BENGALURU: Infosys is considering building a software to help the firm target tens of thousands of potential clients, as CEO Vishal Sikka looks at breaking the downward spiral of prices in its core services business and reach the company’s ambitious target of $20 billion in revenue by 2020.Currently, Infosys has about 1,000 customers, but a lion’s share of revenue comes from just 250 of them. Even though IT companies have increasingly started building platforms and products, they mostly target bagging more business from existing customers. Sikka wants to change that by building mass-use software, like he did in his previous stint at SAP.“In order for the software to be world class, you have to expose it to the entire world. It has to be a standalone software. If you just target 250 clients you will quickly run out of scope without producing a lot of revenue. So, the software has to go outside our services and outside our clients,” Sikka told ET in a recent interview.Infosys has products such as its automation platform Mana and ecommerce platform Skava, but those are still in the process of being deployed across its existing customers.“We are in early stages, but ultimately we have to go to tens of thousands of clients. We are one year away from formulating a strategy on this, but this is the long-term goal,” Sikka said.Building such a software that could stand alone and be sold without a services component will not be easy. Software takes a great deal of investment to develop internally and companies do not begin to recoup investments for several years.At an analyst conference in November, Sikka highlighted the challenges the company would face in making such a shift. In a pure software business, the kind Sikka was in charge of at SAP, a company could fund transformation initiatives out of its existing cashcow products. But for the IT sector, the core business is itself under pressure and the existing automation software that is being built is unlikely to help in the long term as the downward pressure on price will continue.Sikka said he wants to continue to work on the softwareplus-people model to improve the company’s productivity but additionally build software for other use cases.“And in parallel, build that same software that improves our productivity, to go out there and build other use cases, which are high-margin, next-generation use cases like bitcoin, blockchain, internet of things, artificial intelligence,” Sikka told the analysts in New York.“These kinds of high-margin, next-generation, intelligent applications built on the same automation platform that helps us improve our productivity. There is no other way.”Analysts say while a softwareled strategy has merit, executing it will not be easy. “Selling software/platforms is also very different from selling IT services. Companies have to resist the pressure to customize their product for each client,” said Sagar Rastogi, an analyst with Ambit Capital. “Finally, building software requires predicting market needs, a year or more in advance. Dr. Sikka might have that skill, but few IT services veterans would.”Convincing the stock market to back heavy investment that will cut into existing margins would also be a hardsell.“One approach to succeed could be to spin off the products business into a separate company like Infosys did with Onmobile in the past,” Rastogi added