Digital First Magazine – May 2022 – India Edition – Digital Transformation Trends in 2022

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INDIA EDITION

MAY 2022

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Digital First Magazine May 2022

Digital First Magazine May 2022

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www.digitalfirstmagazine.com

May 2022

Vol - 3 Issue - 5

Digital Transformation Trends in 2022 Special (India Edition) Editor in Chief

Dr. Manoj Varghese, Ph.D

Managing Editor Sarath Shyam

Consultant Editors

Dr. Johny Andrews Anuja Mulmule Suchita Gonsalves

Anna Elza Roshni Rajagopal Komal Banchhor

Editorial Enquiry: admin@digitalfirstmagazine.com

Art and Design

Ajay K Das Manjunath R Rohith Poojary

Sales & Marketing

Reshma Reshma Ashokan

Arati Waghmare Rupali Mohankar

Sales Enquiry: admin@digitalfirstmagazine.com

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Digital First Magazine May 2022

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MANAGING EDITOR’S NOTE

When the Change is Imperative

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couple of years ago, digital transformation was a ‘good thing’ in an organization, though not many thought it was a ‘necessary thing.’ However, with the pandemic came a sea of changes in the global business landscape. To survive the storm created by the COVID-19, businesses had no other option but to adapt and accelerate their adoption of emerging technologies.

Now, the digital transformation era has arrived. There are countless innovations for businesses to explore, from intelligent technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to cloud-based platforms.

The number clearly shows where the world is headed. According to the World Economic Forum, USD 100 trillion will be added to the world economy through digital transformation by 2025. By 2025, interactions driven by platforms are expected to enable two-thirds of the USD 100 trillion value from digitalization. Statista

states that the global investment in digital transformation is expected to double between 2022 and 2025 - from USD 1.8 trillion to 2.8 trillion.

Now, the question is not about whether you need to adopt digital technologies in your organization; it is about how quickly you can implement digital tools necessary to automate manual processes, shorten your sales cycle and deliver products faster than your competition. In fact, 91% of businesses are engaged in some form of digital initiative, and 87% of senior business leaders say digitalization is a priority, says Gartner. To help our readers understand more about digital transformation, we have come up with a special issue that features insights and ideas by industry leaders. We hope our efforts will help entrepreneurs in their digital transformation journey.

Enjoy Reading.

Sarath Shyam

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ADVISORY BOARD Dr. Varughese K.John, PhD, MBA, MPhil, MCom, LLB. Dr. Kuldeep Nagi, Ph.D, MBA, BSc.

Former Program Director, MS in Management Program, GSATM - AU

Former Program Director of Ph.D, Recipient of Fulbright Fellowship Award & Dan Evans Award for Excellence and Writer columnist.

Mamta Thakur Former CEO (ASEAN), Arc Skills

Dr. Ajay Shukla, Ph.D, MBA, BE. Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Higher Education UAE

Mr. Amulya Sah, PGD PM & IR, PG Diploma in PM&IR (XISS Ranchi)

Chief Human Resources Officer, Former Head HR group Samsung R&D Institute India,Transformative HR Leader, Change agent, Digitization facilitator, Engagement architect, Trainer and Diversity champion.

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Digital First Magazine May 2022

Mr. Sreedhar Bevara, MBA, B.Com Dr. Manoj Varghese, Ph.D

Senior Director - Global Partnerships, Advisory & Consulting - Connecta®, Head of Advisory Board Higher Education Digest® & K12 Digest®, Adjunct Faculty Assumption University, Former CIO - Athena Education, Former Global Director Technology - GEMS Education

CEO at BMR Innovations, Ex Senior General Manager at Panasonic, LG, The Hindu, TATA, Author: Moment of Signal & The Roaring Lambs, Motivational Speaker & Leadership Consultant.

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DigitalEducation First Magazine Higher Digest November 2020 May 2022

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C O N T C OE N N T ET N S T

20 WHY IS IT IMPERATIVE FOR FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS TO STREAMLINE THEIR CUSTOMER ACQUISITION PROCESS?

Praveen Paulose, MD & CEO, Celusion Technologies

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HOW EMBEDDED BANKING WILL CHANGE BANKING Harshavardhan Pusala, Founder & Managing Director, Techurate Systems Private Limited

28 BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION IN SERVICES INDUSTRY

Alok Bhatt, Senior Vice President Business Transformation, Analytix Solutions

DIGITALIZING HEALTH SECTOR: HEALTH-TECH TO PROVIDE SERVICES ON THE PHONE

Gaurav Dubey, CEO, Livlong

36 CLOUD ADOPTION IS EMPOWERING DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION ACROSS INDUSTRIES

Rahul S Kurkure, Founder and Director, Cloud.in

16 ENABLING DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION IN YOUR ORGANIZATION

Subramanyam Reddy, Founder and CEO, KnowledgeHut

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C O N T C OE N N T ET N S T

12 HOW IS CLOUD TECHNOLOGY DISRUPTING THE TECH INDUSTRY IN 2022

Piyush Somani, Managing Director & Chairman, ESDS Software Solution Limited

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HOW LOCATION INTELLIGENCE CAN REFINE MARKETING STRATEGIES FOR COMPANIES

Ashwani Rawat, Co-Founder & Director, Transerve

24 WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS FOR CLOUD-BASED SOFTWARE PRODUCTS?

Nilesh Gudhe, CEO and Founder, Bynry

WHY IS IT THE OPTIMUM TIME FOR COMPANIES TO INVEST IN AUGMENTED AND VIRTUAL REALITY? Rakesh R, Business Head & Director, Deepsense Digital

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WHY PREDICTIVE ANALYTICS IS A MUST FOR YOUR BUSINESS Subodh Parulekar, CEO and Co-Founder, AFour Technologies

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EXPERT’S OPINION

How Location Intelligence Can Refine Marketing Strategies for Companies Ashwani Rawat, Co-Founder & Director, Transerve

L

ocation as a component has always been an important factor when it comes to developing marketing strategies; however, the spatial bit of marketing and advertising has become increasingly critical in today’s digital age.

With consumers that have become more discerning and researchers who have become more adept, marketing strategies have felt the need to become increasingly precise and more relevant to catch the attention of the target customers. Hence the effective usage of location intelligence is essential for making sure that the right people are seeing the right advertisements.

While it has been a few years that companies across the globe have been utilizing location intelligence for making business decisions, improving their ROI and enhancing the overall customer experience - in the 2020s the importance of location intelligence continues to grow. In fact, according to Forbes, 53% of enterprises have concurred that location intelligence is either very important or critically important for achieving their business goals.

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Ashwanii is one of the leading experts

in

satellite

navigation

technology in India, particularly in the field of precision mapping and its applications. He has a decade long experience in the field of location intelligence

and

solutions

built

thereon. During his stint at US-based Technology major Trimble Navigation, he helped in establishing the brand and GNSS precision technology in India and neighbouring countries. He built solutions that leveraged machine learning on satellite imagery and has co-authored research papers with reputed scientists in this area. He has studied Civil Engineering from IIT Kanpur. Awarded at several prestigious international and national forums, Ashwanii is credited for establishing strong

business

development

and

customer

relationships

for

the

Transerve.

Technologies

for

smart data collection, land records modernizations and UN Sustainable Development Goals are his core interests. He has spearheaded large scale data collection implementations at national and state levels using mobile computing technology.

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Furthermore, the crisis of the pandemic, and now as we are experiencing the post-pandemic era, location intelligence can help companies, especially retailers garner an understanding of the purchasing patterns of customers as well as their preferences, so as to help them deliver hassle-free shopping experiences.

