Systems integrator, consulting and business process services firm Wipro on Aug. 1 unveiled a slick new Silicon Valley Innovation Center at its offices in Mountain View, CA. It’s the company’s only such facility outside of India, where it has an innovation center at headquarters in Bangalore. The new center will make it possible for Wipro customers and partners based in North America to collaboratively explore the art of the possible without traveling half way around the world.

Two years in the making, Wipro’s multi-million-dollar Innovation Center features an intimate multi-media theater space with a glass holographic screen. Surrounding this space are modular application and solution displays with room for groups of executives and developers to gather around and interact with state-of-the-art technologies. At the inaugural event, which was kicked off by Wipro CEO and Member of the Board Abidali Z. Neemuchwala, tech showcases featured artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality, hyper spectral imaging, machine vision and collaborative robotics and automation.

An opening video featured an Internet-of-Things (IoT) application powered by Wipro’s Looking Glass IoT platform and co-developed with customer JCB, the U.K.-based heavy equipment manufacturer. The theater’s holographic screen added a wow factor, with the video seemingly appearing out of thin air. The application, which is now in production, includes predictive maintenance and automated parts ordering capabilities, which are getting to be routine, but it goes a step beyond with virtual reality “digital twins” of JCB equipment. Operators needing training on a backhoe, for example, can interact with a digital twin and learn about components and controls through hover-over pop-up screens and interactive tours of the digital twins while remote service experts can help local operators and mechanics to diagnose  problems and make repairs.

Solution highlights included a retail “Store of the Future,” human-interactive systems and interfaces powered by the Wipro Holmes AI platform, an in-home banking experience integrated with Amazon Alexa, a social- and personalization-enhanced telco customer experience, and a connected health demonstration with facial recognition, imaging-based health monitoring and fitness coaching.

The innovation center’s modular displays are designed to be updated as state-of-the-art technologies evolve. For example, the Store of the Future was on display in January at the National Retail Federation Big Show in New York. Pick up an item off a sensor-embedded store shelf and a nearby displays lights up with detailed product information. Pick up a second item and the display offers product comparisons. Now in Mountain View, the store has added a mobile app that lets customers view shelves through their smart phone cameras and see pricing and product information superimposed over the items in view.

Wipro executives stressed that the point of the innovation center is not to demo finished products and applications, but rather to share the state of the possible and spark new ideas. The intention is to iteratively co-develop new and unique solutions with customers and partners, blending and extending concepts seen in the innovation center.

MyPOV on Wipro’s Innovation Center

Innovation Centers are all the rage Silicon Valley. Most major auto manufacturers, for example, now have software design and innovation centers in the Bay area, and the idea it to interact with tech startups and hatch new ideas. With this week’s launch, Wipro beat some of its larger rivals in the race to build an innovation center in the epicenter of tech innovation.

Like many of its rivals, Wipro has digital design labs around the globe, but these are more like conventional office spaces where customers and Wipro executives can hold design workshops and collaborate on short- and long-range projects. Innovation centers are more capital- and staff-intensive and, when done well, they require constant renewal and investment in the next generation of innovation.

Collaboration is also key, as it takes interaction to spark new ideas. Executives said the innovation center will a space for working with partners and tech startups, not just demonstrating Wipro platforms. The company puts money behind that collaborative bet though its Wipro Ventures investment arm, which is a S100 million fund that invests in early- to mid-stage startups, many of which are in the Bay area.

In short, the opening of Wipro’s Silicon Valley Innovation Center marks an important milestone for the company. It’s a statement about the company’s commitment to innovation and investment in a U.S. presence.

Descriptions of consulting services, business process solutions and outsourcing options are often hard to differentiate from one provider to the next. Here are three things stood out to me at this week’s Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) Analyst Day 2015: plentiful customer case examples, positioning around taking some of the artisanal (meaning, bespoke and costly) quality out of consulting, and the IT-focused nature of the IGNIO neural automation technology.

The theme at the TCS event was “Default is Digital,” meaning that most every enterprise now aspires to capitalize on five familiar digital trends: mobility and pervasive computing, social media, big data and analytics, cloud and robotics (a.k.a. automation). TCS surpassed $15 billion in revenue last year, and it presented third-party research here that shows that the company is now in the top tier of consulting and systems integration firms (after IBM, HP and Accenture) as measured by brand recognition. TCS has boosted that recognition in part through worldwide sponsorship of endurance running events including the New York City Marathon.

TCS says it’s helping its clients with two big imperatives. First, there’s industrializing software and processes so they just work in cost-effective, automated and repeatable ways. Second, and more importantly, it’s helping companies to reimagine the art of the possible by exploiting game-changing digital capabilities such as pervasive computing and big data and analytics.

We heard at length about TCS consulting, business process solutions and outsourcing services, but it’s hard to tease out clear nuances among similar-sounding services across the many consulting and systems integration firms. As I explain in the video below, I was most impressed by the real-world customer examples presented, including one presented by an “industrial services firm” executive who was there in person. Unfortunately we were asked not to share the name of his firm, but it’s an industry giant that’s strongly associated with Internet of Things innovation.

EVENT REPORT: INSIDE TCS ANALYST DAY 2015 from Constellation Research on Vimeo.

MyPOV on TCS Analyst Day

To get beyond the sound-alike buzzwords and categories of service offered by consulting and business process solutions and outsourcing firms, it’s crucial to explore customer case examples that fit the areas and kinds of challenges you’re trying to address. All the better if the firm can name the names of the firms and share executive references. TCS has lots of slick customer testimonial videos, but it’s only in conversation and in in-depth case studies that you get to the unvarnished truth and detail of an engagement.

Perhaps the most differentiating point I heard at TCS Analyst Day came from Krishnan Ramanujam, VP & Global Head, Consulting and Enterprise Solutions, who said that TCS is taking a “disruptive” approach by taking some of the “artisanal quality” out of consulting engagements. That means it’s looking to apply repeatable approaches and solutions in non-differentiating areas while applying unique expertise and customer-specific solutions at the core of the engagement.

Citing one example, Rumanujam said TCS was able to complete an engagement in less than five months at a cost of $3 million for one client where “high profile rivals” had bid $30 million and $16 million, respectively, and were looking for engagements of 18 to 24 months. One lynchpin of this strategy, says Rumanujam, is working with existing clients, so TCS has a leg up on understanding the firm’s operations and challenges and can avoid lengthy fact-finding interviews and exploratory analyses.

One other stand-out presentation at TCS Analyst Day detailed Ignio, which is this firm’s entry into the cognitive computing and artificial intelligence arena. Launched in June, Ignio is about “igniting change,” and the idea is to replace robotic automation with what it calls neural automation. Instead of having to explicitly program rules and automation – an approach that doesn’t scale and doesn’t last, due to rapid change within organizations – TCS says it has equipped Ignio with human-brain-like contextual awareness, composable skills and pattern-recognition capabilities. When you plug it into your data sources and systems, it autonomously learns about the technical functioning of an enterprise and automatically and proactively spot poor system performance and looming problems without human guidance.

What stood out about Ignio is that it’s squarely focused in the IT domain rather than tackling business process challenges. In that sense Ignio seems less ambitious than, say, IBM Watson or other cognitive computing initiatives. It’s aimed at the keep-the-lights-on challenges that consume the bulk of IT’s time, and that’s a good place to target next-gen automation capabilities. It also presents a technology solution to a technical audience first rather than expecting business people to trust and pioneer a new capability. It’s a conservative approach that just may be the most realistic way to wade into the cognitive arena.