Indian cos lack in data maturity for analytics: Unilog

BANGALORE, INDIA: With exponential increase in data, enterprises in India have realized the need to use the data to their benefit. The focus is gradually shifting to data collection, data governance and data maintenance, but as a market India is yet to reach there.

Suchit Bachalli, executive vice president, Unilog Content Solutions, sees it happening in the next 18 months. In an interaction with Deepa of CIOl, he talks about quality of enterprise data, on why India is not a target for Unilog and how Indian companies are more reactive than proactive.

Excerpts:

CIOL: What is the company into?

Suchit Bachalli: Unilog is a 14-year-old company. We started off as a data services company focusing mainly on the American, European as well as Australian markets. Though the original idea was to leverage on low-cost model, we developed ourselves purely as a BPO services company.

Over the years we realized that competing on the low cost model does not help in the long term because eventually we will remain as the low-cost option. So we started to be more value oriented.

Thus, over the last two-to-three years we developed a fleet of products. We started analyzing the problems that our BPO customers face and came up with some strategic solutions.

Today we are repositioned as a products/solutions company with a little over 300 people spread across three locations - Bangalore, Mysore (where the R&D exists), and Chennai.

The R&D centre is focused on two products - an e-commerce platform called CIMM-2, a cloud-based SAP offering and XRF-2, a BI (Business Intelligence) analytic tool.

XRF-2 was developed in 2003. The algorithm still remains the same till today, but back then, the problem was lack of computational power, unlike today. So it can be used for big data analytics as well. The big data analytics is targeted for distribution and retail.

CIOL: How affordable are big data analytics solutions?

Suchit Bachalli: We have these kind of conversations with our customers as well. However, you have to look at it from a value proposition perspective.

Now, if it was an IBM or an Accenture or a Capgemini that had come up with this solution, it could run into millions of dollars per deal. We are a home grown ITeS product company, so are fair in terms of how we offer the solution. XRF2 implementation would typically start at about half a million dollars and could go up to about 1.2 million dollars.

CIOL: When it comes to adoption of big data, what is the trend that you see in the market?

Suchit Bachalli: I have read a lot of things that are written about it and everyone seems to have a different perspective. We are very focused on enterprise big data and are not talking about social networking feeds from Twitter or Facebook.

We are talking about enterprise big data. In a couple of sectors, such as energy and finance, it is very matured, whereas, distribution and retail sectors in India are far behind in terms of the level of maturity.

The other challenge is that there is a lot of enterprise data, but the quality is very poor. So, no matter how sophisticated a tool you buy, you are not going to get the results unless and until you spend some time to clean it up and map it properly.

Data collection is basically done more from a regulatory perspective rather than business. Moreover, in many enterprises, data is still in the form of files, and is not digitized.

A lot of companies have not paid attention to data collection, data governance, data maintenance, but it is changing gradually. So, as a market India is yet to be there, however, in the next 18 months I see it happening.

CIOL: But, why would a company which has been in the industry for like 30- 40 years, does not have a system in place in terms of data governance or maintenance?

Suchit Bachalli: It is a question of prioritization. I do not want to question the judgment of these companies. Indian companies do very well, but the mindset is like 'fly by wire' type, i.e, they are more reactive.

CIOL: What are some of the trends that you see in the market?

Suchit Bachalli: I am not familiar with the Indian market. Globally, the thirst for data has increased exponentially unlike before where enterprises were afraid of large data, as they did not know what to do with it.

Today, many of them are actually spending money to collect data and do analytics on it. They are also moving towards social media, such as Facebook and Twitter.

CIOL: Do you agree that there is a dearth of data scientists in the industry?

Suchit Bachalli: It is said so because today we are dealing with different types of data. Earlier, data was just RDBMS (Relation Data Base Management System), and it was in vogue. However, if you ask the same person to do analytics on Mango DB or a database that has no structure, or table, or rows, or columns, he/she will not be able to do. In order to run analytics on today's 'lump of data', you require different set of skills.

However, we are not deficient and even if there is a dearth, it will be just for short term. We have a very good set of talent available. We need to just re-train them. I will not be surprised if three years from now all IT schools will start offering big data analytic courses.

CIOL: Why is India not a target market for Unilog?

Suchit Bachalli: The level of data maturity that we need does not exist here. So I cannot sell XRF2 solution to a retail customer here because they do have the underlying data in place to be able to actually use it. It will take time, maybe over the next few years.

CIOL: By when do you think India will be ready for you to be a target market?

Suchit Bachalli: I see a three year horizon.