Additionally, it can also help them in making critical business decisions, such as, whether they should move in or out of a new market, the hours in which stores should operate, how to enhance the efficiency of their supply chain, etc.

Thus, let us take a look at the ways in which location intelligence can help businesses refine their marketing strategies: ● Trade Area Analysis: Trade Area Analysis can help businesses in understanding where their customers are located with relation to a precise point of sale. Analysing the demographics of a particular area can help them profile customers, and thus it becomes easier to align sales and utilise the marketing budget areas where it is easier to reach maximum customers in the most cost-efficient manner. Accurate analysis by leveraging multivariate data can make a humongous difference when it comes to improving marketing decisions that can aid in enhancing operational performance and increasing return on marketing operation investment.

By analysing mobile location-based data, enterprises can efficiently monitor store performance using vitiation and dwell time analysis and also measure the key statistics that impact it like origin and destination analysis and catchment area. Furthermore, it can also contribute to the selection of new locations where the business has the maximum potential for growth and decrease marketing expenses while finding new customers. The mobility data also helps in understanding the behaviour and need of the customer like cross visitation and time spent in other stores. ● Predictive Analytics: Location intelligence aids predictive analysis with map-based visualisation that can reveal special dependencies or trends that would be difficult to discover otherwise. With enhanced insights regarding customer behaviours, businesses can identify cross-selling opportunities, detect frauds and risks, prevent high-value customers from leaving, and even anticipate their consumers’ needs. Since predictive analytics is a way to help organisations in anticipating the probability of any future outcomes, they help in carrying out marketing strategies that can boost sales.

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Location intelligence can help your business turn the data about customers and marketing operations into insights that can enhance its operational performance

● Data Visualization: With the help of data visualisation and reporting, businesses can better identify hidden trends, gain insights and understand overall marketing strategy and on the basis of that be able to enhance customer relations. When companies adopt location intelligence solutions and leverage them in innovative ways, via integration of spatial dimension for data analytics, the vast array of data that has been acquired by then, can be quickly queued, queried, analysed and displayed via maps. This allows enterprises in exploiting the data proactively through dynamic and interactive dashboards and detailed reports.

Location intelligence can help your business turn the data about customers and marketing operations into insights that can enhance its operational performance.

By implementation of spatial markers, companies can move quickly from mere diagnostics to action and gain a competitive advantage while obtaining tangible results such as: ● Monitoring store performance by analysing visitation patters on hourly, daily and weekly basis. ● Understanding the cross visitation to similar stores in the vicinity ● Identification of underperforming sales territories

● Improving your pricing strategy and cataloguing to cater to the visitors ● Enhancing direct marketing conference and advertising strategies ● Understanding the catchment area on day to day basis ● Analyzing sales performances ● Increasing the retention rate of reward and loyalty programs and cardholders ● Identification of potential markets and finding new trade areas for new stores There is an overwhelming majority of marketing professionals today, who are attributing the usage of location data in conjunction with personalising marketing strategies for creating positive customer experiences, and this is most definitely only the beginning of marketers trying to adopt spatial thinking.

In today’s competitive marketplace, successful brands are listening to and trying to understand what their customers really care about. Hence utilising technology for visualising where the customers are located, by analysing psychographic, demographic, purchasing and spending behaviour for accurate customer segmentation can give businesses the advantage they need to create marketing strategies that can help them succeed.

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LEADERS’S INSIGHTS

Digitalizing Health Sector: Health-tech to Provide Services on the Phone Gaurav Dubey, CEO, Livlong

Gaurav is an alumnus of Marine Engineering and Research Institute, and comes with the experience of more than a decade and a half, has been leading, evangelizing & representing the insurance sector across multiple podiums. With a vision of building a new age health-tech platform to improvise, especially the peripherals of OPD along with the frugal and transcendent healthcare services for millions of Indians, especially the bourgeois of the society, he stepped into the entrepreneur’s shoes with the launch of LivLong.

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The change within the healthcare segment on account of digitalization with the increasing internet and smartphone penetration across the globe addresses the gap in the availability of specialist doctors while reducing the burden on tertiary-care hospitals in small cities and rural areas

T

he digital healthcare sector is on a massive growth path, aided by digital transformation across the ecosystem of healthcare. The pandemic’s infectious nature and unfavorable repercussions necessitated a critical shift in the healthcare sector.

The rising interest in successful treatment triggered a flood in digital advancements inside the ambit of medical services, prompting the evolution of various solutions comprising e-drug stores, teleconsultation, and e-diagnostics. The digital healthcare sector’s tremendous growth can be figured out by its value, INR116.6 billion in 2018, and is estimated to be around INR485.4 billion by 2024.

While the decline in physical interactions and mobility has empowered patients to get online administrations, increasing internet penetration and the adoption of e-commerce has also highlighted the interest in advanced medical care. Undeniably, tools facilitating

affordable consultations and an easy interface associating everybody across wellbeing frameworks will probably be the new ordinary. This essential change is progressively helping medical services access to smaller towns and provincial regions.

Telemedicine and virtual care models introduced by the digital healthcare sector proved to be life-saving at the peak of the deadly pandemic. Patients in rural and remote areas, who remained aloof from healthcare, can now afford quality services that were formally out-of-pocket expenses for many.

The change within the healthcare segment on account of digitalization with the increasing internet and smartphone penetration across the globe addresses the gap in the availability of specialist doctors while reducing the burden on tertiary-care hospitals in small cities and rural areas.

Maximizing the medical care system’s potential through advanced innovations requires building on key regions,

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including supportive infrastructure, upskilled talent and strong rules guaranteeing data security conventions.

Considering the pressing need for technology, the Healthcare players quickly adapt to the various tools.

Internet of medical things (IoMT), Artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) is leading the imperative transformation, and smartphones have served as an integral part.

Mobile technology has been revolutionizing the healthcare industry. Various medical and healthcare services providers have integrated telemedicine into their services, including video conferencing, real-time remote monitoring and wireless communications.

The use of cell phones, tablets, wearables and other handheld gadgets to give medical services support, simpler admittance to records, improved frameworks, the superior quality of patient care, therapy adherence and substantially more is referred to as mobile health or mHealth. It also provides physicians access to drug information, the latest medical research, and online learning practices - another vital segment or feature of mHealth.

The two different and distinct, yet equal, developing fields in the mobile healthcare sectors are ● Gadgets, applications and administrations intended for the treatment and patient care ● Devices and wearable technologies intended to improvise a healthy way of life and screen the fitness activities The global mHealth revenues are expected to increase to around 247 billion dollars by 2025, following its fast adoption in adult and pediatric patient care.

Mobile technology has proven to improve the quality of patient care and contribute to back-office operations and medical training.

The benefits provided by health tech on smartphones are innumerable. Fortunately, the few advantages of mHealth have been bundled up as: ● An easy and straightforward coordinated effort among labs and trained professionals ● A streamlined work process and management process ● Upgraded efficiency of medical and healthcare experts ● Better-informed medication and therapy decisions ● Quicker patient-physician communication ● Diminished time on documenting reports ● More noteworthy transparency of patient insurance claims ● Accurate clinical diagnostics ● Constant remote monitoring post-surgery recuperation ● Focused and effective treatments and therapies ● Reduced costs through automation and data driven operational insights

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The patients and mobile app users experience the advantages of the mobile health through: ● Customized treatments ● Consultations with experts and specialists from remote areas ● On-time access to emergency wellbeing services ● Easier access to the digital health records ● More control over their health ● Improved medication adherence ● Proficient medical and health care spending Despite various benefits, the technology-driven health tech needs to combat multiple challenges in the growth process.

Administrative uncertainty: The absence of explicit administrative and regulatory rules for online drug stores and utilization of e-solutions is a challenge for the sector and may prompt fraudulent practices like forged prescriptions.

