CXO of the week: V. Padmanabhan, Senior VP – Engineering, GlobalLogic India

GlobalLogic, a Hitachi Group Company, founded in the year 2000, for over 20 years, GlobalLogic has partnered with businesses to deliver innovative solutions and connect the dots between people, products, and business opportunities. By using human-centered design practices, superior engineering skills, and Agile delivery — the company helps customers re-imagine their business, and consumer interactions, and develop innovative products and services, with an accelerated time-to-market.

Recently we have engaged in an interview with V. Padmanabhan, Senior VP – Engineering, GlobalLogic India. He talks about the how increased use of technology is enabling rapid adoption of metaverse and what will be the future of metaverse.

Introduction.

GlobalLogic, a Hitachi Group Company, is a leader in digital product engineering. Founded in the year 2000, for over 20 years, GlobalLogic has partnered with businesses to deliver innovative solutions and connect the dots between people, products, and business opportunities. Headquartered in Silicon Valley, GlobalLogic design studios and engineering centers operate around the world, extending their deep expertise to customers across numerous industries. By using human-centered design practices, superior engineering skills, and Agile delivery — the company helps customers re-imagine their business, and consumer interactions, and develop innovative products and services, with an accelerated time-to-market.

What is metaverse? How will it affect business?

Metaverse is a shared virtual 3D world that is interactive & immersive. One can define it as a 3D collaboration platform elevating virtual collaboration to a whole new level from what we know as bridge-based calls.Moreover, itis a lot more than a simple collaboration platform. Metaversecan be defined as a virtual B2B Engagement Platform – a parallel universe to the physical universe, and each industry has a native adaptation of this parallel universe.

OT/IT convergence and software-controlled hardware like automobiles, industrial equipment, and medical devices - all promise to make Metaverse more than just a ‘Human-to-Human’ interaction engine. For the first time, we will have digital twin capabilities representing real-world devices in the virtual world and allowing for interactive controls. This makes Metaverse a more realistic replica of the real world.

The Metaverse is growing day by day and has paved the way for other platforms to shine in the sector:

• Gaming industry: Metaverse is a true blue multiplayer real-time gaming environment providing a real-time highly interactive 3D gaming experience with several concurrent tournaments happening at the same time live streamed to all Metaverse citizens
• Marketing/advertiser Industry: This is the perfect universe to find all the target demography and deliver hyper-targeted content (notwithstanding the 3rd party cookie deprecation and the emergence of alternatives to contextualise)
• For a content developer or a studio, it is a perfect place to set up a theatre and delivers just in time high-quality content experience to the citizens
• From an education domain standpoint,it is a perfect place not only to deliver education but also to conduct simulated experience
• Infrastructure/manufacturing industry: Metaverse is a perfect parallel universe to expand the digital twin experience. It is crucial from Banking and Finance domain standpoint to create Digital Currency exchanges, trade, and compensate in digital currencies

Metaverse is promising to be the perfect storm scenario where all forces are converging to not only define what it means but are also investing and stealing a lion’s share of it. In today’s time, everyone wants a piece of Metaverse and doesn’t want to miss the bus unlike the earlier transformations - be it digital content / OTT, industry 4.0, electric autonomous connected cars, or app-based service business models.

What, according to you, are the challenges and opportunities with metaverse?

When the world imaginesthe Metaverse to be a parallel universe, the business possibilities are immense. This isacross all industries like banking, retail, education, manufacturing, and many more. The trend will only be accelerated and driven by innovation from Silicon / Edge Device vendors around “Always On” such as smart speakers, smartphones, or home entertainment systems that have “always listening” voice command functions. The same is true for camera-based devices performing facial detection or gesture recognition, which are “always watching.” Moreover, health and fitness monitoring devices must be “always sensing.”

In banking, while there are strong trends emerging around digital currencies, NFTs, and blockchain, virtual retail banking will stand to be the biggest beneficiary of the Metaverse universe. The retail experience is set to be transformed with the concept of an ‘infinite aisle’ in the Metaverse universe. A retail store in the Metaverse will easily transcend the limitations of a 2D search-driven online experience to an “In Store” experience with real-world assistance from store reps and try-and-buymodels. Further, it is all set to maximize customer experience and minimize the cost of store setup and customer access improving profitability and customer stickiness. Consumers, basis their preferences will be guided through a very personalized aisle which maximizes relevance and improves revenue per consumer.

The power of Metaverse can truly be seen in highly personalized education delivery across the globe instantly expanding the addressable market. Several premiainstitutes with a brand and a reach to expand will no longer face physical boundaries & barriers in expanding their offerings to a global student ecosystem. Clubbed with powerful 3D simulations, a very intense experiential and powerful learning platform will only deliver highly informed and competitive studentsin normalizing the talent differential across the world. This will result in true globalization of the talent market in yielding similar quality of talent across the globe.

