SPECIAL FOCUS

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

TO BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION

The digital transformation journey of Al Masah Capital resulted in not just centralizing IT across all its verticals but invest in IT to be a profit center sector. Ashith Piriyattiath, Group CIO of Al Masah Capital and CEO of Guardian One Technologies gives us an insight on the journey.

— By Arya Devi

Al Masah Capital is one of the leading independent advisory and asset management firms in GCC. It provides an array of investment offerings and advisory solutions tailored to the needs of client. The company is an alternative asset management firm (Private Equity, Hedge Funds, Real Estate) incorporated in the Cayman Islands, headquartered in Dubai and focusing on investments in the MENASA region. Being a customer, Al Masah has seen the need for a special focus Vendor or an SI and has moved on to be a solution provider under the brand, Guardian One Technologies. Ashith Piriyattiath, joined Al Masah Capital as the group head of IT in January 2016 but is now the Group CIO of Al Masah Capital and CEO of Guardian One Technologies.

During the time Mr Piriyattiath joined Al Masah, it had around four different revenue verticals, which were private equity, asset management, corporate advisory and real estate. Being venture capitalist, the investments were further invested in their own private equity companies. Under private equity there was healthcare (Avivo Healthcare), logistics (Gulf Pinnacle Logistics), education (Al Najah education), F&B division (Diamond Lifestyle) and BFSI.

The company had over 50 hospitals and clinics under Avivo healthcare and in and around 50 educational institutions under Al Najah education. The Johnny Rockets burger chain belonged to the F&B chain named Diamond Lifestyle. The Gulf Pinnacle Logistics comprises of 2 logistics company, 1 courier company and 1 school transport division. There were also multiple BFSI companies as well including Al Masah Capital, Al Masah Capital Management Limited, Future Capital, Allied Investments Private Limited etc. Even with so

Ashith Piriyattiath Group CIO, Al Masah Capital & CEO, Guardian One Technologies

many sectors and companies, the IT was not centralized.

“The time I joined IT, it was completely deshuffled and there was no structure. I have asked the management to consider centralizing IT across the verticals. But, being into private equity, the board has declined my suggestion,” said Ashith Piriyattiath.

“Whenever entities are matured, we exit from it. Either we will put it in stock exchange or we will sell it to some other party, so that our investors will be getting more revenue out of it. That is the business model. The boards said it is not wise idea to go for a centralized IT because whenever we are exiting from this private equity segment, whatever arrangements we have done maybe overheard,” added Mr Piriyattiath.

Later the IT was centralized segment wise. For example, healthcare had its own IT division, so did education, logistics etc. and all the heads of IT were reporting to Mr Piriyattiath. As part of digital transformation journey, Al Masah migrated to IBM cloud, did AI and Blockchain related projects etc. Later, the company realized the need to centralise IT be

cause of the expenses being spend on it. “By 2018, when we were looking at the commercials, we could identify that we were spending around $2.1 million for IT operations. Then I went back to the board saying that it is high time to centralize IT as we were spending this much amount in IT operation expense, excluding the capital expense,” said Mr Piriyattiath. “The board approved and asked to not just centralize but change IT to profit center. IT was a cost center before, as it was spending money. Then we decided to change IT as a profit center and has restructured the team completely. More skilled resources came in picture and the areas we were outsourcing to third party vendors were done in house,” he added.

The birth of Guardian One Technologies thus came into being. With further analysis, the team realized that the amount spend on IBM cloud was high. They further decided to have private and public datacenter as part of cost cutting in the long run.

“Guardian One Technology is currently having huge private datacenter in Singapore and we have our back office in India and head office based in Dubai, JLT. In back office team we

have Network Operation Center (NOC), Security Operation Center (SOC), Center of Excellence (COE) team, who are taking care of business application, digital innovations team, who are working on to the emerging technologies like Block chain, AI, RPA etc. We also have our help desk team in India,” he said.

In January 2019, Guardian One Technologies was registered in DMCC and started its cloud datacenter in Singapore in May 2019. The company also has a datacenter in JLT, Dubai as well because certain customers wishes to keep the data in country. Presently they are catering to 138 internal customers and have started extending support to external customers since July. The company has also reached its break even point.

The core services offered are cloud services (including private cloud environment, public cloud environment and cloud consultancy services) and security and forensics. “We do understand that the highest level of security is the Layer 7 security which is required for banks and financial organisations. We bought in a new concept called ‘SOC in a BOX’. The major feature in this is there is support 24*7*365, where we monitor the environment. It is a kind of a box concept where customers can decide what level of security or products is required. Then we will pack it in a box and deliver that services to the customers and there will be a monthly billing. Normally any security solutions will provide only threat detection and reporting, but we provide this and mitigation control, post internal analysis and the compliance and regulatory requirement. This is not delivered by any products in the region,” said Mr Piriyyattiath.

Mr Piriyattiath working in the customer side for over 19 years uses his knowledge to understand what a customer requires from a solution provider. This is how he came up with the products like ‘School 360’ and ‘Healthcare 360’. ‘School 360’ covers the on premise infrastructure, cloud infrastructure, disaster recovery and business continuity plan, school management system, e-learning system and all tablet based curriculum system. This is a bundled one stop solution for education sector. Similarly ‘Healthcare 360’ is a complete solution for healthcare sector. From a customer, they became a vendor or an SI who are managing internal and external customers. The CEO who understand the need of a customer with the knowledge of a customer CIO runs the business to be the best in the region.