Infrastructure and abilities: Digital upskilling of professional experts is an immense prerequisite, as the demand for digital skills across industries is high. The absence of an appropriate skilling framework further makes a barricade digital upskilling. Moreover, physical infrastructure and cold chain logistics are expensive and scarcely present in rural regions.

Data privacy and security issues: Remote patient monitors and gadgets are vulnerable and pose security issues, influencing patient-provider privacy.

Absence of standardization: Health tech being at an early stage, needs coordination and standardization, which it lacks and brings about irregularities in patients’ clinical results. Consequently, the normalization of patients’ health records is a significant stage in empowering numerous medical care specialist organizations to access steady, persistent records easily.

Mobile health applications and wearable gadgets have become essential to the medical care industry over the last few years. It has made mobile health one of the sections with the highest potential for advancement in future and one of the most subsidized and funded medical fields worldwide.

The benefits of portable innovation in medical practices vary, including quicker communication, smoothed out efficiency, cost reduction and everything associated with it.

Used every day by specialists, attendants, lab experts, patients, their care-takers, and relatives, mobile technology has demonstrated to be profoundly influential in boosting healthcare services quality to a higher level.

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Higher Education Digest October 2020

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IN MY

VIEW

How Embedded Banking Will Change Banking Harshavardhan Pusala, Founder & Managing Director, Techurate Systems Private Limited

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he seamless integration of financial services into a traditionally non-financial service is known as embedded banking, also known as embedded finance. Customers can, for example, use a cab to make cashless payments. Embedded Finance Infrastructure allows customer-facing digital platforms (known as “anchor platforms”) to “embed” financial services into their own systems. Businesses in the MSME, B2C and B2B categories can use embedded finance to boost client lifetime value, monetize their customer base, and vertically scale their product offering.

As more businesses and ecosystems integrate financial services into their offerings, banks should consider how they will fit into this paradigm. Consumers nowadays expect digital services to be available anywhere and at any time. In banking, the focus has shifted away from the branch and possibly even the banking app and toward the service itself, and technology is allowing those services to be brought closer to customers. With the widespread use of the internet, it is now possible to provide a completely integrated banking experience at scale—something that an increasing number of businesses are doing.

Embedded Banking is the conclusion of several phases of FinTech infrastructure development in India. New techniques of constructing FinTech apps have been enabled by the evolution of UPI and the introduction of Account Aggregators (NBFC-AA) and Open Credit

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Embedded Banking is the conclusion of several phases of FinTech infrastructure development in India

HARSHAVARDHAN PUSALA

Harshvardhan is the Founder & Managing Director at Techurate Systems Private Limited.

He has over 15 years of experience in General Management, Software Development, Product Support, Delivery and Consulting. His domain experience is primarily in Oracle FLEXCUBE (Core Banking Software) and Channel Banking which includes 9 years at multiple client locations across Africa and Asia as a Project Manager and Technical Lead.

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Enablement Network (OCEN). Banks are now delivering banking directly to customers through embedded finance which vitally changes the playing field and separates the leaders from the followers.

Embedded banking is a new concept therefore let’s take a look at the examples of embedded finance that will transform the near future: Embedded Payments Embedded Payments is the process of integrating payment infrastructure into an app or platform to provide a seamless payment flow. The first financial service to be integrated into nonfinancial product experiences was payments. They’ve evolved into an important aspect of any E-Commerce app or SaaS platform’s value proposition, with end-users using this function on a regular basis.

Embedded Payments enable a wide range of applications, including video game in-game purchases, payroll automation software, e-wallet integration in E-Commerce apps, payment via educational institutions’ ERPs, subscription-based payments for SaaS, and more.

Embedded Insurance infrastructure companies provide an easy way to connect with insurance companies through their tech stack

Embedded Credit You can use embedded cards to make payments in addition to credit and debit cards. End-users can transfer funds electronically onto the card and make purchases up to the whole cash value on the card with embedded cards.

Smart cards, virtual cards, and expenditure cards are all issued by different systems. These cards may be a handier option than cash. Because all information is encrypted, embedded card payments are safe. They are also more cost-effective than standard cards and allow for speedier processing.

Embedded Insurance Insurance is bundled with the purchase of a product or service, which is known as embedded insurance. Maruti

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Suzuki, for example, sells car insurance both online and in-store. Embedded insurance firms provide transactional APIs and technologies that enable insurance solutions to interact with mobile apps, websites, and other ecosystems.

Platforms prefer to partner with external insurance companies instead of building the complex capability internally. However, insurance companies work with outdated tech stacks that are hard to integrate.

Embedded Insurance infrastructure companies provide an easy way to connect with insurance companies through their tech stack.

Embedded Investments Embedded Investment, in its most basic form, allows platforms to integrate stock market investing into their vertical products. The trend of Embedded Investing has been spearheaded by APIbased brokerage businesses.

They’ve developed APIs for every microservice, including account opening, funding, trading, portfolio management, and market data. This enables multiple platforms to provide incontext investment services to their customers.

Embedded Banking Embedded banking is the type of banking in which bankinglike services are offered by nonfinancial players. It replaces the checking or savings accounts provided by banking institutions.

From a single platform, you can make investments, apply for loans, smart cards, or manage your transactions. This offers users a seamless banking experience.

Embedded banking services make processes more efficient with fewer touchpoints and they are much more cost-effective as compared to normal banking.

Fintech, including embedded banking, is a fastgrowing niche. It is poised to proliferate some companies to success by enabling them to offer more than one service.

With embedded finance, for instance, online retailers can instantly turn themselves into lenders, thereby serving as a one-stop shop for all their customers’ needs.

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Higher Education Digest July 2020

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EXPERT’S OPINION

How Is Cloud Technology Disrupting The Tech Industry In 2022 Piyush Somani, Managing Director & Chairman, ESDS Software Solution Limited

T

he last two years have brought about a significant change in how individuals or organizations do their daily business. The onset of the pandemic is believed to have forced the organizations across the industries to enhance their focus more on operational agility. To remain competitive in their respective business areas, it has become important for businesses to adopt Digital Transformation. CIOs and business heads may also require to focus on talent retention and improved relationships with their stakeholders.

This increased digitization has given a significant push toward the adoption of cloud-based services that is estimated to increase the global investment in Data-Centers to over US$ 200. The Indian industry is expected to gain a significant share in the global market, with the country’s investment expected to hit ~US$ 5 billion annually by 2025. The accounting of revenue expected to be gained from digitally underserved MSMEs of India could further provide a major boost to the IT sector. Even small firms in the unorganized sector are realizing the need to have an all-around run time for mission-critical applications,

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Piyush Somani is the Managing Director

and

Chairman

of

ESDS

Software Solution Ltd. He holds a bachelor’s (electronics)

degree from

in the

engineering University

of Pune. He has over 16 years of experience in the information technology sector. As the founder of our Company at the age of 26, he has been instrumental in expanding the operations of our Company in India and several international markets. He is also on the board of our Subsidiaries, ESDS Internet Services Private Limited, SPOCHUB Solutions Private Limited, ESDS Cloud FZ LLC and ESDS Global Software Solution, Inc.

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The Cloud industry in India is witnessing a surge in adoption by various industry verticals such as the Government sector, manufacturing industry, IT Industry, and others

digital customer acquisition, and servicing tools. Backed on key technologies of artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data, and analytics, IoT, the IT/ITes sector in India is expected to benefit immensely from the increased adoption across end-user firms of all types and sizes.

The Cloud industry in India is witnessing a surge in adoption by various industry verticals such as the Government sector, manufacturing industry, IT Industry, and others. This ESDS operates across Managed Cloud Services, Cloud IaaS, SaaS, and Security Services.

