TCS highlights expansion plans for learning platform iON

TCS is set to channel significant investment into expanding the purview of its cloud-based learning solution TCS iON. Speaking to the Economic Times, Global Head of TCS iON Venguswamy Ramaswamy indicated that development in India will be central to the solution’s global expansion plans. 

Housed in the cloud, TCS iON is a platform for collaborative learning that facilitates interactions between students, instructors, administrators and learning institutions. For students, the platform acts as a means to accessing study material, make submissions and receive feedback.

Instructors can use iON to design courses and conduct assessments, while administrators and other institutional officials can use the platform to organise learning events and develop learning communities. iON has had tremendous success in a variety of educational domains, in India and across the globe.

For Ramaswamy, the next step is to get institutions on board in numbers. “We will work with a number of large corporates. The first dimension is, we will have large (engagements) both on the content aggregation side as well as working with corporates and enabling them. For example, certifications in Cisco, certifications in Google, certifications in Microsoft products – all of them we will enable because we have the platforms,” he said.

Ramaswamy also indicated the importance of development in India, a market where iON has played versatile roles so far. In 2018, TCS iON was selected as the platform of choice for the Skill India initiative managed by the National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC). Skill India is looking to train as many as 400 million Indians in the lead up to 2022.

Building on the growing uptake, TCS iON recently launched an artificial intelligence (AI) driven command centre in India which leverages AI capabilities to monitor examinations being conducted across 6,000 examination centres in India, further illustrating the division’s scale.

iON is now looking to leverage this momentum to expand at a global scale, particularly in areas where it has been inactive thus far. Latin America and the UK are examples of such markets.

Expansion efforts will also apply to the suite of products and services on offer at iON, according to Ramaswamy.

“You will see us talking about a lot more set of platforms. India is very unique in that sense and if you drive the car in India you can manage it much easily in an international geography. So, we will do that. We will also have a focus on infrastructure creation, both in India as well as international.”

“We have around 257 centres in this country which are physical centres with compute power that we use in order to deliver many of our programs...This infrastructure expansion will go to a large number of countries, so that’s another big focus that we have clearly articulated to ourselves,” he said.