Digital First Magazine – January 2021 – India Edition – 21 Indian Technopreneurs to Watch Out for in by Connecta Innovation

INDIA EDITION

www.digitalfirstmagazine.com

First Stop for Digital, Technology and Business Insights

Raj N, Zaggle

Kyle Fernandes, Meme Chat

Arnab Mitra, DigiBoxx

Satish Kannan, MediBuddy

Harsh Pokharna, OkCredit

Nikhil Mahadeshwar, Skynet Softtech

Nikhil Joshi, Digital Jalebi

Prem Kumar, SnapBizz

INDIAN

TECHNOPRENEURS TO WATCH-OUT FOR IN 2021

Rajat Singhania, SocioRAC

JANUARY 2021

Sandeep Kumar, LingerTech

Sadiya Khan, Akund Communications

Sudhir Kothari, Embee Software Pvt Ltd

Shivjeet Ghatge, StepSetGo

Thirukumaran Nagarajan, Ninjacart

Srinivas Chitturi, MTAP Technologies

Venkatesh Rao, Xfurbish

Digital First Magazine January 2021

www.digitalfirstmagazine.com

January 2021

Vol - 2 Issue - 1

Technopreneurs to watch-out (India Edition) Editor in Chief

Dr. Manoj Varghese

Managing Editor Sarath Shyam

Consultant Editors

Dr. Johny Andrews Anjana K Shyam S

Navya Venkatesh Stanly Lui Emma James

Editorial Enquiry: admin@digitalfirstmagazine.com

Art and Design Ajay K Das Manjunath R

Sales & Marketing

Jyoti Kumari Nikhil V A

Arati Waghmare Hanna George

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Dubai Focus Innovation Technologies FZE P.O. Box 48299, Dubai Silicon Oasis Dubai, UAE Bangalore Connecta Innovation Pvt. Ltd. Carlton Towers, Old Airport Road, Bangalore - 560008 India Digital First Magazine is a digital magazine published by Connecta Innovation Private Limited. All rights reserved. The opinions expressed in the content are those of the authors. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Connecta Innovation Private Limited or any of its members or associates. The publisher does not assume any responsibility for the advertisements and all representation of warranties made in such advertisements are those of the advertisers and not of the publisher. Digital First trademark is owned by DFG Digital First Infotech Pvt Ltd. and Connecta Innovation Pvt Ltd. has permission to use Digital First brand name. Digital First Magazine is a Free Subscription digital magazine strictly not for sale and has to be strictly for internal private use only. Publisher does not assume any responsibility arising out of anyone printing copy of this digital magazine in any format and in any country and all matters related to that.

EDITOR’S NOTE

Who is a Technopreneur?

t the beginning of 20th century, an Australia economist and academician named Joseph Schumpeter coined the term ‘entrepreneurship.’ He defined it as an idea of “creative destruction” that can be a driving force of modern economic progress. For Schumpeter, entrepreneurship was much more than just starting any new business. He said, “to be entrepreneurial is to make a conception and put it into effect, despite any possible opposition.” Ultimately, a successful entrepreneur is someone who can make revolutionary changes in business methods and practices, including the launching of outstanding new products, production techniques, and organizational approaches. However, the word technopreneur does not have a 100-years-old history to tell. It appeared somewhere in the middle of 1980s and became popular in the 21stcentury due to the internet’s wide use. Thanks to Steve

Jobs of Apple Inc., Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Google, Bill Gates of Microsoft, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and other well-known technopreneurs out there. Now, the community of entrepreneurs involved with high technology does not need any introduction. They are indeed driving the economy by creating products or solutions that use the heft and technology capability to change the way something was traditionally done. Digital First Magazine’s January 2021 issue celebrates the success of Indian technopreneurs who have been revamping business models, restructuring safety protocols, and developing comprehensive digital presences to navigate the challenges created by the COVID-19 pandemic. We have listed ‘21 Indian Technopreneurs to Watch-out for in 2021’ and written their stories to inspire those who wish to change the world with innovation and technology. Enjoy Reading.

Sarath Shyam

Digital First Magazine January 2021

ADVISORY BOARD

Dr. Kuldeep Nagi, Ph.D, MBA, BSc. Program Director of Ph.D, Recipient of Fulbright Fellowship Award & Dan Evans Award for Excellence and Writer columnist.

Mr. Amulya Sah, PGD PM & IR, PG Diploma in PM&IR (XISS Ranchi) Senior Director HR. Former Head HR group Samsung R&D Institute India,Transformative HR Leader, Change agent, Digitization facilitator, Engagement architect, Trainer and Diversity champion.

Digital First Magazine January 2021

Dr. Varughese K.John, PhD, MBA, MPhil, MCom, LLB. Program Director, MS in Management Program, GSATM - AU

Dr. Ajay Shukla, Ph.D, MBA, BE. Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Higher Education UAE

Mamta Thakur Former CEO (ASEAN), Arc Skills

Mr. Sreedhar Bevara, MBA, B.Com Senior General Manager: Panasonic Middle East & Africa, Thought Leader, Speaker & Author of ‘Moment of Signal’ (Amazon’s International Bestseller)

Digital First Magazine January 2021

CONTENTS 16

Arnab Mitra, Founder & Ceo, Digiboxx

Making Digital Adoption in India Easy!

Harsh Pokarna, Co-founder & CEO, OkCredit

Kyle Fernandes, CEO & Co-founder, MemeChat

Nikhil Joshi, Co-founder, Digital Jalebi

Nikhil Mahadeshwar, Co-Founder & Director, Skynet Softtech Pvt. Ltd.

Offering Customized New Media Experiences

Raj N, Founder & Chairman, Zaggle

Rajat Singhania, Founder & CEO, SocioRAC â&#x20AC;&#x201C; HyLyt

Digital First Magazine January 2021

Onward and Upward with Empathy and Humility

Shielding you from the Dark Side of the Internet

Prem Kumar, Founder & CEO, Snapbizz

Unravelling the True Potential of Digital India

Developing A MoneyMaking Machine for Kirana Stores

The Odd One Out Setting Unprecedented Milestones in the FinTech Industry

HyLyting Constructive Information for a Productive Workforce

The Upcoming Paragon of Neoteric Digital Marketing Solutions

Using Tech Innovation to Make Hospitality Industry Future Ready

Sadiya Khan, Founder, Akund Communications

Sandeep Kumar, Founder, LingerTech

Facilitating Rural India Enjoy the Wealth of Health

Satish Kannan, Co-Founder & CEO, MediBuddy

102

Rewarding People to Take a Step Towards Fitness

Finding Innovative Solutions in the Transport Automation & Optimization Space

108

Removing the obstacles between Farmers and Consumers through Technology

The Engineer Encouraging IT Companies Go Green

Srinivas Chitturi, Co-Founder & CEO, MTAP Technologies

120

Owning the Digital Transformation Chrysalis

124

Shivjeet Ghatge, CEO & Co-Founder, StepSetGo

Sudhir Kothari, Founder & CEO, Embee Software Pvt Ltd

Thirukumaran Nagarajan, Co-founder & CEO, Ninjacart

136

Venkatesh Rao, Founder & Managing Director, Xfurbish

Digital First Magazine January 2021

CONTENTS IN MY VIEW

Why Digital India is Vulnerable to New Age Cyber Attacks Sandeep Kamble, Founder & CTO- SecureLayer7

EXPERT OPINION

56 Tech Trends to Watch Out for in 2021 Rahul Goyal and Rohan Shah, Founders, Realatte

74 Companies Need to Develop an Invisible Sense of Unknown Cyber Threats Jaydeep Ruparelia, Co-founder, Infopercept Consulting Pvt. Ltd.