IoT services, big data, and cloud computing are expected to integrate where cloud computing is expected to play the role of a common platform for IoT. The following illustration demonstrates the cloud services market segmentation in India by industry (IT/

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ITes, Manufacturing, Government, BFSI, and others) based on revenue (%) – Fiscal 2020 The Key Differentiators of Cloud Technology ● Scalability - Data center operators struggle to scale sufficient infrastructure to facilitate more demanding IT requirements (such as increasing compute, storage, and network needs). Cloud services have proved to be highly scalable, as an organization can increase or decrease resources to support business growth by saving money during slower periods. ● Cost-Effective- Cloud services save organizations from spending huge costs on storage services. The cloud service provider handles the server maintenance, power

and cooling cost, software licensing, and upgrade expenses for their clients. ● Flexibility - Cloud technology is a subscription model, which gives its users the flexibility to scale up or down the resources which leads the CSPs to bill their end customers on a pay-per-use basis.

The Trends Responsible for the potent Disruption Increasing adoption of big data, analytics, artificial intelligence, and the internet of things (IoT) The growth of the cloud services market is driven by the increasing adoption of big data, artificial intelligence, and IoT. IoT connects multiple devices or appliances that need to be connected to the internet for reasons including automation and real-time control of the device Artificial intelligence is being embedded into IT infrastructure to help streamline workloads and automate repetitive tasks. Companies are using cloud infrastructure to collect, store, process, and analyze the huge bulk of data required for artificial intelligence tools and applications. The surging adoption of big data in India is also leading to the growth of the cloud services market as cloud infrastructure allows for the real-time processing of big data.

The SaaS Industry The global SaaS market is expected to grow multifold in the next few years owing to increased awareness among enterprises for its usage, advancement in technologies, and the corresponding introduction of new products and offering (vertically and horizontally), supply-side enablers providing consumption-based models, etc.

In 2018, Canada ranked first with 8.6% spent on SaaS as a percentage of the software and services industry, followed by the USA and Russia at 6.6%. It was estimated that around 4.0% spend on SaaS was incurred as a percentage of the Software and Services Industry in India. However, the Indian SaaS industry is expected to occupy a 7-9% share in the global SaaS industry by 2022, fueled by India’s competitive edges compared to the world in terms of low-cost structure, the abundance of engineering talent, increasing acceptance of Indian products across the globe and effective customer service The following illustration demonstrates the market size of the global SaaS industry in USD billion from 2020 (estimated) to 2025 (projected)

Growth Drivers and Trends in the Global SaaS Industry-2021 ● Integration through APIs ● Increase In Micro SaaS Companies ● The rise in Consumption-Based Models ● The emergence of the SaaS marketplace ● Data-Driven Decision Making Culture ● Promotion of SaaS Adoption by Governments Worldwide Deployment of Futuristic Technologies in SaaS Concerning the potential and the opportunity in the SaaS, Market ESDS has garnered an elaborated SaaS portfolio placed on our innovative SaaS Marketplace SpocHub SPOCHub is a platform to assist organizations in their digital transformation journey by enabling them to choose the right fit products & solutions. It provides both in-house developed and third-party applications, hosted on the ESDS cloud platform, to end-users, over the internet, on a monthly or quarterly subscription model, which allows clients to develop, run and manage applications and services. This way, Spochub enables ESDS and its software vendors to offer solutions with custom packages to enterprise customers. It is a Digital Transformation Marketplace with a Curated Catalogue of Innovative Industry-Specific solutions and is now marching toward the XaaS (Everything as a service) DX platform. SPOCHUB fills this gap across industries, empowering ISVs with great solutions to partner with ESDS and increase their market reach, backed by the commitment of exuberant support from ESDS to the customers.

Concluding Words The adoption of cloud computing is now observed across all industries. With its numerous benefits & capabilities compared to on-premise solutions, Cloud has transformed & facilitated product research, design, and development. Consequently, increased innovation and lower development costs have resulted in increased market distribution. A cloud-based solution improves the overall performance of organizations regardless of their domain, making them more efficient, more productive, and more streamlined. Today, Cloud Computing is the most logical solution for storing data, performing analytics, and generating intelligence. Hence, it proves to be the better option for the technological and overall development of industries and easing of everyday lives of individuals and industries alike.

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IN MY

VIEW

Why is It Imperative for Financial Institutions to Streamline Their Customer Acquisition Process?

Praveen Paulose, MD & CEO, Celusion Technologies

I

n a changing business landscape that is dominated by digitisation, it is imperative that financial institutions streamline their customer acquisition process to stay relevant and competitive. The world has evolved and sticking to the traditional approach without adapting to the new normal could invite the fate of the dinosaurs and drive businesses to extinction. The need of the hour is to remain nimble and make necessary changes to adjust to the changing dynamics of customer acquisition.

Onboarding customers cannot have a “one size fits all” strategy. It will require a multi-pronged approach to maximize the acquisitions through each channel. Financial institutions will need to have an omnichannel strategy where one channel can feed into or be complemented by another to complete the onboarding process.

Having digital platforms provides a 24/7 window for customer acquisition that is free from the limitations of banking hours/ holidays. It offers flexibility to customers to explore products at a time of their convenience.

While some customers may onboard themselves independently via the digital platform, there would be another set of customers who would need some hand-holding or human touch to complete the process. The telesales team or the branch sales team should use

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In a highly tech-savvy world, staying ahead of the competition is essential for mere survival

PRAVEEN PAULOSE

Born in 1978 in Mumbai, Praveen completed his schooling from St. Mary’s High School, Mt. Abu (Boarding School in Rajasthan). He completed his Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Science from D.Y. Patil College of Engineering, Mumbai. After a brief period of employment, he became a first generation entrepreneur when he started Celusion Technologies. The idea was based on the premise that they could build great software but today their software is changing the way people look at finance.

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the information about half-filled forms to contact the customers and conclude the onboarding.

Why is it critical for financial institutions to streamline customer acquisition?

There are several reasons why tweaking the customer acquisition process to meet the needs of a changing world is critical. Let us explore a few of them in detail.

Increase the business The purpose of business is to do business and acquire more customers. Onboarding new customers are the raison d’etre of business and every strategy should move towards the fulfilment of this outcome. Having access to multiple customer acquisition channels improves the probability of getting more customers and should definitely be explored. Given the explosive success of fintech platforms, existing banks and financial institutions have moved towards acquiring such platforms or designing independent digital platforms for the same purpose. With the increase in smartphone users and access to cheap internet, it is a logical extension to actively use the mobile and web for customer onboarding. Financial institutions will be required to build the infrastructure to manage all channels - branches, telesales, web, mobile and social media to ensure maximization of customer acquisition round the clock.

Reduce operational cost Having access to multiple channels will give financial institutions an opportunity to explore the success rates of each channel. Using data analytics the performance of different channels can be monitored based on which allocation of resources to the best performing channels can be increased. Increased use of digital channels will reduce operational costs in terms of hiring human resources. The available manpower can be productively deployed to manage core business activities. Digital platforms reduce turnaround time for customer onboarding improving productivity. This leads to considerable time and costs savings while promoting efficiencies.

Stay competitive In a highly tech-savvy world, staying ahead of the competition is essential for mere survival. No financial institution can afford to ignore the new customer acquisition channels. Digital platforms have to be set up to provide an excellent customer experience. Ignoring the elephant in the room can be injurious to the health of

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the organisation.While traditional channels will continue to exist to meet the needs of a large customer base that may not have transitioned to digital banking, the need of the hour is to tap all new channels to provide new generation customers with a safe, seamless experience at their fingertips. It is important to achieve a balance between channels and explore synergies.

