HCLTech’s Metafinity combines tech with industry knowhow to speed metaverse outcomes

Just when you thought investment in the metaverse might be on wobbly foundations, here comes HCLTech with the launch of a new customer-proven platform to help enterprises succeed in the new experience paradigm of the metaverse.

HCLTech joins a raft of leading service providers and consultancies taking the metaverse very seriously. Read our inaugural HFS Metaverse Services Horizons report here.

HCLTech says its Metafinity platform is a response to high industry demand and a proliferation of use cases its enterprise customers are keen to explore, and our data supports that (see Exhibit 1). The Metafinity platform is intended to provide end-to-end domain-centric metaverse capabilities in financial services, retail, consumer packaged goods (CPG), high tech, telco, manufacturing, life sciences, and healthcare. The inclusion of retail and CPG illustrates the firm’s desire to spread its net wide in the metaverse, given that the bulk of its FY22 revenues come from financial services (21%), manufacturing (18%), high-tech and services (18%), and life sciences and healthcare (15%).

Exhibit 1: Enterprises are committing to increasing their investment in the metaverse

Sample: HFS Pulse H1 2023; n=592 Global 2000 leaders
Source: HFS Research, 2023

Metafinity pulls together AR, VR, cloud, data, IoT, blockchain, and more

The platform pulls together experience in metaverse enablers such as augmented and virtual reality, data, cloud, and the internet of things (IoT) along with HCLTech’s blockchain platform COTRUST and its tokenization framework OBOL. For more on the role of blockchain and tokenization in the metaverse, read our POV, Delivering on the internet’s promise of democratized experiences.

Metafinity is built on the company’s XRStudio, an augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and mixed reality development platform. HCLTech turned to its long partnership with Adobe to leverage marketing and web analytics capabilities, allowing marketers to re-use their current stack to deliver and measure in the metaverse. The platform will streamline the adoption process, reducing investment requirements and enabling the rapid development of virtual worlds, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), 3D content, and human interface design and deployment. It offers a repository of reusable components to accelerate the delivery of metaverse products and services.

Strong metaverse-related credentials—now assembled for enterprise consumption

Like many service providers, HCLTech has been busy delivering AR and VR experiences for several years. Previously this was all under the auspices of its mobility and extended reality (XR) capabilities. At the end of last year, the company—a little later than leading competitors—assembled such capabilities under the “Metafinity” umbrella. It also runs engineering labs providing capabilities for the metaverse hardware and device makers, a differentiator versus those solely focused on applications.

But it is only now, in April 2023, that HCLTech has felt ready publicly launch its capabilities after first learning and honing it with 10 customers. These have included two telcos, banking and insurance clients, a global logistics company, and automotive and consumer electronics manufacturers.

The HCLTech metaverse proposition includes a resource pool of 500 experts in UX, 3D modeling, 5G and cloud, a set of platforms and accelerators, use-cased-based templates and reusable components, products for niche cases, 11 metaverse labs, studios and CoEs, partnerships for the co-development of metaverse technologies, and a Metachamps’ incubator.

The Bottom Line: Better late than never, HCLTech hits the metaverse with customer-proven capabilities.

While the metaverse buzz reached a crescendo last year, HCLTech was holding its fire… getting on with the job of proving its metaverse services were able to deliver for clients. Now it has a customer-proven platform ready to help enterprises make rapid progress in the metaverse. The question is, will enterprises hear the message in a market already busy with earlier adopters? Success will depend on the impact HCLTech can make at upcoming launch events with partners Salesforce and Adobe.