Infosys signs major pacts with China’s Huawei, Hitachi

In what is seen as another fallout of the visit of Chinese President Xi Jinping to India, Infosys Ltd, India's third-largest software company, on Thursday announced fresh alliances with three technology giants - Microsoft, Hitachi Data Systems and Huawei - to jointly explore opportunities in newer technology areas such as cloud, data and analytics computing.

These partnerships will also include setting up labs and centres of excellence.

Infosys has a decade-long partnership with Microsoft as a system integration partner and will now expand its capabilities for analytics and other service offerings. The Indian IT services major will also establish a global centre of excellence for Microsoft Azure Machine Learning, capable of training more than 1,000 engineers by the end of fiscal 2015.

Infosys also announced a global partnership with Chinese technology giant Huawei to jointly offer cloud, big data and communication solutions. Both companies will jointly develop IT solutions that combine Huawei's cloud infrastructure and services expertise from Infosys.

Huawei and Infosys will also explore setting up a joint lab in China.

Infosys chief executive Vishal Sikka said, ''We are really excited to partner with Huawei to bring the power of Huawei's cloud infrastructure and communication technologies to our joint customers, so that they can efficiently achieve this dual objective.''

The third is partnership expansion with Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) to bring in next generation infrastructure and data centre transformation solutions. Infosys will also establish a centre of excellence to co-create pay-per-use solutions.

U B Pravin, chief operating officer at, Infosys, said, ''Growing our partnership with Hitachi Data Systems will enable us to bring together our complementary capabilities around cloud and big data to help our customers enhance their IT infrastructure with new technology solutions.''