114

2021 Predictions: Mobile is the Future of TV April Tayson, Regional VP INSEA, Adjust

140

How the ‘New Normal’ will impact Industrial Parks across India

Integrated Campaigns: How to Create O2O (offline to online) Experiences

Prakash Patel, Founder & Managing Director, Bhumi World

Rohit Sakunia, Co-Founder & CBO, Art-E Mediatech

LEADER’S INSIGHTS

38 The Significance of Product Engineering Services in the Constantly Evolving HighEnd Tech Environment Bala Mageswaran, Chief Product Officer, Goavega Software

Digital First Magazine January 2021

52 Broadband as a Critical Resource in India: What Might the Indian Networking Industry Learn from the Pandemic Pravin S Bhandarkar, Founder & CEO, RtBrick

98 TRENDS IN ADVERTISING FOR THE YEAR 2021 Arun Fernandes, CEO, Hotstuff Media Group

130 How India Based MSP are Outperforming Global Competitors? Prateek Garg, CEO & Founder, Progressive Infotech

Digital First Magazine January 2021

DigitalFirst FirstMagazine Magazine 12 Digital January January2021 2021

he year 2020 has been an unexpected one, which brought difficulties and opportunities that weren’t imaginable. As this year ends, what we can do is HOPE -- hope for a better year, one that brings in good health. New technologies, evolving customer demands, and societal shifts are rapidly changing the business landscape. These factors paved the way for location-independent companies, niche markets, disruptive industries, as well as closely-knit global teams. Many people put entrepreneurship on a pedestal. As a result, people at a very young age are being encouraged to become entrepreneurs when they grow up. In the early days of the technology, IoT projects were only taken on by big companies (like Amazon) that had the time and resources to build systems from the ground up. But thanks to new tech and development platforms, IoT is now accessible to most business owners. Given the changing market and resources available to small businesses, the way business owners run their operations has changed. Many of them now deal directly with their customers and are less likely to be organized in the traditional sense. A lot of them are also outsourcing functions, so they don’t have as many middlemen. Building a business is not an easy task, especially after businesses worldwide took a hit in 2020. Despite that, many companies overcame the unfortunate pandemic by strategically planning ways and setting goals to stay on top of their game. With that in mind, Digital First Magazine presents “21 Technopreneurs to Watch Out for in 2021” to showcase their talent and their efforts in making revolutionizing the Indian Tech Industry Sector.

Digital DigitalFirst FirstMagazine Magazine January January2021 2021

Name

Designation

Company

Arnab Mitra

Founder & CEO

DigiBoxx

Charu Noheria

Co-founder & COO

Practically

Dr Vivek Bindra

Founder & CEO

Bada Business

Harsh Pokharna

Co-founder & CEO

OkCredit

Kyle Fernandes

Co-founder & CEO

Meme Chat

Mayank Tewari

Co-founder

Skeps

Nikhil Joshi

Co-founder

Digital Jalebi

Nikhil Mahadeshwar

Co-Founder & Director

Skynet Softtech Pvt. Ltd.

Piyush Pathak

Founder & CEO

CommerceUp

Prem Kumar

CEO & Founder

SnapBizz

Digital First Magazine January 2021

Name

Designation

Company

Raj N

Founder & Chairman

Zaggle

Rajat Singhania

Founder

SocioRAC

Sadiya Khan

Founder

Akund Communications

Sandeep Kumar

Founder

LingerTech

Satish Kannan

Co-founder & CEO

MediBuddy

Shivjeet Ghatge

Co-founder & CEO

StepSetGo

Srinivas Chitturi

Co-Founder & CEO

MTAP Technologies

Sudhir Kothari

Founder & CEO

Embee Software Pvt Ltd

Suman Gandham

Founder

Finin

Thirukumaran Nagarajan

Co-Founder & CEO

Ninjacart

Venkatesh Rao

Founder

Xfurbish

Digital First Magazine January 2021

ARNAB MITRA Founder & CEO, DigiBoxx

MAKING DIGITAL ADOPTION IN INDIA EASY!

ecessity being the mother of invention, the Covid-19 crisis has dramatically accelerated corporate digital transformation. As companies hurry to develop new digital capabilities to build resilience and retool for the post-pandemic world, keeping up with fast moving technology trends is critical. A human-centered approach to DAM configuration and deployment will make a huge difference in user adoption and, subsequently, business impact. The human-centered approach will help uncover the questions that you need to ask yourself to maximize the chances for your new DAM to become not just storage space but also an intuitive data management solution that people need in daily their working day. Another trend that is already gaining significance is the migration of enterprise systems from on-premise and co-location

Digital First Magazine January 2021

facilities. Public cloud-based implementations are now well understood, and many organizations are fine-tuning their implementations. As a strong believer of a solution-based approach in life, Arnab Mitra, CEO, DigiBoxx, was looking for a quick-fix and permanent solution at the same time for every problem, and which quite often translates to a technology-based solution. Arnab started working with some exciting individuals and organizations on machine learning in identifying patterns around COVID19 cases, related to user behaviours and possible predictive analytics that could potentially help various government organizations. However, the pandemic’s biggest bane was the non-availability of critical files all across, and that’s exactly where Digiboxx was born. “A tech solution whose need was felt the most. Digiboxx is a testimony of

WE WANTED TO PROVIDE A SIMPLE STORAGE SOLUTION THAT CAN BRING PEOPLE TOGETHER FROM ALL WALKS OF LIFE, REGARDLESS OF THEIR PROFESSIONAL OR PERSONAL NEEDS

Digital First Magazine January 2021

our commitment to make Indians go paperless; so that in the future if we are out, fighting a bigger menace, our critical & necessary files and documents are made available to us whenever we need it and at a cost, we can afford in our own terms”, adds Arnab.

unique to us is our pricing structure. We want people to feel that Indians can own a lot in very little. Our pricing point is a strategic call where we provide 100GB of storage at Rs.1 per day”, points out Arnab. An engineering grad who loved everything digital, Arnab has never considered How it all started himself a leader. He While working for one says, “My lessons have of the group companies, been extremely grounded Arnab and his team had throughout my life. My to go through the tedious parents, my elder sister, and process of digging up an more importantly, my teachers ARNAB MITRA old data that was lost in the have instilled a sense of rigour outdated data server, he realized in me that taught me that we need to there needs to be a simpler solution for work hard to make good things happen. this. Having a cloud service or private server setThis is something I firmly believe in and exercise up that can be used for data dump as data retrieval can till date”. turn into a nightmare, especially if we don’t know where they were kept and what file name they have been stored. Making India Digitally Competent “While we have enough storage options from the tech Having been in the digital business for over 15 years, giants for business as well as individual users, but there’s Arnab found it surprising that despite having 70 million a distinct lack of smart storage. There is no Digital Assets digital users, only a few petabytes of data have been Management service in India in a sense that can help you created over time. “We as Indians are late adopters manage your data and make the data work for you when to tech, we are still in the ‘catching up’ phase. With you need it and more importantly, the way you need it. DigiBoxx, we wanted to change that. We believe that That’s where the whole concept of DigiBoxx came in.”, there is a huge potential to understand what it means to says Arnab. be Indian tech adopters. When we use global platforms, DigiBoxx is a Digital Assets Management (DAM) 80% of the time, we don’t understand those products and platform that is completely new to the Indian Market. services. We perform only basic rudimentary actions. Before designing it, Arnab did a study across 20 cities in We wanted to simplify that and build something that the country and realized that Indians from certain social was much more Indian. We wanted to provide a simple strata don’t even care about storing their data. He wanted storage solution that can bring people together from all to start there and make them aware that storing your files walks of life, regardless of their professional or personal in a platform that follows the law of the land is a must in needs”, opines Arnab. the current geopolitical situation. Realizing almost 50% With a small team that has people from some great of the digital adopters are never going to speak English organizations like Oracle, IBM, and Alibaba, DigiBoxx and various pockets where regional language prevails, is a close knit group, that is running like a pack of wolves DigiBoxx was created to have 8 languages that can be knowing what they need to achieve. Oversubscribed by used to access their services. 15 times than what they predicted for 3 months, within 2 There are many complex actions that all public cloud days from their launch, DigiBoxx is all set to hit 1 million companies have set up because they did the research in paid users in the next 6 months. “As for the long-term their country. In order to tackle those issues, Arnab and goals, we plan to hire 5,000 engineers to cater to the 10 his team customized DigiBoxx to cater to the needs of million users we are looking to have as our users in the Indian and made it user friendly. “Another thing that is next three years”, concludes Arnab.