Support the potential of a remote workforce The COVID-19 pandemic opened up the viability of remote workforces. Almost overnight, workplaces underwent a transformation as they switched from physical to virtual mode. Business continued as usual with employees logging in from home. Meetings moved to video conferencing as Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams chipped in. Whatsapp,Google Messenger and Email became the modes of communication. The runaway success of this model during the crisis has ensured that hybrid workplaces will be here to stay when the world returns to the new normal. The availability of multiple customer acquisition channels will support the unlimited potential of the remote workforce.

To sum up, Customer acquisition channels need not be mutually exclusive. Financial institutions can maintain a presence in all channels and use customer analytics to tweak the performance of each model. Over a period of time, these channels will complement each other as customers would start the onboarding process in one channel and probably complete it in another. It is important to keep all lines of communication open with customers.

Digital marketing will continue to play a lead role in spreading awareness about the products and services and providing ready access to customers at a time and place of their choice.

The streamlining of the customer acquisition process is bound to have successful business outcomes as it will tap the potential of technology to improve the business ecosystem adding value to all the stakeholders. As businesses try to better understand changing customer preferences and psychology, they will be able to provide tailored experiences that exceed customer expectations. This will lead to crossselling and up-selling opportunities that will add to increased loyalty and enhanced customer satisfaction levels.

As the world slowly moves to put the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic behind it and firmly focus on the way ahead, it is the right time for financial institutions to survey the change in the business climate and consumer behaviour and create winning strategies that cover all the opportunities available. Exciting times are ahead as businesses put their best foot forward to successfully negotiate the new normal.

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EXPERT’S OPINION

What Are The Benefits For CloudBased Software Products?

Nilesh Gudhe, CEO and Founder, Bynry

C

loud has made our lives more convenient. And rightfully so for multiple reasons. It is more cost-efficient, reliable, scalable, easy to deploy and requires the least IT/infrastructure support. Earlier, companies were expected to budget for huge infrastructure overhaul and support teams to get things going.

With cloud, all these strategies have undergone a sea change. Data storage is no longer an issue and security worries can be bid goodbye too. Utilities especially stand to gain as a cloud-based utility billing software can help them run their business more efficiently. Read on to know how a cloud-based software product can help you.

Lower costs With a cloud-based software product, companies are no longer expected to invest in in-house resources, hardware, software, upgrades or look to build an IT team. No separate costs will be expected to be borne for ensuring high-level security for assets and data. Costs which can otherwise go into developing remote data centers can also be saved as nowadays good cloud based softwares offer pay-as-you-go services which can take into consideration usage requirements and bill a customer only for the services they are using, thereby leading to a decrease in the total cost of ownership (TCO). They also come with their own reliable services which means companies need not spend their energy, time and money on fixing downtime or outage issues.

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Nilesh Gudhe is the CEO and founder of Bynry. He has 20 years of expertise in designing, developing, and maintaining web, cloud and mobilebased, high data volume platforms for businesses in the Americas, the United Kingdom and Asia, and over five years of experience addressing high-value industry challenges for Electricity, Water, and Gas. He founded Bynry from scratch in 2016 and successfully grew it into a multimillion-dollar ARR. A member of IEEE and AWWA, Mr. Gudhe volunteers at the Adult Literacy Program and advocates for the skill development of the underprivileged.

He speaks at various conferences and forums and believes in integrity, creativity and leading by example.

He is married with two children and enjoys playing table tennis and cycling in his spare time.

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Greater scalability Every business undergoes changes over a period of time.

What seems adequate today may no longer be sufficient tomorrow. A cloud-based software product understands this well and enables users to scale their operations and requirements up or down without having to invest in upgrading or downgrading their infrastructure. Fluctuating bandwidths and demands can thus be managed seamlessly with the least risk or downtime. No up-front investment is required, and more servers can be added dynamically as per the need. Flexible database services can also be looked at if needed.

Faster, swifter deployments/upgrades An on-premise application would require months of planning and loads of resources to get started. With a cloud-based software product, a project can be deployed much faster. Add the ability to integrate with multiple products, and you can be sure to hear a sigh of relief by your team. Software updates can also be tested and deployed swiftly by the vendors, leading to loads of savings in time, resources, and money. In fact, upgrades are managed automatically for a slew of customers, thereby ensuring industry standards and best practices.

Enhanced security and disaster recovery Security is an important area that just cannot be overlooked. When companies go for cloud-based software products, they can be rest assured about security as vendors take extra effort to take care of their clients’ data with many even providing custom security settings and access rules. Likewise, if any issues occur or any hacks take place, companies can be confident about getting their data back safe and secure, as vendors also take utmost care to implement robust disaster recovery mechanisms.

Companies need not worry about investing in a separate data center or backup tools. According to an IBM study, the average cost of a data breach in 2021 was $4Mn annually. With features like single sign-on, role-based access, authorization rules, strong encryption methods etc., cloud can help companies stay safe.

Better insights As decision makers work on digitizing their business, cloud helps them make better decisions based on rich insights. Realtime data is available at the teams’ fingertips, thereby providing chances for further enhancements and improvements across various parameters and data points. This also helps companies gain a competitive advantage as these insights could enable them to take more informed decisions and come up with better ideas to improve their processes.

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As decision makers work on digitizing their business, cloud helps them make better decisions based on rich insights

Improved collaboration and teamwork With cloud, teams can collaborate on files and data together.

Cloud-based software products are thus beneficial to all teams as they all get one view of the data which acts as a single source of truth. Teams of varying nature, dispersed across the globe, can collaborate, and help each other improve their processes. They can share data and relevant information, leading to better communication and visibility across the board. Conflicts and confusion are thus avoided, and, in fact, access controls can also be defined. Thus, everybody is happy and gets to access information that is relevant and important to them, anytime and anywhere.

Final thoughts Gartner predicts that the global public cloud spending will reach $482Bn in 2022, registering an impressive 21.7% increase over the previous year. Cloud-based software products help companies get an edge and are a clear path to digitizing their infrastructure at a fraction of the costs and effort. Companies can leverage industry best practices while also focusing on their core business. Managing vast amounts of data becomes a lot easier. Companies can use their resources for enhancing their business while reaping the myriad benefits that cloud has to offer. As a utility company, you too can benefit immensely from the cloud.

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Digital 1086 First Magazine +91 33 4061 May 2022

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LEADERS’S INSIGHTS

Enabling Digital Transformation in your Organization Subramanyam Reddy, Founder and CEO, KnowledgeHut

Subramanyam Reddy (Subbu) is the Founder and CEO of KnowledgeHut, the leading technology workforce development company that helps enterprises and individuals around the world move forward to the next level with the help of technology. In 2012, at the age of 28, Subbu, as he is known to everyone, started KnowledgeHut. Hailing from a small town of Kadapa in Andhra Pradesh, he completed his MBA in 2007 and then moved to Bangalore to work as a growth hacker and marketing consultant for some of the biggest IT companies in this part of the world, including TCS and others across India & Singapore.

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To flourish in the competitive environment, it is of utmost necessity for businesses to adapt to digitisation

D

igital transformation is not merely just a buzzword but a tailored solution for businesses of all sizes to unlock their potential.

Organizations that adapt to the changing times by adopting new-age technologies can remain competitive and relevant. Deloitte’s Digital Transformation Survey, 2020, says, 45 percent of companies reporting a positive impact of digital transformation, also have higher net revenue growth.

But digital transformation programs are beset with challenges. Jeff Sutherland, the co-creator of Scrum, has stated that 47% of Agile transformations fail, and 67% of these failures are terminal. How can you ensure that yours doesn’t fail?

