CXO of the week: Rupesh Lunkad, Managing Director – India, TeamViewer

TeamViewer is a global technology company that provides Remote Software Innovation to customers and enterprises for digitizing workflow, improving efficiency, and reducing operational costs.

Over the last three years, TeamViewer has invested significantly in Augmented Reality (AR), especially for enterprise use cases. The adoption of TeamViewer’s Augmented Reality Support solutions (AR Solutions) is enabling the frontline workforce to increase productivity, efficiency, and quality across all industries with more than 625,000 subscribers which makes a compelling value proposition for any company pursuing digital transformation.

Rupesh Lunkad, Managing Director – India, TeamViewer comes with more than 16 years of experience in strategy, delivery, product management, digital transformation, and IT leadership. He is an experienced advisor to enterprise businesses and has a strong track record of helping companies with their digital transformation initiatives and align their long-term business objectives with technology strategies based on a customer-centric approach. In the past, he has helmed key positions with leading tech players such as SAP India and Wipro.

Recently we have engaged in an interview with Rupesh Lunkad, Managing Director – India, TeamViewer. He talks about Role of AI, AR, and MR in transforming the consumer experience and also share his journey so far.

Introduction.

TeamViewer is a leading global technology company that provides a connectivity platform to remotely access, control, manage, monitor, and repair devices of any kind – from laptops and mobile phones to industrial machines and robots. Founded in 2005, TeamViewer’s software has been installed on more than 2.5 billion devices around the world. The company is headquartered in Germany and has around 620,000 subscribers which enables companies of all sizes and from all industries to digitalize their business-critical processes through seamless connectivity. Against the backdrop of global megatrends like device proliferation, automation, and new work, TeamViewer proactively shapes digital transformation and continuously innovates in the fields of Augmented Reality, the Internet of Things, and Artificial Intelligence.

With what mission and objectives, was the company set up initially?

Since the company’s foundation in 2005, TeamViewer’s mission has been to seamlessly connect people across geographies with devices, providing them easy accessibility and empowering them to do their jobs remotely in a more effective and productive manner. Over the years, TeamViewer has driven innovations and has developed robust enterprise connectivity solutions. These have enabled customers to manage remote connectivity between numerous devices, which are not just restricted to IT equipment such as computers, servers, and mobile phones, but also production machines, robots, vehicles, etc.

On the other hand, TeamViewer has also initiated an expansion into workflow management for manual work processes and provides robust solutions to digitalise work operations along the entire value chain – across logistics, manufacturing, field service, and quality assurance. TeamViewer was set up with the objective of working toward digital transformation by playing a major role in the digitalization of workplaces and work processes – both in a traditional office and outside the office environment. The company is continuously and significantly investing in emerging technologies such as AI, AR, and MR, which are playing a critical role in optimizing processes and supporting frontline workers.

How is TeamViewer focusing on the ‘Make in India’ vision through government tie-ups to further accelerate its operations in the Indian market?

India is an important market for TeamViewer, and we are committed to accelerating the digital transformation journey of the country. We are aligned with the Government of India’s vision of bringing the digital revolution by harnessing the power of emerging technologies and scaling innovations. Currently, we are focusing on two important domains, which are automotive and manufacturing, to further accelerate our growth in the Indian market. On one hand, we are building partnerships with large enterprises and conglomerates to drive their technological journey, while on the other hand, the company is focusing on the government sector to increase business efficiency in these verticals. Moreover, TeamViewer is closer to its customers than before in India and has been playing a key role in providing world-class solutions and digitalizing its business operations.

What were the challenges and obstacles you faced while establishing TeamViewer?  

One challenge that everyone faces is competition and staying ahead of the curve. It is imperative that one should focus on bringing innovation into the industry by staying cutting-edge and disruptive.

Over the years, TeamViewer has built a reputation for being a trustworthy digital transformation partner across the world, and we are working towards adding significant value across industries such as automotive, manufacturing, and logistics, with our cutting-edge technology.

What, as per you, are the five important things that TeamViewer should be looking at today?

