CXO of the Week: Agendra Kumar, Managing Director, Esri India

Esri India is an end-to-end GIS solution provider enabling customers to think and plan geographically to make timely, well-informed, and mission-critical decisions. The company plays a key role in defining the adoption of the latest GIS technologies in the country.

Agendra kumar has been associated with Esri India since 2013. An industry veteran with over three decades of experience in the IT industry, Agendra has been promoting the use of geospatital technologies in the country. Under his leadership, Esri India has partnered with various government and private organization to execute critical and transformative projects using Esri's GIS (Geographical Information System) technology.

In a recent chat with Agendra Kumar, Managing Director, Esri India, he talks about the Indian tech industry and what Esri India has been up to.

Introduction of the company - (A brief non-promotional profile)

Esri India Technologies is an end-to-end Geographic Information Systems (GIS) solutions, provider. We as a company, try to help our users to think and plan geographically to make timely and well-informed decisions and help them solve their greatest challenges, be it business or social, through the use of GIS.

How long have you been working with your current organization? What are your major contributions to that?

I joined Esri India in August 2013. It’s been nine years now. We've come a long way in the last nine years; apart from very significant revenue growth, we have worked with a very large number of new customers and users in the country. Until a few years ago, in 2018, we had about 60,000 ArcGIS users in the country, today, we have close to half a million users of ArcGIS. Many contributions have come in terms of greater adoption from very large private organizations and government departments. That's one important milestone that we have achieved. Second important thing is that most of the national mapping agencies today are large users of our technology, whether it's the Survey of India, Geological Survey of India, National thematic mapping organization, Registrar General of India, or NIC. They all are major users of the Esri technology and have adopted it because they see a lot of value in what we offer in terms of better technology, better features, lot of additional software tools, which have got added over these years. Moreover, over the years, we have transformed into a solutions company as customers today look for varied solutions. Apart from technology, we have teams that work in providing complete solutions to our customers, and we've been very successful while working with smart cities, municipal corporations, and many other customers in providing complete solutions to them and addressing their day-to-day challenges.

What are the five important things Esri India should be looking at today?

 Firstly, customer success is very important today. We need to ensure that our customers are successful in whatever work they are doing, which, in turn, will make us also more successful. When our solutions aid customers’ success, we ‘earn’ customers for life, and having customers for life is extremely important in today's world. We must not forget that customers have various choices at their disposal, which they can use. They can achieve the same outcomes by using different kinds of solutions. Taking care of our customers and making them successful is a very important ethos for Esri India. We have launched a Customer Success program to make sure that we proactively work with the customers in helping them adopt and use the technology and solutions that we provide.

Our second most important focus area is solutions. We have built a fairly large number of solution products to address some of the common challenges like forest management, disaster management, and water as a utility. Some other solutions include locust monitoring and disease monitoring like vector-borne diseases. These concerns are common for every state and many cities also look into these issues in terms of planning and ensuring readiness. We have created solution products, which go along with ArcGIS. We also have a new offering from Esri India, which is called Indo ArcGIS which provides more than 100 solution products and a lot of Indian datasets. So, the focus is on providing more solutions to our customers so that they don't have to spend time building those customized applications. They have something readymade which they can start using from day 1 and achieve 80-90% of the requirements without any need for coding.

The third line of focus is to reduce complexity and cost for our customers. We consider it to be very important to work with customers to reduce the complexity of the whole IT infrastructure and therein reduce the cost as well. We are offering our technology stack on clouds that are hosted in India. We have partnerships with some leading companies like RailTel.We make our ArcGIS Enterprise and ArcGIS Pro available to our users on a cloud, hosted in India. We also offer services to manage customers’ GIS/IT infrastructure, bringing the complexity and cost down, while taking away the hassles of infrastructure management.

The fourth part is continuously upscaling our people. We are in an industry where changes happen very fast.GIS is getting used for more and more new applications and customers demand new functionalities to meet their needs. Every few months, we have new features which support more advanced AI/ML applications. They support more 3D content and 3D applications and image processing capabilities because satellite imagery and images captured by Drones are becoming commonly available. With so many rapid technological developments, the need to continuously upskill our people remains imperative. We help our people to understand the power of technology because unless they understand, they cannot really help our customers in using that technology.

The fifth area of focus is ESG initiatives. ESG is an important part of every organization today, whether it's government or private. As a company, Esri India is looking at chalking out robust ESG initiatives.  We are trying to build solutions for our customers through which they can avail the power of mapping and GIS in addressing challenges like climate change, environmental issues, or even governance issues. Using mapping and GIS, we'd like to help our customers in moving toward being carbon neutral and building their businesses in a more sustainable manner, and having better governance as a part of their business operations. These are the five important things on which we are focusing right now.

Do you encourage upskilling programs for employees? If yes, how has this changed the working structure?