What is Digital Transformation?

Technology has created limitless paths to shape the future of our lives, by providing easy access to amazing tools and resources. Boundaries across societies have become blurred because of digitisation. Big Bata, AI/ML, the Internet of Things, Mobile, and cloud computing, are revolutionising industries by generating innovative and smart business strategies. With the emergence of online learning, learners from remote corners have access to new and advanced learning concepts. Even smart home technologies provide comfort and convenience by optimising resources.

Digital transformation creates value for the end-users by connecting people, data, and processes, which helps

businesses to maintain a competitive advantage. Businesses can create customer delight, improve processes and productivity and mitigate risks while optimizing resources, with a successful value-creation strategy.

Covid-19 threw the world into disarray, causing havoc in practically every facet of our life. One of the far-reaching consequences that the pandemic has brought about is, as the Economist put it, “the infusion of data-enabled services into ever more aspects of life.” To flourish in the competitive environment, it is of utmost necessity for businesses to adapt to digitisation. Adopting digital will help them build the resilience that the future demands.

According to research conducted by Mckinsey, 70 percent of large-scale transformations will fall by the wayside, without achieving their objectives. The most common flaws are poor employee engagement, lack of guidance and support from the leadership, a disconnect between cross-functional teams, and a lack of accountability.

Given below are some of the key factors that will help enterprises in accelerating digital transformation and ensure successful adoption: Companies must take a people-first approach Investing in the workforce along with technology is imperative to bring sustainable change and drive innovation.

Analysis shows that bringing a change in company culture along with technology up-gradation is important for a successful digital transformation. A successful digital

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transformation requires bringing a change in the mindset of the people along with bringing in new technologies.

Businesses must empower their employees to adapt to the new technologies and ways of working. As even the most innovative digitisation strategies become redundant if the workforce is not trained to use the new technologies.

The two ways in which businesses can drive successful employee engagement in digital transformation are: establishing and reinforcing new habits among employees through formal mechanisms such as continuous learning;

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and allowing employees to provide their opinion on how and where technology can be adopted. The employees will be open to adapting to digitisation when they feel they are being heard and their opinions matter.

Hire savvy, far-sighted leaders For implementing a change, the mindset and values that are followed by the most senior leaders will be the main differentiator that enables the effectiveness of the organization’s transformation.

challenge old, traditional ways of working and take risks.

For a successful digital transformation, leaders need to collaborate well with employees at all levels and need to be open to discussions on challenges faced by the team.

For implementing a change, the mindset and values that are followed by the most senior leaders will be the main differentiator that enables the effectiveness of the organization’s transformation

According to MIT Sloan’s Management Review research initiative titled The New Leadership Playbook for the Digital Age, only 12% of the respondents felt that their leaders had the right mindset to lead their companies forward into transformation. To make a difference, businesses must invest in top talent, and go the extra distance to hire savvy, far-sighted leaders. Leaders are capable of motivating employees to outperform only if they connect with them on a deeper level.

To create a successful strategy for the transformation plan, senior leaders need to encourage employees to experiment. This involves the leader being bold enough to

Implement digital upgrades wherever possible For a digital transformation to be successful, the employees must be trained to use the right digital tools and processes.

To implement the adoption of digital tools, an organization must facilitate improved communication, analysis of complex data, and ease of access to information. The organisation should also create a network of crossfunctional teams who will be accountable for their tasks.

An enterprise is on the path of successful transformation when they start modifying the traditional operating procedures to integrate digital technologies. According to research by McKinsey, leading businesses are investing heavily in upgrading their technology, and adopting innovations that will help them meet the challenges of the present and the future.

Build capabilities for the future of work It is not just enough to install the digital upgrade and expect that it will be adopted seamlessly. Businesses need to ensure that the employees, who need to adapt to the technologies are upskilled or reskilled.

The workforce needs to continuously adopt new technological skills as these skills become obsolete in this dynamic environment. To create tangible benefits, it is necessary to imbibe the right capabilities that will deliver value to the company, its employees, and its customers. Along with technical skills, social skills such as communication, empathy, and resilience are important to change.

What is the roadmap for a successful transformation?

An organization must consider transformation initiation programs to manage their digital transformation. It begins with assessing the current digital strategy of the business, and then defining the vision of the digital future. Along the way, to ensure successful transformation intermediate business goals and measurable metrics are required to achieve one step at a time.

A successful business transformation is well-positioned to hold its own in the competitive marketplace, attracting more revenue and winning the hearts of customers. A successful business transformation has the buy-in from the leadership as well as the employees and engages all levels of the workforce for the larger business goals.

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EXPERT’S OPINION

Why Is It The Optimum Time For Companies To Invest In Augmented And Virtual Reality?

Rakesh R, Business Head & Director, Deepsense Digital

A

dvertising and marketing has evolved dramatically over the years, from traditional methods such as billboards, print ads, and flyers to cutting-edge digital methods. We all know that digital marketing is all about understanding customers’ wishes and expectations so that businesses can deliver a pleasant user experience.

However, as the digital world advances, so does the way businesses communicate with their clients. It’s no wonder that, with Internet penetration at an all-time high and technological innovation at an alltime high, digital marketers are maximising the use of emerging and immersive technologies like virtual reality in their advertising efforts.

The global virtual reality market is predicted to hit $12 billion by 2024, up from $5 billion in 2021, according to Statista. The number of AR users is predicted to nearly double in the next three years, reaching close to two billion.

These technologies are certainly affecting not only digital marketing, but also the landscape in general. Let’s take a look at how AR and VR will impact digital marketing in 2022.

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Through

his

consistent

and

focused efforts, Mr. Rakesh seeks to leverage his knowledge in the fields of sales and management to lead his company to become a pioneer in the field of digital solutions. His unique skill set includes a noteworthy 5 year-long experience in sales and a 4-year long experience in the field of management.

The young entrepreneur also owns a Bachelor’s Degree in Instrumentation and Control Engineering and a Post Graduate Diploma in Management.

He has previously worked with brands like Titan and the Times Group in the position of a team leader and HR person respectively.

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Simply put, businesses with complex services and products may use virtual reality marketing to begin breaking down the various components of their offering in ways that end consumers can comprehend. As a result, they’ll be more likely to choose your brand over the competitors, increasing your ROI directly.

The marketing industry is being disrupted by new technologies such as augmented reality and virtual reality

What exactly is VR marketing?

VR, unlike AR, does not integrate the physical and virtual worlds. Virtual reality, on the other hand, immerses them in a completely new universe. Visual assistance such as 3D glasses, aural tools such as headphones or speakers, or a combination of technologies can be used to achieve this.

VR regularly manipulates multiple sensory inputs to create a new environment.

Virtual reality, in general, employs a 360-degree strategy in a computer-generated environment with which clients can engage. When someone stands or kneels, their perspective adjusts, just as it would in real life.

Businesses can utilise a variety of useful VR apps to reach out to their target customers fast and effectively.

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What exactly is augmented reality advertising?

Simply said, augmented reality allows digital marketers to change a static entity. A printed commercial or magazine cover, for example, can be turned into a realistic 3D experience. Virtual reality is not the same as augmented reality. AR augments and improves the reality that the user would normally see utilising electronic overlays, whereas VR completely immerses the user in a virtual world.

AR allows businesses to interact directly with their customers while also allowing them to virtually experience their products. For example, an AR marketing campaign for a furniture manufacturer will allow buyers to view items from their displayed catalogue as though they were set up in their own homes.

The technology may also alter the size of the products to meet the proportions of the consumers’ rooms, allowing them to “try-before-you-buy.”