Digital First Magazine January 2021

HARSH POKARNA Co-founder & CEO, OkCredit

UNRAVELLING THE TRUE POTENTIAL OF DIGITAL INDIA

he ongoing digital transformation urged every business to get digitalized. Gone are the days of SMB’s avoiding digital mediums to handle and maintain the business transactions. Still, many less-savvy micro-merchants and shop owners follow traditional bookkeeping and struggle to settle their month-end credit balance. There are grocery stores that rely on maintaining separate Khata books for every customer and losing track of a few payments as the number of customers increases. To solve the problems encountered by the traditional bookkeeping method of all the small business owners, Harsh Pokarna, Co- Founder & CEO of OkCredit, and his two other friends Gaurav and Aditya, found the

Digital First Magazine January 2021

digital accounting app named OkCredit. “We aim to motivate the local merchants of the country to be technologically advanced by letting them manage all their monthly settlements of the customers and clients digitally,” says Harsh. He also adds, “Established in 2017; we have seen tremendous growth of our app. The installed audience base was skyrocketed to almost 250% from August 2019 to March 2020. As of now, we have over 5.5 million active users who recorded transactions worth $ 7.5 million in October, and it continues to grow at a good pace.” Graduated from IIT Kanpur in 2014, Harsh Pokarna started his career as an entrepreneur. He co-founded two other startups before OkCredit; one to update contact lists and another to

AT OKCREDIT, WE GIVE EVERY EMPLOYEE THEIR LEVEL OF OWNERSHIP AND FREEDOM TO MAKE BUSINESS DECISIONS, WHICH HELPED US BUILD THE MOST TRUSTED CULTURE IN THE ORGANIZATION

Digital First Magazine January 2021

HARSH POKARNA

plan events with the same team. Acknowledging the importance of adapting technology to SMB’s to manage their monthly ledgers, Harsh, Aditya, and Gaurav came up with the idea of OkCredit. The intuitive mechanism, single click accessible, personalized log made the app a one-stop-shop solution for all the macro, micro-businesses to maintain and monitor their transaction records while identifying different customers’ credit dues. The First Steps As the CEO and Co-founder of OkCredit, Harsh sees the app as an agile solution that can penetrate small businesses’ digital transformation process. “The uniqueness of our products lies in its simplicity. It is easy to use, secure, and technologically advanced. The app runs on a basic smartphone and helps the business owners automate the entire process of the users’ mobile transactions with their clients”, says Harsh. The idea for OkCredit rang a bell in their minds when the team visited a local grocery store to settle their month-end credit balance in Bangalore. Harsh

Digital First Magazine January 2021

recounts, “We saw how hard it is for the store owner to record, track, and close all his regular customers’ credit transactions. Being profound entrepreneurs with ample of experience into technology, it is right at that moment we decided to simplify the process by developing the digital ledger app.” Talking about the team, Harsh says that “It’s just not us (co-founders) who made our app a success. We are lucky enough to be associated with some potential people who enabled us to acquire an active merchant scale by bringing an initial critical mass of SMBs. At OkCredit, we give every employee their level of ownership and freedom to make business decisions, which helped us builds the most trusted culture in the organization.” From being a small office at a small house in Koramangala, the app today emerged as a complete digital makeover to the traditional register book -’Bahi/Udhar Khata.’ It made the bookkeeping task simpler and useful for millions of small businesses. Apart from just tracking the credit transactions, the app also sends timely reminders to

the customers regarding the dues with an integrated reminder feature via WhatsApp and SMS.

FROM BEING A SMALL OFFICE AT A SMALL HOUSE IN KORAMANGALA, OKCREDIT TODAY EMERGED AS A COMPLETE DIGITAL MAKEOVER TO THE TRADITIONAL REGISTER BOOK - BAHI/UDHAR KHATA.’

Towards the Future “With the exponential increase in the smartphone users, towards the later part of 2020, we have seen a majority of small business owners’ pro-actively exploring internet-enabled, mobile-first alternatives. A vernacular, voice-first solution to ease out the data entry part would be key to building product solutions to penetrate the market segment starting 2021 fully,” says Harsh. He also adds, “As of now, our app covers 19,000 pin codes across India. We have decided to maximize our growth by reaching out to small businesses that are not aware of our products and services. We will also ramp up our efforts on OkShop and OkStaff, which will help our business users reap the benefits of digitization.” Through the workshop, merchants can display their products and offers to customers. Whereas OkStaff can be used for the staff and payroll management application for the relatively bigger SMB’s who have staff members running their business operations. The daunting COVID challenges of a CEO The attack of the dreadful coronavirus has brought much business to stand still. The pandemic significantly affected the small business owners. Due to the lockdown, many of them were forced to shut down the businesses. “During the lockdown, we noticed that merchants were not selling on credit due to the uncertainty of payment when compared to regular times. We saw a dip in our business. Post lockdown, gradually company started picking up. “The fear of getting out to buy daily essentials during pandemic has turned out to be an advantage to all the businesses who sell their products online. Our merchants started using apps like WhatsApp to sell their products by creating product catalogues that ease their consumers’ purchase. This way of offering has spiked customers’ interest to buy products promoting contactless transactions. With this flow, our user retention and revival post covid has been remarkable and completely organic. We have successfully surpassed the pre covid business “, exclaims Harsh. Harsh and his team are planning to expand the business to other regions of the country in the future. “The app is already available in thirteen regional languages; our recent voice note feature enhanced the usability of the app by allowing the shop owners to record their transactions. We have raised $67 million in Series B funding by Light Speed Ventures and Tiger Global that took our total to $83 million. We are soon planning to increase the digital awareness among the SMB’s which would drive loyalty and boost the revenue generated for our business”, concludes Harsh.

Digital First Magazine January 2021

IN MY

VIEW

Why Digital India is Vulnerable to New Age

Cyber Attacks Sandeep Kamble, Founder & CTO- SecureLayer7

ven as governments and economies are coming to terms with the new normal and gearing up for long term impact of the crisis, technology innovators have been working overtime to design solutions which could help retain operations and growth. Supported by government policies and innovations in emerging technologies like AI, ML, IoT etc., India has been steadily inching towards a technology enabled economy. However, with the rise of connected devices, efficient internet penetration, and widespread digitisation of multiple sectors, including education, finance, healthcare, retail, and even agriculture and logistics, comes the threat of cyber-attacks which can cause not only monetary losses but compromise data privacy and put the economy and lives in danger. As of the first quarter of 2020, India already recorded a 37% rise in cyber-attacks. Risks like data leakage, connection to unsecured Wi-Fi networks, phishing attacks, ransomware, spyware, apps with weak encryption (also known as broken cryptography) are some of the common

Digital First Magazine January 2021

Sandeep is a cybersecurity professional with 9+ years of experience bringing together the best security experts to simplify the complicated cybersecurity problem. As the Founder and CTO of SecureLayer7, from the beginning of 2013, Sandeep built its vision, strategy, and direction. As a bootstrapped startup, Sandeep has worked towards building a stable and reliable cybersecurity firm with remarkable growth.