TeamViewer is at the forefront of driving innovations and scaling businesses. According to me, flexibility and scalability are the foundation of TeamViewer’s products and service offerings. There are a few important things we are focusing on to enhance customer experience and stay relevant:

• Reinforcing leadership in remote connectivity solutions: TeamViewer has become the de facto standard when it comes to remote connectivity. With TeamViewer, one can remotely access and control numerous devices, no matter if classic IT devices or more sophisticated non-IT devices like medical equipment, robots, machines, and vehicles. This is an exceptional functionality that helps in providing remote support for customers as well as employees, preventing downtime and increasing efficiency. It also strengthens the sustainability aspect as doing things remotely avoids travel and thus CO2 emissions at a significant scale.
• Industrial Metaverse: TeamViewer has been the flag-bearer in leveraging the Industrial Metaverse. The Consumer-Metaverse uses virtual reality glasses to transport people into a virtual new online world for entertainment, gaming, and shopping. The Industrial Metaverse, however, uses Augmented (AR)- and Mixed Reality (MR) smart glasses to make digital information and data accessible that enriches the real world. The information is displayed in the immediate field of view of industrial frontline workers on small screens placed directly in front of the eye. However, the full potential of the Industrial Metaverse will only be unleashed with the appropriate software. AR and MR solutions, like TeamViewer Frontline, enable digitalized workflows, blueprints, instructions, or holograms to be displayed in the right place and at the right time via the smart glasses - as if they were part of the real environment and without obstructing the workers' view.

Furthermore, TeamViewer Frontline interacts with the company's backend systems and retrieves as well as stores information there, from immersive pieces of training for engineers to step-by-step instructions for frontline workers in the logistics center. This opens almost limitless application areas in all industries and across all disciplines. For example, in the automotive industry, employees must be trained, logistics managed, parts assembled, and quality checks carried out. In service, regular maintenance appointments or repairs are due. All these processes can be digitally supported and mapped in the Industrial Metaverse via TeamViewer Frontline

• Focus on vertical solutions: TeamViewer takes a verticalized approach when it comes to its industrial offerings and creates solutions for a wide range of industries and steps of the value chain, ranging from logistics to assembly to field service.
• Leveraging TeamViewer through Sports Sponsorships:To establish TeamViewer’s brand globally even more broadlyand make people aware of our leading technology, we have partnered with Manchester United and Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 racing team. We have implemented several joint use cases and are helping Manchester United in digitalizing their processes, e.g., remotely accessing the stadium irrigation system, or transferring pictures from the pitch in real-time to the media.Moreover, our cutting-edge solutions are supportingthe Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 team’s operations, both on and off the racetrack. These examples are great showcases of the power of our solutions, and we look into helping Indian organisations to accelerate their digital transformation journey in the same way.
• Local Partnerships/Tie-ups:To serve our Indian clients in the best possible way and expand our customer base in India we rely on local partnerships with large system integrators (SI) and have created a strong ecosystem of alliances. They have helped to expand our footprint in the Indian market

What changes is TeamViewer bringing to the industry?

With the coming new technologies such as AR and MR, businesses will be at the center of this transition towards a new era of computing that just like the Internet will lead to a profound change for all businesses. In the past three years, TeamViewer has heavily invested in scaling advanced technologies such as AR, especially for enterprise use cases. As TeamViewer offers a robust and leading AR platform that operates on smart glasses, smartphones, tablets, and smart wearables, we have demonstrated our comprehensive capabilities around AR & MR – from simple AR annotations and markers to 2D overlays to complex 3D holograms. These capabilities have been extended further with our recently introduced AI potential that can be combined with AR workflows.

As the ‘Metaverse’ has been the hot topic across industries, TeamViewer has been making remarkable strides to make it a reality. We are going in the direction, which is Metaverse led, and we call it the ‘Industrial Metaverse’. We certainly believe that today, we already offer relevant AR and MR-based enterprise solutions that can be understood as part of the Industrial Metaverse. Moreover, TeamViewer Frontline, our enterprise AR platform, is designed to consciously empower the human worker in an increasingly digitalized working environment and increase productivity and efficiency. TeamViewer Frontline unlocks the industrial metaverse which brings 80%of frontline workers into the metaverse. AR work instructions are also powerful in job roles that face high attrition. Using AR workers are onboarded significantly faster. We are bringing game-changing solutions that are enabling our customers to digitalize their processes and operations.