What is the impact of augmented reality and virtual reality on digital marketing?

The marketing industry is being disrupted by new technologies such as augmented reality and virtual reality.

They are undeniably changing the digital marketing sector.

AR and VR digital marketing campaigns improve brand recognition by creating a wow factor.

Because communicating with a company via AR/VR is still a new experience for most people, they can help raise awareness. One of the most intriguing features is the ability to mix digital marketing campaigns with actual consumer interactions in novel and creative ways. They link digital and traditional media. This allows a business to transform a static physical advertisement or brochure into a digital experience that may be tied to a digital marketing campaign.

Conclusion Businesses can easily present customers with a new viewpoint by exploiting the capabilities of AR and VR. Users can quickly assess a wide number of items to find the right fit, or they may personally feel the social impact of their choices.

The nice part is that even small businesses can benefit from such marketing methods. If companies want to survive and grow, they must embrace VR and AR digital

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43

LEADERS’S INSIGHTS

Cloud Adoption Is Empowering Digital Transformation Across Industries Rahul S Kurkure, Founder and Director, Cloud.in

Rahul, a first-generation entrepreneur, is the Founder and Director of Cloud.in, an established player in the Cloudtech sector, delivering high-performance, customised Cloud solutions. These solutions are scalable, cost-effective and highly available too. Established as an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner and an AWS Channel Reseller Partner, Cloud.in serves, start-ups as well as leading enterprises across all sectors. Rahul is responsible for driving the organisation’s value proposition, business development, strategy and operations, in addition to building the team and equipping employees with high level competencies. His deep domain knowledge and exceptional execution capabilities have significantly contributed to the robust year-on-year growth of Cloud.in, the flagship brand of Hostin Services.

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To ensure optimum performance of the cloud model, organisations, irrespective of the infrastructure – private, public or hybrid they operate in, need to have complete visibility to constantly monitor across the entire spectrum

L

egacy IT systems are quickly getting replaced and organisations are in different stages of digital transformation to address the fast-evolving customer expectations aspect. Traditional or legacy on-premise infrastructure has limitations in terms of flexibility, scalability and other benefits.

To remain ahead of the curve, organisations have to adopt a ‘constantly catering to customer demand’ mindset. Delivering exceptional customer experience is the top business priority of every business, big, medium or small. Individuals are willing to pay for a stellar customer experience and do not think twice to switch brand even if they had to face only a single instance of a poor experience.

Brand loyalty is not a common occurrence in today’s market.

Reducing customer churn and generating higher revenues are key business objectives compelling organisations to formulate a robust customer experience strategy.

For better customer experience, organisations have to understand the former’s needs, gain insights to take further action, connect with customers emotionally, capture their feedback in real time and improve the product or service through innovation. CIOs and CTOs are recognizing the immense value digital technologies are bringing to customer experience efforts. Legacy systems are not flexible for digital transformation and technology vendors are not willing to support on-premise applications. Digital

transformation will require the respective organisation to migrate to a public or private cloud. Hence organisations are now accelerating their digital transformation journeys with cloud services. Cloud is empowering their businesses to innovate, reach out to market quickly, grow, scale efficiently and deliver enhanced customer experience.

Let us now take a deeper look into how cloud can ensure the success of digital transformation initiatives.

Stability of the cloud model To ensure optimum performance of the cloud model, organisations, irrespective of the infrastructure – private, public or hybrid they operate in, need to have complete visibility to constantly monitor across the entire spectrum. Monitoring should cover, network and application performance, login and access to the cloud services in addition to resource and license usage. This will lead to the much-required stability, preventing outages or downtime. Cloud environments can eliminate the constant crashing of the computer systems and servers, which have to rebooted regularly.

They do this by delivering high availability of resources, reliability with automatic restart function and resilience by restoring from any disastrous failure.

Cloud replication will provide the necessary backup in instances of failure.

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The first clear cost advantage with public cloud services is that no investments have to be made for the hardware equipment and office space can be optimised, thereby reducing energy costs as well

Cloud Security is another critical aspect when established, will address data breaches that are increasing in number and getting more sophisticated, by the day.

Offers faster time to market As business agility which improves the operational efficiency to support innovation is not feasible with any physical server, due to the high time-consumption for the entire process. Organisations may also resort to postponing the innovation process, leading to decrease in productivity and efficiency. On the other hand, many CIOs and CTOs confirm cloud services will significantly reduce the time for the organisation to reach the market and also it acts as a catalyst for new launches. The setting up of the cloud infrastructure can be established in a few minutes with the environment made production-ready. A cloud server can thereby deliver the competitive advantage to the business by providing the necessary resources as and when required due to its flexible aspect, enabling better customer service.

Significant cost reduction The first clear cost advantage with public cloud services is that no investments have to be made for the hardware equipment and office space can be optimised, thereby reducing energy costs as well. Secondly, the manpower deployment for running the data centre is decreased and so are the maintenance costs. These employees can focus on more important tasks than the mundane maintenance and spend time efficiently leading to higher productivity. They can develop higher order skills sets and even support in the innovation process. The initial capital investments made by the organisation, can be significantly decreased with the cloud’s pay-as-you-go

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business model where resources are also scaled up and down as required.

Security and Privacy issues addressed At an in-house data centre, where shutdowns are at unexpected times and frequent, organisations more than often encounter risks of losing critical business data, leading to losses on revenues, customer numbers and brand reputation. Such instances are much rare in a cloud hosting environment, where there are multiple backups at different levels, enabling smoother digital transformation.

The Cloud service provider generally takes the responsibility of the security of cloud infrastructure with Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and other such providers owning the security of their applications running on the cloud. The organisations will thereby become the custodian of business as well as customer data and overall security of the cloud.

According to the recent market research by ReportLinker, the global cloud computing market size is estimated to grow from US$445.3 billion in 2021 to US$947.3 billion by 2026, at a CAGR of 116.3% during the forecast period. The pandemic which has no doubt accelerated digital business transformation with high demand for cloud solutions across IT, Telecom, Education, Healthcare, BFSI, media and entertainment, and other sectors. Cloud effectively leverages machine learning, big data analytics, Internet of Things (IoT), chatbots, augmented reality and other such technologies to enable digital transformation initiatives. In today’s digital era, Cloud has evolved as an integral component for any successful business strategy leading to better growth, higher revenues and better business outcomes.

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IN MY

VIEW

Business Transformation in Services Industry Alok Bhatt, Senior Vice President - Business Transformation, Analytix Solutions

T

oday, the list of 500 largest companies by revenue comprises more service companies than those in manufacturing. The service industry’s contribution to global GDP is rising every year and reached 60% in 2020. Services sector is one of the major contributors to economic growth and is also a major source of employment. In the Unites States, for example, services sector contributed to more than 77% of the annual GDP in 2020, and is is estimated to be the second largest employment sector by 2030 with approximately 134 million jobs.

The global economy, and especially the services sector, has been hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic, correctly described as the worst global healthcare crisis in a century. The pandemic has led to an unimaginable loss of human lives, and caused an unprecedented economic devastation. The pandemic has forced companies to relook at the way they are delivering the services. In a few months, COVID-19 led to changes in the way companies do business that would otherwise have taken many years during normal times. The companies that have accepted the new normal and adapted their business and delivery models by embracing the digital transformation have not only survived the pandemic but have come out stronger, more efficient and more agile.

Key themes Driving Business Transformation in Services Industry

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Be it consumption of information or buying grocery or even for big ticket purchases, customers now prefer to do it all online

ALOK BHATT

Alok Bhatt is Senior Vice President (Business Transformation) at Analytix Solutions, a company specializing in providing technology-enabled and value-driven solutions to help businesses succeed by focusing on growth and profitability. Based out of Ahmedabad, Gujarat, Alok has more than 16 years of experience in scaling up organizations and delivering transformation. Alok has been a trusted transformation partner for a diverse set of clients ranging from Fortune 500 companies to small & medium-sized businesses.