Digital First Magazine January 2021

ABOUT SANDEEP KAMBLE

Sandeep is focused on leading, directing, and executing client-facing engagements that include SecureLayer7’s cybersecurity service offerings. Since SecureLayer7’s founding, Sandeep has created strategies that prioritise and focus on customers and employees. This has become the company’s key strategy, which has led to customer satisfaction reviews reflected in the NPS (Net Promoter Score) of 89%. Under Sandeep’s leadership, SecureLayer7 has successfully increased the delivering value to the customer, which resulted in the 180% growth in the business from the last four years. The company has earned some major accreditations such as CERT-In, ISO 27001. In 2019, Sandeep founded and introduced two products to the cybersecurity industry. The first one, BugDazz, a Pentest as a service and the second one, AuthSafe, for fighting with online frauds. Before founding SecureLayer7, Sandeep worked as an independent Bug-Bounty Hunter. He reported multiple vulnerabilities to Google, Facebook, Dropbox, Twitter, Paypal, and many others. Sandeep has completed a disruptive strategy course from Harvard Business School and holds an Engineering Degree in Information Technology from JNEC at Aurangabad, MH, India.

Digital First Magazine January 2021

Even as we are trying to deal with the threats, the type of cyberattacks are also evolving, creating a more complex and advance set of threats.

cyber threats plaguing us.Â IoT and connected devices have also reported increased cases of data breaches. Being the second largest consumer for smart devices and a country with one of the largest base of internet consumers, India continues to remain a sitting duck, vulnerable to several national and international cyber-attacks. Some of the key reasons for this vulnerability can be listed as: Outdated Systems and processes: While we do enjoy smart personal devices, a large part of corporate and business technology systems continue to depend on outdated or legacy infrastructure, with poor or inadequate cyber security protection. Accelerated digital adoption, over a short span of time: The wide spread digital adoption across public and private sectors, has left little or no time for the proper development of a backend cyber security infrastructure, putting a large amount of data at risk. Limited understanding about cyber security: The understanding of cyber security and its prevention continues to be limited to installation of antivirus and malware protection software on individual computers/ devices. Even as cyber-crimes are getting more and more sophisticated, the lack of understanding among the end user, continues to aid in successful cyberattack instances. Fragmented and Unorganised cyber security infrastructure: This is a largely unorganised and fragmented sector of cyber-security service providers and entrepreneurs. More so, the lack of stringent legal framework for identifying and taking cyber criminals to task, is hampered, for the lack of strong cyber security laws. Even as we are trying to deal with the threats, the type of cyber-attacks are also evolving, creating a more complex and advance set of threats. These include: Cloud Vulnerability: Even as an increasing number of businesses adopt cloud computing, data security concerns continue to rise. As per an Oracleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s cloud threat report 2019, cloud vulnerability continues to remain the highest cyber security challenge in the near future. While larger third party players like Amazon and Google are investing heavily on cloud security, smaller organisations and businesses that are using independent cloud services, are sceptical about investing in cloud security and thus remain vulnerable to threats like data breach, account hijacking, malicious internal threats, and even DDOS attacks.

Digital First Magazine January 2021

Social Engineering and phishing attacks: This implies manipulating and leading unsuspecting victims to perform actions or divulge information, without the knowledge of the consequences. Baiting, Scareware, Pretexting etc., are some of the most common forms of Social engineering attacks. Phishing continues to be one of the most wide spread form of social engineering attack that involves fraudulently obtaining sensitive data like card and bank details, personal information etc., which is then used to make fraudulent transactions. Rise of e-commerce has further increased instances of Social Engineering attacks and it is on a rise. Attacks using Emerging Technology: Machine Learning, AI, and connected devices use a large amount of crowd sourced data and information user information from social media and apps, like satisfaction ratings, brand preferences, spending patterns, browsing histories etc., making them a preferred target for cyber criminals. Machine learning poisoning, a method to inject instructions into a system to gain insights, information and even control the outcome, is one of the modern security breach methods targeting sophisticated systems. AI fuzzing, another tool primarily used to detect, identify and fix cyber-attack vulnerabilities in a system, can also be used by fraudsters to control and automate attacks. Data breaches, malware, and ransomware: While these are some of the most easily executed threats, they also continue to be the most common and widely used threats among cyber criminals. In the age of AI, ML, VR and connected devices, Data is the new currency. Data breaches thus remain the priority target for most fraudsters. Malware and ransomware have caused a lot of trouble recently when work from home had rendered official IT systems vulnerable due to access from unsecured home servers. Infecting a computer with a malware or ransomware which then encrypts and makes the data unavailable for the user until the ransom is paid, is nothing less than a bank heist! While each of the above pose a grave threat, an efficient and strategic cyber security infrastructure can help prevent these instances and save the government, businesses and individuals a lot of time, effort and

Digital First Magazine January 2021

The lack of stringent legal framework for identifying and taking cyber criminals to task, is hampered, for the lack of strong cyber security laws

money. By investing in a robust cybersecurity that offers end-to-end security ecosystem for individual device and network to reliable data back-ups, regular third party risk assessment, and strong multifactor authentication mechanism need to be put in place. On a mass level, the first step would be a strong legal framework for handling cyber-crime, followed by a wide spread awareness campaign about the significance of cyber security and why businesses need to take it seriously. Together, these unwarranted and fraudulent interferences can be handled, to make India a truly robust digital superpower.

Digital First Magazine Higher Education Digest January 2021 November 2020

KYLE FERNANDES CEO & Co-founder, MemeChat

ONWARD AND UPWARD WITH EMPATHY AND HUMILITY

aving found his passion to code while he was suspended from school, Kyle Fernandes, CEO and Co-founder, MemeChat built his first social network platform with his friend, Taaran Chanana (Co-founder of MemeChat) at the age of 15. Kyle and Taran met in DPS, Gurugram and continued their journey together in the same college, SRMIST (Sri Ramaswamy Memorial Institute of Science), Chennai. For Kyle, the road to becoming a successful entrepreneur started with sheer motivation and the wish to add a humour dose in everyone’s life. He was often told by his teachers that he was not good enough at Math and Science, but Kyle kept pushing on and continued to hone his skills via

Digital First Magazine January 2021

online courses. His dedication paved the way for him, and at an early age of 21, MemeChat was established and became one of the winners of AatmaNirbhar Bharat App Innovation Challenge in 2019. As technopreneurs, Kyle and Taaran faced their most significant hurdles in the initial days. “The biggest challenge we faced was in reaching out to others. I had the product, I had deployed it, but how do you reach out to others?” adds Kyle. Realising that marketing was one of the critical factors needed to make their app a success, Kyle and Taaran reached out to their peers in their social circle to get the word out, but in vain. “People of the same social circle tend to be more competitive,” says Kyle, so the duo then reached

I ALWAYS TELL THE TEAM TO NEVER EVER THINK THAT THEY ARE BETTER THAN OTHERS

Digital First Magazine January 2021

KYLE FERNANDES

out to strangers via social media to help them grow. They even reached out to investors hoping for funding, but at every juncture, they faced rejections. Finally, an idea sparked, and they decided to start small. This led to the creation of ‘Shit Indians Say’, a meme page in social media which soon became a massive hit with 250 million followers. “That’s when the brands started to come to us for marketing. The reason I made a meme page first was so that I could promote my products with free subscriptions,” explains Kyle. Currently, MemeChat offers its services to two different sections of the society. One, consumers, people who make, view and send memes. Second, businesses, companies who are trying to reach Gen Z’s and the millennials. “We are catering to a massive audience through

Digital First Magazine January 2021

our first service, and we have a direct route to reach companies, through the ways that we work, through memes, their promotion, getting memes across distribution channels on social media, and our own platform. We offer them good quality memes that are actually funny and relatable,” adds Kyle. Talking about the team’s milestones; Kyle says that the first milestone was when MemeChat hit 1 million subscribers and the second milestone was when the company secured funding from 500 Startups during their first round of funding. Since the whole essence of MemeChat is humour, Kyle believes that to be a part of MemeChat, one needs to love memes and be a memer. Following a collaborative approach, every member at MemeChat is involved in the business’s development and growth. Adding

