategy is what Infosys senior managers were tasked with doing. They had to find new blue water within the confines of the market that already existed.
The company was founded in 1981 with a very small operating budget and a dream to provide information technology services in a global scale (Narus & Sechadri, 2004). The company was founded in Bangalore, India (regarded as the Indian silicon valley) by a group of seven "visionary software professionals" (Narus & Sechadri, 2004). The company went through many difficult times during its first decade, but began to turn its fortunes around in the 1990's.
Infosys had reached many of its goals by the time the year 2000 came along, but they needed to further institute plans that would set them apart as a company. This process led to...
The CEO of the company challenged this group of individuals with coming up with ideas that would see Infosys through its next large phase of growth. He said "I want each of you to feel free to present your own personal view of what Infosys should be doing. Try to get as many ideas "on the table" as possible" (Narus & Sechadri, 2004). This was the basic charter that the team worked with. They had some basic feel for what the company wanted and they each had their own ideas about the direction the company needed to go.
To understand what Infosys was trying to do it is first necessary to try and understand how the industry of information technology came about and what it is today. Information technology is a way of disseminating information through the use of emerging technologies. It is also the system by which the technology is managed. When people think about information technology they probably imagine a person fixing a company computer, but the responsibilities for an IT department or company are much greater than that. Today, IT companies are involved in every level of computing that has anything to do with transmitting information (cloud computing, web applications, etc.). This is the business that Infosys is in and what the blue sky committee is trying to project into the future.
The team had to look at the different ways that they could examine the strengths of the company and discovered that the best program would be to conduct both a Porter's Five Forces analysis and a PEST analysis. The threat of new competition is always a reality that any…
