"Indian cos not open to partner with analytics firms"

BANGALORE, INDIA: With a number of startups that has sprung in the recent past, it has undoubtedly made the market more competitive and speculative on what new disruptive trends and new paradigms are taking over the scenario.

Ma Foi, a startup in analytics differentiates itself in the clutter through service experience and standards of delivery in client engagements.

Satyakam Mohanty, CEO, Ma Foi Analytics, explains how the Indian market is catching up with the trend of analytics and how the company intends to grow overcoming the challenges.

CIOL: What are the challenges that you are facing in the Indian market?

Satyakam Mohanty: Among many we believe that lack of data collection capabilities and inertia to change internal IT structure for enabling data collection are the most significant challenges in developing an analytics practice. Although many industries have realized the importance of implementing analytics, yet that realization has not been pervasive and internal analytics teams have faced challenges in finding internal consumers or champions of analytics.

If we look at Indian market these hurdles are even graver and companies have not been open to partner with specialized analytics firms. As a way forward, companies have to revamp their IT infrastructure which would enable seamless data capture and thus provide scope for analytics. Moreover, we believe that developing synergistic relationship with specialized analytics firm would help firms setup and embed analytics within existing processes faster and achieve buy-in from organizational leadership and internal stakeholders.

CIOL: In the next few years, what are the growth prospects of your company?

SM: When we had set out 32 months ago, we had bet on certain long term trends like increased usage of Big Data, IoT, real-time technology analytics. As anyone can see, all of these trends are panning out which therefore puts us in a very strong place to take advantage of market opportunities having become an early leader in these in India.

The first company to have patented a Big Data Analytics platform in India, and also the first to integrate IoT into platform based analytics means that our solutions are not only future ready but are actually guiding the future of analytics in India. Our SAAS solutions sitting on top of our Big Data platform debuted this year with great success in the retail sector. Watch this space to see where we go!

CIOL: Which sector in India, is more upbeat about analytics?

SM: Analytics usage is going to increase for both early adopters such as BFSI, E commerce and the emerging industries. Among the emerging industries we see tremendous enthusiasm from retail and process manufacturing whereas industries such public sector units which we believe are going to be most benefited by analytics implementation in decision making have been comparatively slow.

CIOL: Are SMBs keen to adapt the technology??

SM: There is no doubt that SMBs’, who were once apprehensive of technology solutions now look at technology as a business enabler. New-age SMBs are now demanding more advanced technologies and with their adoption of cloud, mobile, social and analytics, they strive for both growth and agility. They are already utilizing the faster, cheaper and less risky cloud based infrastructure for IT operations and are taking a more data-driven approach to running their businesses.

CIOL: With IoT taking over, potential of analytics is humungous. Will it revolutionize business models altogether?

SM: We strongly believe that IoT and analytics would have a symbiotic relationship. With continuously increasing use of IoT devices there is huge magnitude of data that is getting generated and analytics industry breathes on data. Moreover, if we look at the analytics industry, it is moving towards automation and machine driven algorithms. Now with IoT generating reams of data, the bigger ask is how do you metabolize these data and feed into a machine learning interface which brings out insights and recommendation from mundane activities of you customers. The real differentiator would be the ability to substitute largely inefficient and piece meal human elements in the process with automated tasks and sub-processes based on triggers from IoT sensors. Thus, we strongly believe that analytics would definitely aid IoT to become more decisive and directional to their customer.

If we look around, most consumer facing brands which are developing IoT devices are focusing on making these devices more intelligent for the user. This phenomenon is revolutionary for the analytics industry as analytics would no longer be bound to organizational decision making but lead to democratization of analytics usage for individual decision making.