SINCE THE WHOLE ESSENCE OF MEMECHAT IS HUMOUR, KYLE BELIEVES THAT TO BE A PART OF MEMECHAT, ONE NEEDS TO LOVE MEMES AND BE A MEMER

on about the work culture at MemeChat, Kyle said, “It’s not me who is responsible for inspiration and innovation. It comes organically through our discussions. Everybody is part of it, part of the innovation. This company also belongs to each of them. I just have to give them what is rightfully theirs, and it works out brilliantly.” For young Kyle, the constant doubt instilled in him by his teachers that he wasn’t good enough pushed him to practice selfeducation and helped him turn the cards in his favour. According to him, this journey taught him empathy and humility, and he works to incorporate the same values in the company. “Empathy is the core value of our company. They all have to be incentivised to do well within the company to know that they are a part of this company. That is the most important part, realising what they want and what users want. The second is humility. I always tell the team to never ever think that they are better than others,” he adds. Talking about the future of MemeChat and breakthrough technologies, Kyle said that the most exciting technology in their field is GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks), a machine learning technology for generating images. He believes that the same will be a gamechanger, which will help automatically make and edit memes. As for his future plans for MemeChat, Kyle said, “My short-term goal is to hit 2-3 million user and raise another round of funding after that. Then we will focus on new technology, magical technology, something that would attract a large following.” MemeChat has indeed garnered attention and popularity even amidst the pandemic. While most businesses were at the brim of failure due to COVID-19, MemeChat saw a jump in the user base. They were able to leverage the growth in digitisation due to the pandemic and experienced exponential growth .”Many brands in the digital space were looking to expand their marketing, which has been a big bonus for us. That said, we also work with some primarily offline brands. These companies did see a slump. But luckily, any decline in revenue from these clients was more than offset by digital-first companies,” concludes Kyle.

Digital First Magazine January 2021

NIKHIL JOSHI Co-founder, Digital Jalebi

OFFERING CUSTOMIZED NEW MEDIA EXPERIENCES

OVID-19 has generated unprecedented exigency responses from organizations and governments. Emergency response readiness has been stretched to limits. The Indian technology industry has mobilized exemplary BCP/DR resources to ensure continued business for critical client services worldwide. One of the biggest challenges that tech brands had to face during these trying times was completely changing their business to fit into this new-age of the pandemic that hit the world. Re-orienting their offerings and services to focus on delivering experiences over personalized devices, Digital Jalebi has aided in a massive shift towards the digital world, which is quite in contrast with how one

Digital First Magazine January 2021

has been using technology to engage users in commercial spaces. Digital Jalebi doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t sell products but provides engaging experiential communication channels for the brands and end customers they work with. The company offers customized services according to the brief of the clients and aim to create memorable and very powerful experiences for the end-users to achieve newage, experimental technologies, and new innovative design patterns, for the end-users to intuitively engage with the technology or with the idea, â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;What the brand was trying to sellâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. Initially started as a Design School, Nikhil Joshi, Founder, Digital Jalebi, saw a massive need for the company or a group of designers

THE VARIETY OF TALENT THAT WE HAVE IN OUR TEAM AND THE UNIQUENESS THAT WE HAVE IN OUR SERVICES PROVED OUT TO BE OUR BIGGEST STRENGTH

Digital First Magazine January 2021

to offer commercial services and experiential engagements and designs that were hardly there in 2012. The biggest challenge of starting a transdisciplinary team is to get many types of talents which starts from having an MBA, Architects, electronic Programmer, Computer science Programmers, graphic designers, multimedia artist and have all of them on board at the same time to be able to deliver projects. “In the initial stage of business, this was a huge challenge to have so many talents aligned to deliver smaller projects up. Over the years, that has become our strength. The variety of talent that we have in our team and the uniqueness that we have in our services proved out to be our biggest strength”, states Nikhil.

NIKHIL JOSHI

Digital First Magazine January 2021

A Designer turned Entrepreneur Holding a Bachelor’s Degree in Animation and Multimedia, Nikhil got great exposure in working with all sorts of multimedia in his early years. Spending several hours learning 2D/3D Animation Softwares and working with different types of interfaces piqued his interest in programming and become a game developer. After working in the Game Development domain, he moved down to study post-graduate in New Media Design at the National Institute of Design. “The most important learning is that it all lies in observation you have to keep observing things, most of the learning that happens in a design school is very objective, and 90% of the learning happens subjectively/subconsciously while you’re observing things around you. That’s where the true learning comes from, that’s where you constantly nurture yourself as a designer that’s the most important thing that you would want to have”, opines Nikhil. As an entrepreneur, Nikhil wanted to use new media technologies that are experimental and are very niche to help people communicate better to help brands to build a communication channel that is very innovative, engaging, and creates a higher recall value at first. “When we started, we thought that this entire moment of new media experiences would be attached to spaces like museums or experience centres which are owned by corporate’s, but over the years the entire idea of experiential engagements have been picked widely by the industry especially marketers who are trying to completely transform. User experience in spaces that are visited by a common man like railway station, airport, and malls have been the biggest

AS AN ENTREPRENEUR, NIKHIL WANTED TO USE NEW MEDIA TECHNOLOGIES THAT ARE EXPERIMENTAL AND ARE VERY NICHE TO HELP PEOPLE COMMUNICATE BETTER

NIKHIL JOSHI

turning point for our business which has helped us scale our services and offer them to every single common man you see out there”, opines Nikhil. Building Innovation through their Core Skills Primarily led by new media designers and computer science engineer, Nikhil considers himself very lucky to have found a core team that has good roots in technology as well as have an artistic bent towards design, who always want to explore and experiment with different media, not just in technology but with colours and paints as well. Allowing people to come up with their experiments and fuel more and more wild ideas, Nikhil says, “The resources that are available at our Studios allow our team members to learn various skill-sets like computer vision working with cameras, projections, electronics woodwork colours and that is one of the core things that allow all the team members to build a different kind of skill-set and when all of these come together, we can build very powerful and innovative creative ideas”.

Over the years, Digital Jalebi has been working to be focused on commercial projects. Apart from the turnover numbers, the very important milestone was to achieve stability in business in terms of revenues to support the internal research team. The team is just focused on researching new ideas and not directly attached to a commercial project that has deliverable timelines as a designer. “As an entrepreneur, I think that was one of the biggest achievements for Digital Jalebi to be able to support such a team because the core of our offering is to be able to experiment with things and have a dedicated team, it is a milestone for us”, point out Nikhil. Working for brands and building services and solutions for them, Digital Jalebi is trying to identify few key sectors where the intervention of augmented virtual reality experiences of fares are required, and we would want to create few products for them. Aiming to work around and revamp Digital Jalebi in providing a more holistic approach, Nikhil concludes, “I think the product is the solution where we give our ample amount of time and effort in building a product for a year and then slowly and gradually growing at over another couple of years so that it truly has a huge impact on the organization and that’s what our focus would be a starting 2021”.

Digital First Magazine January 2021

LEADER’S

INSIGHTS

The Significance of Product Engineering Services in the Constantly Evolving High-End Tech Environment Bala Mageswaran, Chief Product Officer, Goavega Software

ith the fast-paced digital adoption across sectors, which is further accelerated by the pandemic, Product Engineering has gained tremendous significance over the last few months. The term ‘product engineering’ refers to the holistic process of conceptualising, designing, developing, testing and deploying a software/ technology solution to generate maximum value for its consumers. From a business point of view, the two key reasons why product engineering has gained a lot of significance today are: 1. Fast-paced technology adoption across sectors: various sectors like Fin-tech and health-tech to manufacturing automation, logistics and warehousing, retail and even education, are looking for accelerated digital adoption, with customised solutions, so as to specifically address current challenges. This, in turn, is driving several IT solution providers to focus on innovative product engineering solutions that can help meet the growing demands of a dynamic market.