Alok specializes in creating global standardized processes and systems through consultancy, collaboration, and control. He has extensive experience in managing global sales operations for multi-service organizations, executing sales and marketing strategies for aggressive growth, driving lean and efficient operations and implementing innovative technology solutions.

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Today, companies are focusing on end-to-end process optimisation and evaluating the automation solutions through a combination of technologies Adoption of digital channels by customers The millennial generation and beyond were already in the always-connected mode but COVID-19 has forced even the earlier generations to adopt digital. Be it consumption of information or buying grocery or even for big ticket purchases, customers now prefer to do it all online. The consumer expectations have changed, more likely permanently, and they are demanding more product options, high availability and quicker delivery models. This has also forced businesses to shift their focus on digital channels and to adopt digital-first customer experience.

Business Model Transformation: Enhanced connectivity and digitisation of processes has made it much easier for businesses to create a global ecosystem of partners. This has had a major impact on how firms are targeting their customers, their value propositions, the customisation of service offerings and the price points.

The overall business model is now becoming much more customer-centric and this is enabled through the digitally connected supply chain for products, partners and people. The old business models are being forced to change or are being completely replaced by the new digital business models.

Services Delivery Model Transformation Digital-first business are easy to scale and most successful business have an inherent desire to go global. The service delivery model for global businesses has now been transformed. While the earlier models were internal focused and emphasised optimisation of costs or increase in efficiency of service delivery, the digital global service models focus on enhancing customer experience through a globally distributed virtual workforce. Digital-first businesses focus more on

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delivering a highly personalised customer experience by leveraging their data-driven decision making capabilities.

These businesses are highly agile and can customise their service delivery at a moment’s notice.

Intelligent Hyper-Automation While earlier companies looked at individual tasks and analysed the feasibility of automation through point solutions, the world has changed now. Today, companies are focusing on end-to-end process optimisation and evaluating the automation solutions through a combination of technologies.

The digital ecosystem provides multiple ways to automate a task and it is prudent to evaluate what technology is best suited for a particular part of the process. Hyper-automation is creation of automated solution through multiple sets of tools and technologies like software integrations, RPA, IDP, AI and ML. These integrate seamlessly to provide an efficient, errorfree and intelligent automated process. This allows companies to focus more on judgement based and analytical tasks rather than transactional activities. The companies can thus move higher in the value chain and provide advisory and consulting services to add more value to the clients.

Empowered Global Workforce Another trend that has accelerated the transformation of service industry in the COVID era is the hybrid work model with more and more employees preferring to work remotely.

This has forced companies to relook at their digital strategies to enable their employees to deliver an exceptional customer service, digitally. Many companies have even revamped their service and product portfolios to bring digital offerings to market. Companies that have enabled their employees through technology have seen their revenues going higher even though the service delivery models may have changed.

The companies are now focusing on hiring globally to source the right talent at the right cost and are then creating a highengagement remote work culture to retain and re-train them.

Leveraging the global workforce and enabling them through Artificial intelligence (AI), data analytics, machine learning and connected platforms is driving the transformation of the industry. AI supports professionals to learn, think and perform better; analytics and machine learning are revolutionising insight generation; and platforms are disrupting traditional business models by bringing buyers and suppliers together. Happy and empowered employees are the biggest differentiators in creating a great customer experience in the digital age.

The companies that are agile enough to transform their business quickly according to the customer demands are not just able to survive but thrive at the expense of companies that are deep rooted in their legacy and resistant to change.

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EXPERT’S OPINION

Why Predictive Analytics Is A Must For Your Business Subodh Parulekar, CEO and Co-Founder, AFour Technologies

E

very business wants to know how to do better - how to sell more products, reach more customers, and set up more stores. Much of the time, the answer to this lies in the past records about what worked and what didn’t. Enter predictive analytics, one of the core tools in every modern organization’s arsenal. Predictive analytics enables intelligent decision-making like never before with the benefits of speed and accuracy and multiple use cases.

Let’s dive a little deeper.

What is predictive analytics?

Predictive analytics is a technique that makes projections and forecasts business trends with the help of machine learning, algorithms, and big data. It involves analyzing business data to glean patterns, creating new models based on those patterns, and passing fresh data through those models to predict what could happen in the future. Most modern predictive analytics processes use machine learning, which constantly sifts through data and learns new patterns in real-time to reflect the latest needs and market trends.

Benefits of predictive analytics Predictive analytics is a powerful tool when it comes to making business decisions. Assessing new initiatives against current market conditions can predict scenarios with high degrees of accuracy, allowing businesses to make an

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Subodh Parulekar is the CEO and co-founder of AFour Technologies and is based out of Redmond, Washington.

With a proven executive management track record, Subodh brings over 25 years of experience driving business strategy, sales growth, marketing, solutions architecture, and software engineering. After working extensively across multiple startups and MNCs across North America, he recognized the need to address certain gaps in

software

service

offerings.

This motivated him to join Disha Technologies, a pioneer in Software Testing and Quality Engineering, and his experience there was pivotal in enabling him to found AFourTech.

Subodh holds an MBA from the University of Washington, M Eng. in Systems and Computer Engineering from Carleton University, and a BE from the College of Engineering, Pune.

He is married and has two children, both of whom are pursuing their studies in the United States.

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Assessing new initiatives against current market conditions can predict scenarios with high degrees of accuracy, allowing businesses to make an informed final choice rather than relying on guesswork

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informed final choice rather than relying on guesswork. Some of the practical applications of predictive analytics include: ● Fraud detection/risk assessment: With cybersecurity threats on the rise and smarter hackers, predictive analytics can significantly identify potential vulnerabilities based on past risks while keeping a tab on real-time threats. It can also draw data from vulnerabilities that other companies in the same industry have faced and thus deduce whether the business in question might be heading in the same direction. ● Predictive maintenance: When used with intelligent sensors, predictive analytics can gather data from physical assets and predict when repairs and replacements may be required, thus reducing downtime and ensuring business continuity. ● Campaign enhancement: Based on data from past marketing campaigns - the ones that succeeded and the ones that didn’t - predictive analytics can help businesses choose the best channels, languages, and content categories to win over their audience. ● Credit scoring: Before extending credit to a customer, businesses can use predictive analytics to assess the customer’s credit risk. This ensures that the business doesn’t invest too much in customers who are unlikely to pay back. ● Behavior pattern detection: Predictive analytics can give essential insights into how customers are likely to behave under different circumstances. For instance, it can predict which category of buyers is most likely to abandon a cart after adding items to it, or which demographic will appreciate a new product the most.

Accordingly, the business can target those customers with tailored campaigns. Predictive analytics can also identify signs of discontent among customers so that the business can take steps to improve their satisfaction, thus reducing the churn rate.

Designing a forward-looking strategy It is important to remember that implementing predictive analytics is not a goal. It needs to be tied to business objectives to be helpful so that the trends and behaviors that the model predicts can be used to drive better decisions. Having a reliable and sufficiently large dataset is vital, as predictive insights are only as good as the data they are based upon. It is equally important to keep revisiting the model and upgrading it as processes, products, or external circumstances change in ways that impact future decisions. Above all, have a talented team in place and ensure that everyone is on the same page about the role that predictive analytics will play. This way, human intelligence, and cutting-edge ML can come together to power the best decisions for your business.

Powerful protection designed for PC gamers

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Digital Education First Magazine Digest 56 Higher May 2022 October 2020