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CXO of the Week: Vikram Labhe, Vice President & Managing Director, Fivetran India

In a recent chat with Vikram Labhe, Vice President & Managing Director, Fivetran India,  wherein he walks us through his entrepreneurial journey.

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Manisha Sharma
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Vikram Labhe

Fivetran is a modern data integration company with a mission to make access to data simple and reliable. Enterprises today require access to data from numerous software as a service (SaaS) models and on-prem data sources. It delivers ready-to-use connectors that automatically adapt as schemas and APIs change, ensuring consistent, reliable access to data and improves the accuracy of data-driven decisions by continuously synchronizing data from source applications to any destination, allowing analysts to work with the freshest possible data.

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Vikram Labhe is a technologist, entrepreneur and investor, he completed his M.S (VLSI) from Simon Fraser University, Canada and EGMP from IIM Bangalore and possesses 25+ years of IT industry experience spanning across Canada & India and across several MNCs and Startups.

In a recent chat with Vikram Labhe, Vice President & Managing Director, Fivetran India,  wherein he talks about his entrepreneurial journey, the unique aspects of Fivetran’s deliverables, and the company’s latest endeavors.

Kindly brief us about the company?

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Fivetran is a modern data integration company with a mission to make access to data simple and reliable. Enterprises today require access to data from numerous software as a service (SaaS) models and on-prem data sources. Fivetran provides cloud data integration services for enterprises to manage data pipelines. This helps them centralise and transform data from these platforms into high-performance cloud destinations and expedite data analysis for critical business decisions.

How did the company come about?

A decade ago, our founders George Fraser and Taylor Brown realised that traditional ETL solutions were inadequate for enterprises using cloud-based software and storage. The complicated nature of configurations with traditional ETL led to difficulties in harnessing timely insights, leading to projects often stalling before take-off. To address these problems enterprises needed to reduce complexity by streamlining and accelerating analytics to effectively execute their projects.

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Therefore, in 2013, our founders established Fivetran and developed fully automated and zero maintenance data pipelines – also known as connectors – to route raw data from source applications to a destination. This helps centralise data from these applications on a single platform for analysis and improve the accuracy of data-driven decision making. The ethos that has since driven George and Taylor to build and grow the company is to make data access as simple and reliable as electricity.

Tell us about the Fivetran’s business model?

Fivetran offers a SaaS-based, fully managed data pipeline as a service. With Fivetran’s 14-day free trial, customers can set up reliable, secure pipelines within minutes and experience automated integrations and transformations before purchasing online or with our sales team. Fivetran’s pricing is consumption-based, so customers only pay for what they use and they get 14 days of free usage for any new source they connect. Fivetran’s pipeline uptime is 99.9%, which we guarantee for higher tier customers.

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What sets you apart from your competitors?

Over the years we have spent considerable time and resources to enhance every aspect of our products and solutions and I’m happy to say that we have consistently delivered state-of-the-art automation that brings to the table reliability and security to our customers. Fivetran’s pre-built and pre-configured data connectors are easily adaptable to changes to schemas such as adding or removing columns or new tables, and adjustments to data element’s types. Our connectors can support more than 180 data sources including databases, cloud services and applications, with the ability to manage the normalisation of data and create ready-to-query data assets for enterprises. The connectors are also built to be fault-tolerant and equipped with auto-recovery functions in case of failure.

What is the most recent advancement in your product and solution and which of those performed well last year?

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We’re proud to announce our improved database replication functionalities, with the core focus on supporting a broader range of use cases. Performance for increased throughput has been an ongoing focus for every database type, but we’ve also begun to incorporate our recently acquired HVR technology in the form of agent-based connectors, along with the former acquisition of Teleport into our log-free database replication update methods. As a result of this, we’ve seen an increase of thousands of additional database connectors added by hundreds of more customers, to support their analytics and operations needs.

In the new normal, which solution or product will be the game changer?

We believe that the following solutions will become game changers for modern enterprises committed to turning data into insights to improve business operations and decision making:

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Finance analytics for enterprises to initiate transformation of finance and accounting reporting, reducing labour intensive processes that can be prone to error and discrepancies.

Marketing analytics to aggregate a vast array of data from platforms such as social media and provide marketing teams instant access to actionable insights to take campaigns to a higher level.

e-Commerce analytics to centralise all e-commerce data for deep insights to analyse sales operations, customer conversion, customer health and forecasting.

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Growth priorities for 2022 and beyond in India

Since Fivetran was established in India in 2017, we have made great strides. From just having a core-engineering team for several years, we officially launched our product offerings in India in January 2021. Within a year, we doubled our customers, grew ninefold and achieved USD 1 million in annual recurring revenue. Guided by our mission to make access to data as simple and reliable as electricity, we are now offering more than 180 connectors that centralise data from numerous sources into data warehouses.

We have also launched a new AWS data centre in India to simplify and provide reliable data access for enterprises across the country. Furthermore, the acquisition of HVR helps us provide our customers with a broader range of high-performing data solutions. With our comprehensive product footprint, we are fully equipped to serve India’s enterprises of all sizes that require powerful automated connectors for data centralisation.

India continues to operate the largest development centre for the company, and the engineering team is set to grow by 50% in 2022. In addition, we have launched global support from India in 2022, and our customer support team is on its way to grow many fold over the next couple of years. Quality and a few other functions are in their infancy stage in India, and will grow over the next few years as we continue to expand. Fivetran will continue to tap into the deep technology talent pool in India to scale its operations.

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