Digital First Magazine January 2021

Bala Mageswaran is an experienced software professional and product executive with twentyfive years of experience in envisioning, developing, and implementing real-time control and status solution for the transportation industry. Bala has hands-on experience in team development, product vision, execution, strong product culture, software design and development, systems integration, customer relationship management, sales enablement, cost estimation, negotiation, driving organic and inorganic top-line growth along with margin accretion with a global staff of multiple offices.

Digital First Magazine January 2021

2. Global, price-sensitive and highly competitive markets: With the volatile and price-sensitive markets, competition is another important factor driving brands to adopt superior and innovative product engineering, which can help them to not just deliver timely and efficient solutions but to also cut costs in the long run. How is product engineering helping its consumers? It helps by: 1. Constantly innovating to remain relevant: The new normal has driven brands across sectors to identify, innovate, and re-imagine solutions in order to stay relevant. And digital adoption through customised product engineering is at the core of creating a holistic, optimised business operation which can drive a business in times of dynamic volatility and yet remain relevant, visible, and effective. 2. Deliver reliable and smart technological solution: With the fast-paced business evolution in an increasingly competitive world, it is vital for brands to be able to deliver products and solutions that are not only cost-effective but also reliable and technologically superior. And holistic product engineering approach helps brands leverage this in the most customised and impactful manner. 3. Product/ solution optimisation: Optimisation is the keyword in today’s business processes, and in order to continue creating products and solutions which are superior and relevant, one needs to embrace the best of tech-enabled processes. Effective product engineering helps amplify a company’s core product and solution design by supporting it with smarter, tech-enabled processes, thereby creating a customer delight and loyalty. 4. Cost-effective and high quality: The role of technology adoption in creating cost-effectiveness is not unknown. Through customised and innovative product engineering, brands can leverage effective tech solutions to build superior and cost-effective products/ solutions which can help build a stronger brand reputation and customer acceptance. 5. Speedy and agile Operations: Driven by superior product engineering solutions can help drive operational efficiency, by creating processes that help speedy, agile and customised operations. This can become vital, especially during times like these, which demand more flexible and customised approach to operations, while maintaining the speed and quality of product and service offerings.

Digital First Magazine January 2021

6. Faster Reporting: Last but not least, effective product engineering helps amplify not only the speed, agility and cost optimisation of core operational processes, it also helps smarter data-driven analysis and can be leveraged for automated and faster reporting. This can go a long way in streamlining internal processes, optimising resources and ensuring a smooth and timely operational process.

Effective product engineering helps amplify a company’s core product and solution design by supporting it with smarter, techenabled processes, thereby creating a customer delight and loyalty

As we usher in the era of smart products and solutions, big data, IoT and AI-enabled connected devices, business process automation, and a global network of the connected work force, it is time we acknowledge and understand the potential of effective product engineering, which is at the core of the Business 4.0 revolution. India, with its vast IT domain expertise and product organisations, is already a leader in designing and implementing some of the most advanced product engineering solutions and its time this expertise is leveraged by not just the bigger Multi-national corporates’ but also the fast-evolving start-up and the Medium, Small and Micro Enterprises (MSME) ecosystem.

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Digital First Magazine January 2021

NIKHIL MAHADESHWAR Co-Founder & Chief Technology Officer, Skynet Softtech Pvt. Ltd.

SHIELDING YOU FROM THE DARK SIDE OF THE INTERNET

he pandemic has adversely affected the industries such as small-medium enterprises and big corporates. However, it has unleashed a new era of change for businesses as well. Few industries were not ready to accept Work from Home because they would have to share the data with their employees at their home premises. Some industries didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have the required setups, which is where the challenge began. They werenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t aware of the parameters and the access level that had to be given to the employees. Data leakage was a huge threat to them. The security of the reporting mechanism, attendance mechanism, and data mechanism was being questioned on whether the data was

Digital First Magazine January 2021

going through a secured tunnel or not. Things eventually began to change, and people who were unaware of remote connections were taken care of, and policies had to be revised. However, they have not adopted it and are sharing the data through it. Another challenge was that several cyber-crime cases took place during the pandemic. Offering a wide range of unique features, Skynet Softtech provides its users with AntiSpying and Anti-Hacking solutions, making them stand out from the rest of their competitors in the cybersecurity domain. While the others are majorly focusing on antivirus feature that detects malware and malicious attacks, Skynet Softtech is a complete security suite and a one-

WE KEEP SWAPPING THE TEAM ON DIFFERENT MODULES AND PROJECTS SO THAT EACH AND EVERY TEAM LEARNS NEW THINGS RELATED TO THE CYBERSECURITY DOMAIN

Digital First Magazine January 2021

NIKHIL MAHADESHWAR

stop solution to secure all the user’s cybersecurity needs. HackShield, Skynet’s product, covers all the needs of the user. Its features are listed by categories that take care of all the cybersecurity needs and protect the user by providing Wi-Fi Security, VPN, Password Manager, Spying, Hidden Applications, protecting the user from juice Jacking Attacks, Spying attacks and Phishing attacks, etc. “HackShield has been developed by analyzing the problems faced by the layman in today’s world. It is a solution for all types of personas. The user does not have to download a bundle of applications for securing their device as HackShield is the solution to all the problems”, adds Nikhil S Mahadeshwar, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, Skynet Softtech Pvt. Ltd. How a Researcher turned into an Entrepreneur Having done his certifications in EC Council as a Certified Security Analyst, Computer Hacking

Digital First Magazine January 2021

Forensic Investigation, and Threat Intelligence Analyst, Nikhil’s journey as an entrepreneur started as a researcher. He learned about writing virus codes and would visit interesting places where he would solve cases related to cyber-crime and cybersecurity, regardless of people paying him. “I was keen to gain experience and learn new things. So the intention was learning rather than earning. I discovered many cyber-crime security issues faced by people. I helped the people affected by ransom attacks, phishing attacks, network attacks, online reputation attacks, data breaches by giving appropriate solutions and raising awareness about VAPT services, preincident, and post-incident services. We also came up with a self-protector product wherein the people could install it and protect themselves from cyberattacks”, reminisces Nikhil. While investigating and working on a case study, Nikhil trained many organizations and law enforcement agencies and started a Cyber Secure India initiative. They trained students through

internship programs. That’s when Nikhil came up with a unique idea of analyzing layman’s issues by providing a one-stop to all the problems, i.e. Skynet Softtech Pvt. Ltd. “The whole idea behind it was to make the user-independent. With its constant research process, Skynet-Softtech Pvt Ltd focuses on finding solutions to multiple problems that are beneficial for the users using the app”, points out Nikhil.

