As we celebrate our 4th anniversary, I want to express my heart-felt gratitude to all our customers who have guided, supported and shaped our journey.
Four years back, we had no customer case studies, no IP, no solutions of our own. We started our journey by building proof of concepts and paid pilots in the (SMAC) technologies. Customers were looking for a partner who was agile to do innovative projects in a short time-frame. Our initial buyer segment was CMOs, CIOs and the innovation groups within the enterprise who wanted to leverage SMAC technologies to enhance their customer loyalty, customer experience & improve business efficiency. We found ourselves co-creating various innovative solutions in these areas. For example, we helped one of the largest fortune 100 retailers to introduce digital signage, e-learning, store KPI and merchandising pick up as a part of their digital transformation journey. As SMAC technology wave picked up in the industry, our customers started inviting us to do advisory workshops – like doing a Mobility Roadmap workshop or a cloud assessment exercise for their leadership team. We earned our stripes as specialists in SMAC technologies.
As we deepened our knowledge in the SMAC space, there was an important learning for us: Transformation programs do not happen only at the periphery, they need to be deep rooted into the business and need to be backed by solid business outcome. Digital Transformation in an organization does not happen simply by mobile enabling an existing app or building a social app or taking the customer IT landscape to AWS or Azure. An organization-wide digital transformation can happen only when it is led by an organization’s digital vision, which encompasses business process changes, and sometimes disrupted by the revenue earning model. From an IT perspective, it invariably involves touching the middleware and back-end core systems. Being experts in SMAC technologies was not good enough. Clearly, Customers were seeking more platformized and productized digital solutions, which encompassed SMAC, middleware and back-end technologies. They want solution ideas which will enable a business outcome – be it heightened customer experience leading to larger wallet share & loyalty or a smart back office which increases business efficiency to improve profitability. The conversations moved from SMAC skills to business outcomes of digital solutions. Our customers in the Fortune 500 category continue to demand capabilities in the middleware, integration, CRM & BPM space. However, the discussions have moved from BPM to Smarter Processes & IOT (Internet of Things) integration, from Middleware to Microservices and API Economy, from CRM to Customer Journey & Personalization. Our customers in the mid-size segment want us to be the one-stop shop for their digital business solutions. Thanks to the guidance we received based on customer priorities, our strategy got refined further: today we have defined service offerings for the IT Buyer and business outcome based digital solutions for the business buyer, across customer segments.
As I reminisce our last four years journey, I feel we are privileged to have got involved with various portfolios of enterprise applications. If I apply the Gartner framework of enterprise apps categories, we are actively engaged in all the three categories: Systems of Record, Systems of Differentiation, and Systems of Innovation. We are engaged in transforming invoicing systems, regulatory reporting systems, DW systems (Systems of record). We are actively building systems of differentiation for our retail and travel customers like assisted selling, improving in-store experience, building omni-channel apps etc. Finally, we are co-creating solutions with our customers in the innovation space like building customized personalization, recommendation engines and enabling innovative content monetization to name a few.
Today we have several cutting edge IP/solutions and platforms, a good number of very exciting and unique customer success stories (and increasing as I write this) which give us the foundation for our future growth. However, four years back, when we embarked our journey into SMAC, all we had was a vision, passion & a couple of ideas. We are grateful to our customers who have:
- Trusted us in our initial days, when we had no customer success stories
- Appreciated the value that we bring in and chose us as a digital transformation partner, when they had a choice to go with several big IT companies
- Invested along with us to co-create Innovative digital business solutions and platform which today is enabling them to disrupt their own business model
This post is to say a heart-felt ‘Thank you’ to all our customers & look forward to your continued support and encouragement in the coming years.
Dattatri is a former Happiest Mind and this content was created and published during his tenure.
