Infosys To Acquire E-Commerce Services Provider Kallidus For $120M

Infosys, the India-headquartered consulting and IT firm, is on the verge of making its second significant acquisition of the year after it announced a deal to buy digital e-commerce services provider Kallidus for $120 million. It also made a $2 million investment in an air monitoring startup.

With the Kallidus deal Infosys, which revealed the acquisition of enterprise resource planning (ERP) software company Panaya for $200 million in February, is buying the holding group behind Skava. The San Francisco-based company provides a cloud-based platform that powers a range of online services for retailers, for example mobile wallets, apps, web stores, and more.

“The [Skala] platform enables retailers to provide a mobile specific experience to their customers through an agile and flexible environment, enabling personalization and delivering customer analytics across multiple channels,” Infosys further explained.

The Indian software giant — which released the results for its 2015 financial year today — had another slice of M&A news: it is putting $2 million into Airviz, an air quality monitoring startup that was born out of Carnegie Mellon.

Airviz’s ‘Spec’ monitoring sensor tracks the quality of air in indoor and closed environments. The device detects invisible particles floating in the air and, while it doesn’t actively filter like an air purifier, it helps owners make changes to improve the quality of air, and track changes over time.

Infosys declined to reveal the size of its stake in Airviz, saying only that it acquired “a minority share.”

“This investment was made out of the $500 million Innovation Fund earmarked for investments in disruptive new technologies, and positions us as a driving force in the fast-growing personal health monitoring market with a big data solution that provides indoor air pollution sensing and visualization,” it added in a statement.

New CEO Vishal Sikka took the top job last summer, declaring that he’d familiarize himself with Infosys’ problems and invest in expanding the knowledge and capability of the organization, which had suffered from slowing revenue growth. Acquisitions and investments are a significant area of focus under his tenure.

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