OFFERING A WIDE RANGE OF UNIQUE FEATURES, SKYNET SOFTTECH PROVIDES ITS USERS WITH ANTISPYING AND ANTI-HACKING SOLUTIONS, MAKING THEM STAND OUT FROM THE REST OF THEIR COMPETITORS IN THE CYBERSECURITY DOMAIN

Making Internet Secure for all! The role played by the cybersecurity experts team was the most important one in developing the company. The company was co-founded by entrepreneurs Mr Nitish Desai and Mr Amey Amre and Nikhil in 2019 with a vision to make digital platforms a threat-free place. Helping many law enforcement agencies, NGOs, corporates, and small businesses solve several cases. It has been observed that every case that they worked with was either pre-incident or a post-incident case. Be it a government entity case or teenager selfie leakage case, every case comes with a problem statement. After noting the problem statement, there are many tasks and subtasks, and we allocate it to a team that doesn’t have experience related to the case so that we encourage them to learn something new. “We keep swapping the team on module projects so that each and every team learns new things related to the cybersecurity domain. For instance, a malware analyst will learn a VAPT when he’s allowed to work on VAPT, and the person who knows VAPT will learn malware analyzing case or digital forensic investigator case. Thus, we make sure that we give everybody opportunities in the team to grow and explore their knowledge in the sector, and that’s what keeps them motivated”, says Nikhil. IoT security, AI Security, and machine learning are trending, and people are really looking at a product that emphasizes ransomware attacks or phishing attacks. It is very helpful for organizations because the pandemic has affected everybody; be it a person working from home or a student learning from home using a device. A device also needs to have security, and that’s why people are exploring products that can secure their systems. End-user products and endpoint security are the products that are currently in demand. Having a range of end-user security and expanding to enterprise-level, Nikhil concludes, “we can look at computer solutions, end-user, and enterprise solutions in the future. We will soon be launching MDM Solutions, mobile device management that protects end-users to enterpriselevel mobile security. Furthermore, we are also launching cyber security-oriented services and are planning to target the UK and UAE, and the rest of the globe post that”.

Digital First Magazine January 2021

PREM KUMAR Founder & CEO, Snapbizz

DEVELOPING A MONEYMAKING MACHINE FOR KIRANA STORES

ndia has more than 12 million Kirana stores, forming nearly 90 per cent of its total trade. In contrast, the overall contribution of supermarkets and organised grocery stores remains a meagre 10 per cent. However, the emergence of e-commerce solutions and multinational online retail players, who offer various easy payment and delivery options, the next-door grocery stores have been on constant fear of running out business. “We have been pleasantly surprised with the resiliency with which Kirana store owners have stood up to the challenges over the years - with a smile! Just when the naysayers have sounded death knell

Digital First Magazine January 2021

for them – be it the onslaught of big-box players/ big supermarkets more than a decade back, be it the aggressive marketing play by e-commerce players in the grocery sector in the past few years or be it the current COVID-19 situation; they have constantly adapted to the changes, re-invented themselves with new practices and have come out from these situations stronger,” says Prem Kumar, Founder & CEO, Snapbizz. In 2020, when an entire nation’s movement was limited due to the spread of coronavirus, a population of 1.3 billion depended on Kirana stores for their essentials – food, beverages, personal and household care products. Prem

THE MOST ENRICHING PART OF MY JOURNEY WAS THE SOCIAL IMPACT THAT A SIMPLE TECHNOLOGY SOLUTION CAN HAVE ON THE STORE EMPLOYEESâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; LIVES

Digital First Magazine January 2021

Kumar adds, “We are now seeing the crucial role that Kirana stores have been playing in the Indian economy and servicing the needs of 1.3 Billion people. This was something which was understated over the years, but they are now finally being given the credit where it’s due.” Prem Kumar is an industry veteran with over 30+ years of experience in Retail, FMCG, Telecom, and Technology across developed markets like the US and Europe and emerging markets like India, Eastern Europe, China and Africa. In India, he has worked the length and breadth of the country in the FMCG industry and has held leadership roles in companies like Lakme Lever, Benckiser, and SC Johnson. The Birth of a Game-Changing Idea “In the early 2000s, while working in Eastern Europe, I had noticed the challenges that the FMCG retail there faced viz. the lack of integrated ecosystem and data. This drove me to build a company - CisLink to overcome these challenges,” shares Prem Kumar. CisLink, even today, continues to remain a market space in the space

Digital First Magazine January 2021

in Russia and Eastern Europe. However, the journey of SnapBizz started off with Qualcomm doing a pilot in India to take wireless technology into fragmented retail. “Given the success of the pilot, they did a global search for an entrepreneur who had the experience of building a company in the same space. Having understood my work with CisLink, they reached out to me. And that’s how SnapBizz was born with Qualcomm being our first investor,” recounts Prem Kumar. Headquartered in Bengaluru, SnapBizz provides new-age solutions to convert the neighbourhood Kirana stores into smart stores with a host of features to enable the store owner to leverage its current strengths to gain a competitive edge and increase store profitability. “The Kirana stores have an underlying competitive edge by their proximity, familiarity, personal connection with consumers, freshly stocked products and providing monthly credit to the consumers. But where they lack is on shopper experience and its inability to match offers like e-commerce and big-box players. Besides, they are not connected with the players within the

THE RETAILERS NOW VIEW SNAPBIZZ PRODUCTS AS A “MONEY-MAKING MACHINE” WHICH ENABLED THEM TO INCREASE BUSINESS BY 20%

FMCG ecosystem. They need a helping hand, particularly in the area of technology adoption for their business,” explains Prem Kumar. Providing technology solutions, SnapBizz positions its products for Kirana stores as a ‘money-making machine.’ The solution transforms the Kirana stores into a smart store. The key features to the retailers include an easy-to-use solution to manage and optimise store operations, take the store online with SnapOrder app, create virtual merchandising space with SnapVision and cloud-connect them to all the stakeholders of the ecosystem through SnapConnect and enabling them to get promotions/discounts from brands and suppliers. SnapBizz has achieved excellence in the product-market fit by customising its solutions depending on the type of Kirana stores and the size of its business. The company also helps Kirana stored to overcome key challenges such as management of peak hour traffic, billing both bar-coded and non-bar coded products and making it simple even for a store boy to learn and use quickly and independently. “The most enriching part of my journey was the social impact that a simple technology solution can have on the store employees’ lives. A few years back, a boy in a Kirana store in Pune thanked me as he got Rs. 1200 increment in salary from the Kirana store owner, which allowed him to send his sister to an English medium school. The reason for getting this increment was that he could increase the sales of the store by using SnapBizz Solution,” shares Prem Kumar. SnapBizz currently has a network of 10,000+ Kirana stores across 7 major cities in India that collectively do a business (GMV) of $1 Billion/year. Solution for FMCG stakeholders Lack of visibility to Kirana store’s business leads to several inefficiencies as the FMCG goods flow from brands to consumers. “The Indian FMCG industry is essentially a disconnected ecosystem with all players working in absolute silos and is also a data-dark space. Besides this, these players have all a common pain-point with respect to traditional retail; consumer and store engagement lack of last-mile connect with consumer and store, lack of data - totally data dark space and inefficiency in the supply of goods and financial solutions,” pinpoints Prem Kumar. Thanks to SnapBizz Solution, the Smart Kirana store is now cloud-connected real-time to the various stakeholders of the FMCG ecosystem such as brands, wholesalers, distributors, research/advertising agencies, e-commerce players and financial service players. Prem

Digital First Magazine January 2021

PREM KUMAR Kumar adds, “We provide all of them with last-mileconnect with consumer and store, never-before data and opportunity to holistically understand the store and to optimise the relationships with them.” SnapBizz Solution allows FMCG brands to visually and contextually engage consumers, run targeted promotions, overcome supply chain and assortment challenges, and avoid stock-outs. For e-commerce players, the platform offers them an opportunity to leverage the hyper-local assortment, inventory and delivery capabilities of the Kirana store to service their consumers and scale-up operations. For the wholesalers and distributors, the platform enables them to increase their wallet share and get insights on what they are missing out on selling to the stores. For Finserve players, the platform gives them access to reach out, engage the Kirana stores with financial service products, and continually track the store’s financial health. The Money-Making Machine Over the past few years, SnapBizz has grown into the preferred technology solution for the Kirana stores across the major cities they were present in. Prem Kumar and his team have been able to earn the trust of the Kirana stores who found SnapBizz’s solutions extremely easyto-use and were able to fully utilise all the features right from day one. The retailers now view SnapBizz products as a “money-making machine” which enabled them to increase business by 20%. “What really keeps us going is when we see a 70-year-old grandmother of a family-run Kirana store using our solution with ease or a 21-yearold seventh-standard pass store boy taking charge of