In today’s time, business scope with Metaverse expands with global reach, expansion in addressable market opportunity, personalized immersive consumer experience driven by data, and a true convergence of the real and digital world enabling real-worldfulfillmentthrough digital engagement.

How increased use of technology is enabling rapid adoption of the metaverse?

Metaverse experience is dependent on the power of the edge as much as the cloud. While the cloud will continue to provide complex enterprise functionalities like catalog management, service rendering, charging & commerce, authentication, and securities-based offering. Itis the edge that will make the customer experience powerful–be it the keyless edge driven by AR/VR, voice and haptics, or the key-based edge like mobile and browser. The 3D experience at the front end will be defined by the power of the edge-driven GPU and the cloud that will provide the powerful backend for all data-driven personalization and business fulfillment functionalities.

While the above are domain-specific scenarios as seen by industries & consumers, the technology ecosystem has a larger role to play. While consumer electronic companies are looking to innovate newer engagement gadgets with amazing AR/VR capabilities and full body haptics to provide a real-timefeedback-basedexperience (do not think of these as mobile or console-only engagements). Silicon vendors are gearing up with some amazing computing capability through GPU solving complex 3D rendering problems to massive edge-based data challenges. Technologies like Web 3.0 (Decentralised web), Blockchain,etc. are extremely critical inbuilding the whole ecosystem based on trust and security.

We at GlobalLogic are looking at this evolving phenomenon as an integrated ecosystem challenge to be solved with an end-to-end view. We are focusing on enabling industry-specific scenarios – be it education, manufacturing, digital twins, content delivery, advertisers, or digital exchanges. Moreover, the open-source community is responding to this phenomenon with several interesting platforms which will enable enterprises to set up their own private universe. We are focusing on developing expertise in such platforms where we can help our customers to experiment and engage with their employees through their own branded universe. Our focus is across experience, content, data, and devices delivering an end-to-end view to our customers.

What is GlobalLogic doing in Metaverse? How is metaverse transforming customer experiences across industries?

The Metaverse ecosystem is a world of opportunity for platform engineering and consulting partners like GlobalLogic. While there is a lot of focus on user experience, the real question is how we can make Metaverse business relevant, deliver business growth,and elevatethe customer experience.

GlobalLogic takes an end-to-end view in answering the above question –

• What is the actual business scenario that is being addressed
• What actual edge silicon strategy needs to be implemented starting from AR/VR devices to web 3.0 to a smart front-end strategy
• How should the user experience be designed crossing the boundaries and limitations of the keyboard, extending into the world of voice and haptics
• How should the security of such a platform be managed and governed
• What type of data farm needs to be set up to deliver highly efficient streaming analytics and privacy-aware models that will deliver a hyper-target experience
• How do the companies integrate this ecosystem with existing and legacy platforms of enterprises that completes the fulfillment part and hence delivers a complete customer lifecycle

All the aforementioned requires an integrated Metaverse strategy from business consulting, experience design, edge/device strategy, platform/cloud strategy, enterprise data blueprint, and security & privacy management strategy to an enterprise integration strategy delivering a complete business outcome.GlobalLogic’s specialized Metaverse team encompassing architects and specialists from all these streams delivers an end-to-end solution-driven approach to customers rather than just focusingon forming communities.

What is the role PES companies play in enabling the metaverse? 

Metaverse is a 5C ecosystem that plays from chip to connectivity,cloud to the consumer, andconsumer to commerce. When we look at Metaverse as a social collaboration platform, the application and outcomes are extremely limited. Moreover, when we look at it as a parallel universe, the application instantly expands to replicating all business models that apply to the real-world universe with exploding business potential and possibilities.

Platform engineering services companies who approach this opportunity comprehensively across the Device, Design, and Data landscape have a phenomenal potential to not only enable legacy enterprises but to launch greenfield enterprises and business models.For the first time, we have a universe offering enhanced real-world experience with hyper-personalizeddata-driven interaction possibilities. As a platform engineering service provider, PES companies can provide end-to-end services from business model consulting to architectural blueprint to silicon/edge design and development to cloud services to integration to an end-to-end data platform.

What will be the Future of the Metaverse?

Metaverse will be successful in creating alternate business models across all industry verticals, providing a realistic experience in the virtual world. Metaverse coupled with a smart edge, haptic sensory devices,and a think bandwidth pipe will take the digital transformation to its next level, delivering a true 3D experience to enterprises and customers. GlobalLogic is focused on making metaverse successful with an end-to-end implementation for enterprises rather than letting metaverse be a collaboration and social engagement platform.