Back in April last year, Infosys was beyond thrilled to introduce its next-gen artificial intelligence (AI) knowledge platform Mana to the masses. The excitement was, however, shortlived as one of the biggest enterprise software giants – SAP – honed in and disrupted their party mid-stride.
The AI-powered Mana platform enables enterprise users or organizations to automate repetitive routine tasks and use the free time for higher thinking and developing creative new solutions. It helps bring around 50 percent improvement in the user’s productivity, thanks to the adaptable knowledge graph and glanceable insights into the collected data.
The functioning of the AI-powered software wasn’t exactly what SAP was concerned about. It reached out to Infosys’ chief executive Vishal Sikka, who was previously employed as their chief technical officer, to convey the trademark violation their Mana platform is leading to. SAP operates a memory database platform Hana and now you know why they took the action they did.
The moniker sounds quite similar to the Indian IT giant’s new platform and was creating confusion in the market, according to SAP representatives. It was especially concerned about the similarities because Infosys was also targeting the U.K with Mana, creating a potential confusion in the minds of prominent enterprise customers.
Being long-standing partners, the German software behemoth confronted Infosys about the naming criterion and they were able to mutually reach a conclusion — renaming Mana to Nia and presenting it as an upgraded platform. The sources suggest SAP also had a few concerns about similarities in functionalities but it chose to ignore the same and make an exception for Infosys. Hana can also provide actionable insights, real-time analytics about the task being tracked by your organization.
Talking about the same, here’s the complete transcript of the statement released by both SAP and Infosys:
AP and Infosys are pleased that the companies have been able to mutually resolve all concerns regarding the use of their respective trademarks. Following the announcement of Infosys Mana, SAP raised concerns about the similarity of the name to SAP Hana.
In the interest of the larger partnership with SAP, Infosys has agreed to discontinue the use of Mana over a period of time. SAP and Infosys believe this will help strengthen the organizations’ strategic partnership while maintaining focus on delivering business value for their clients.
The upgraded Nia platform builds upon Mana’s initial release and brings along a completely new set of features to the table. Nia has been made capable of forecasting revenues, analyzing market trends, understanding customer behaviour, perceiving the content of contracts, legal documents and complying them. It has further bene integrated with a broad set of artificial intelligence technologies to further its use-cases in the enterprise industry.