Most companies today have multiple ways of upskilling people. There are a lot of online platforms, where large numbers of courses are available, and we also subscribe to a platform where many courses are available, and employees are encouraged to take courses. We also have individual development programs. Each individual, in discussion with their manager, agrees on development areas that need to be addressed to build skills.  They are helped by our Organization Development (OD) team, which is a part of our HR group in selecting the right kind of programs. They go through those programs, whether online or instructor-led. We also invest in training our trainers so that they deliver training as per the global standards.

Sometimes, we also invite people from EsriGlobal to come and deliver certain programs. We are also focusing a lot on management and leadership development initiatives, as these are very important parts of any growing organization. We have quite a number of young managers whom we train to become successful managers. Many people transition from being technical individual contributors to managers, first-line managers, and then middle managers. That's the time when they need a lot of training. Many of them do not have formal education or qualification in management, because they are technical people. So, they need to be skilled in being successful managers. That's another focus area.

Another important thing is that we hire a lot of people from campus, each year. We put them through initial training, which lasts about three months, and thereafter, they begin getting on-the-job training. It's very heartwarming to observe these youngsters becoming quite productive in about six to nine months. In about 2- 3 years, they are able to do a lot of good work, whether it's in terms of project delivery, or in terms of technical support, or pre-sales support. They're able to handle complex POCs for customers, sometimes using machine learning and helping customers in using them. That's a big change, which we have seen over the last few years, and this is how our upskilling programs are aligned to the market needs.

How did the pandemic time make you more open and collaborative than you have ever been in your career?

We have multiple offices across the country. Earlier for me to keep in touch with people in different locations was not that easy. We are a sales organization, so when I am travelling from Delhi to Mumbai, typically, meeting customers would be the top priority. Earlier, this would often leave me with no time to meet colleagues in the regional office. During the pandemic, everything equalized and eased off. I work from Noida, but using technology, I can keep in touch with people across different locations, be it in Noida, Kolkata, or Mumbai. As a company, we use technology quite a lot. Most of our IT systems are cloud-hosted. It's easier for everybody to use those. We have used all technology-enabled platforms quite effectively during the pandemic and continue to collaborate and communicate using them more often, even now. We run many programs where people come together and exchange ideas. We are a more digital organization today, and we are still using these collaborative tools to further increase productivity.

Indeed, I have become more open and collaborative as a leader. Now, I personally call for ISOmeetings, which welcome ‘Ideas, Suggestions, and Observations’.During the pandemic, I engaged in many one-on-one virtual meetings with the technical staff and young joiners in the organization. These meetings lasted for 30- 45 minutes and the sole objective was to hear the ideas, suggestions, and observations of staff members which could improve things in the organization. Miraculously, many good suggestions came from people who are new to the organization, some of who have been in the organization for less than a year!  There were different experience levels and different job profiles. It gave me a lot of insight into how different people look at the organization and what their aspirations and expectations are.  We took that feedback into our planning activities and made changes that garnered great value for me and for the organization as well.

Please share your thoughts on how you are managing productivity?

I think productivity was fairly high during the pandemic as well, apart from a few temporary lags during the first and second waves. We witnessed growth in the revenue and the number of customers, and we were able to provide services to all our customers satisfactorily. We were able to manage the productivity quite well. Now, after the pandemic, COVID has sort of become a part of our life, people are not really worried about getting infected, even if they get infected, they're back to work in about a week's time. Our offices are fully open, and we have people coming into offices. We have defined the jobs in three categories. There are some jobs that require people to be present in the office almost 100% of the time because these teams have to work in a collaborative manner, and their productivity is definitely higher when they all are working from one place. Then, there are certain jobs that can be done from anywhere, 100% remotely. These are two extremes, but there are a lot of jobs where we are allowing people to work partly from the office, partly from home. That's how we are managing productivity in the post-pandemic world. Overall, in terms of customer support, addressing the requirements of customers, and business growth, we've done fairly well, and the productivity level has not suffered at all.

What are your strategies for business growth in 2022?

We launched Indo ArcGIS in December 2021 and we are witnessing a good amount of demand for it. Indo ArcGIS has three things. First, solution products for about 100 solution areas. Second, a lot of Indian geospatial content is hosted on Living Atlas servers in India. Third, ArcGIS software has always been the market leader. I expect Indo ArcGISto accelerate our growth in 2022.

Another important growth area for 2022 is processing the data collected through drones. Drones are getting used for many applications. There is a huge potential for their use in surveying and mapping in the country. This is mainly due to programs like SVAMITVA and specialized programs for agriculture surveys, highway construction surveys, and Gati Shakti. We recently launched, Site Scan for ArcGIS, which is a cloud-hosted drone image processing platform. This is also hosted in India. Data remains in India on an Indian cloud, and it gets processed in India. That's another large growth engine for us.

The third important engine is, as I mentioned earlier, making ArcGISEnterprise and ArcGIS Pro available on a cloud that is hosted in India, along with managed services. That's our third important strategy for growing business in 2022. We have teams focused on each of these initiatives and we see a lot of business coming in, in each of these areas.