Digital First Magazine January 2021

his boss’s store with total control using our solution. The love we have been getting from our stores has been overwhelming,” shares Prem Kumar. On the FMCG ecosystem side, SnapBizz has worked with over 100 FMCG brands in the areas of data analytics and consumer engagement. The company has also worked closely with major FMCG B2B players, Banks and fintech players, and research agencies to help them engage with the retailers and add value to both – theirs and the retailers business. Prem Kumar adds, “We are also creating a social impact by reversing the marginalisation of the SMEs, digital/financial inclusion of the SMEs and upskilling people at the bottom of the pyramid. We have been working closely with various partners to drive adoption of healthy food products among slum dwellers, nationwide hygiene practices in Kirana stores and women to play a bigger role in Kirana/FMCG business.” Having worked very closely with small merchants across different countries, Prem Kumar is extremely passionate about helping them to be more successful and profitable. He has been the Kirana stores’ voice to represent their best interest across national and international platforms. In fact, Prem Kumar has been celebrating the Kirana stores during the COVID times as the unsung heroes who are at the forefront of serving the country’s large population. “We aim to build a network of 50,000 Class A stores and 2,00,000 Class B/C stores across 42 cities in the next couple of years and become a $ 21 billion platform. We plan to work closely with over 200 brands, a large number of distributors/wholesalers and major e-commerce and financial services players,” concludes Prem Kumar.

Higher Education Digest July 2020

Digital First Magazine January 2021

LEADER’S

INSIGHTS

Broadband as a Critical Resource in India:

What Might the Indian Networking Industry Learn from the Pandemic Pravin S Bhandarkar, Founder & CEO, RtBrick

he story of high growth in Internet traffic is as old as the Internet itself. From the early days of sending digital photographs to one another to our more recent passion for online television streaming Indians have found more and more ways to use up the bandwidth that our broadband providers deliver to us. But what we’ve seen over recent days is unprecedented. It has become clear that despite the huge investments from carriers, we still don’t have enough broadband capacity to cope when the population turns to the network as its primary means of operating. This pandemic has left people all around India increasingly dependent on their high-speed broadband connections for their public information, their education, their work, their entertainment and their sense of community. And the infrastructure is struggling to cope. Whilst we are all in the midst of this crisis, dealing with our own personal challenges and those of our families, friends and neighbours, it’s unrealistic to rethink and rebuild our broadband networks. But

Digital First Magazine January 2021

Pravin S Bhandarkar is a technologist with twenty years of experience across the product lifecycle spectrum. He has hands-on experience in product architecture, product development, product management and positioning of technologies & products generating multi-million-dollar revenue. Founded by Pravin in 2015, RtBrick has built a full value delivery system for network infrastructure operators. Its offerings include an operating system for driving bare metal network switches, a multi-tenant continuous integration release platform and a fully integrated cloudbased network visibility, analytics and management system.

Digital First Magazine January 2021

once the dust has settled, and life returns to something closer to normal, what lessons will have been learnt for our networks? One thing, unfortunately, is that we can’t assume this peak in network traffic will never happen again. And if it does, the traffic requirements may be even higher, with higher quality TV, more video calls for work and more sophisticated e-learning platforms in demand. So, on one level, the answer seems simple. Invest in more Internet capacity. But the Indian telecoms market is already a tough place to operate. Carriers are burdened with high spectrum licensing costs; operating costs continue to grow, and demand for investment in new infrastructure has to be funded from somewhere. Most operators would agree that ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) is unlikely to significantly increase anytime soon, so how can we square that circle? A second issue is the length of time it takes to deploy new infrastructure. Using today’s systems, it takes months, if not years, to increase the amount of infrastructure in a network to react to unanticipated traffic demands. But answers to both these problems of cost and time can be found in the giant ‘cloudnative’ companies, who operate vast quantities of IT infrastructure at a much lower cost point than the telcos. Unlike telecoms providers, these cloud-native build their infrastructure using open off-the-shelf hardware, running independent software, and deploy new capacity using zero-touch-provisioning systems that can scale to demand in days, rather than months. Conversely, carriers have traditionally built their networks from monolithic systems which have integrated software and hardware from a single vendor. Unlike the world of cloud computing, in networking infrastructure, software and hardware have always been intrinsically linked. Telcos trying to keep pace with increasing demands find themselves in a perpetual and slow hardware replacement cycle, as each element

Digital First Magazine January 2021

of the system is upgraded in turn, without the ability to break-out of the system investment that they are locked into. They can’t select and deploy the best hardware and the best software independently – equipment selection is always a compromise between the two. And investment in equipment is already escalating faster than revenues. The answer for operators is analogous to the way the cloud-natives build their data centres and is known as network disaggregation, which in simple terms means deploying network software separately from the hardware. This shift has been enabled by the arrival of socalled merchant silicon. Silicon vendors now have the equivalent capabilities on their high-volume, low-cost networking chips that the traditional network equipment vendors used to have in their customized systems. This merchant silicon is being used to build a new category of powerful low-cost ‘baremetal’ switches, often constructed on the same outsourced assembly lines that manufacture the traditional router systems. These switches are a fraction of the cost of conventional telco switches and routers, but just as powerful. And alongside the hardware, a new generation of networking software companies are entering the market. They provide routing software that turns these bare-metal switches into the IP/MPLS switches that are used in broadband networks. These software providers often specialize in different areas of the network, such as broadband access, edge

Silicon vendors now have the equivalent capabilities on their highvolume, lowcost networking chips that the traditional network equipment vendors used to have in their customized systems

PRAVIN S BHANDARKAR

or core networks, so carriers can mix and match vendors as they choose. The approach that most of these new software providers are taking is very much like those used by the massive cloud-native IT giants. They bring carriers the ability to turn their operations into something that resembles those of the cloud-native companies, rather than a traditional telco. Both hardware and software can be deployed using zero-touch provisioning, without human configuration. And once installed, operations staff can deal with single homogeneous equipment and operating environment, regardless of the software running on it, instead of being trained in multiple vendors’ systems and processes. They can upgrade the capacity of any dimension of the system, within minutes, without throwing away the existing infrastructure. These disaggregated systems can replace many functions within a telco’s network, from core and edge routers to Broadband Network Gateways. And, along with a cloud-IT toolset to operate the networks, disaggregated systems are a fundamental part of the way telecoms operators are set to transform their operations to match the agility, simplicity and cost-levels of cloud-native infrastructure. It’s going to be too late to implement this approach in time for this pandemic. But it’s not too late to learn the lessons of how reliant Indian society becomes on the Internet during such times, and evolve our networks accordingly. Adopting a cloud-native approach for our networks, we could more than double the broadband capacity for no more cost, and just as importantly migrate to an architecture that allows us to turn up capacity at short notice. For now, we have to do what we can with the tools we’ve deployed. But as soon as we get the opportunity to turn our broadband networks into cloud-native networks, we need to take it.

Digital First Magazine January 2021

EXPERT

OPINION

Tech Trends to Watch Out for in 2021 Rahul Goyal & Rohan Shah, Founders, Realatte

he business world faced unprecedented challenges due to Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. Consumer behavior and preferences changed drastically as well. Anticipating the changes, the brands used different business models, advanced technology and digital solutions to remain relevant and to have an edge over their competitors. Consumers, at the same time, embraced technology for easy processes and seamless solutions. In 2021, the use of technology will further accelerate the changing business dynamics that began last year, and it will provide meaningful customer experiences. This trend is set to continue with more innovations, coming-in in how the brands will enhance their product offerings through the use of technology. Here are the key trends that the brands should watch out for in 2021: Re-organizing Consumer Behaviour and Market Analysis Since customer behaviour on all fronts has changed considerably due to pandemic, brands will need to re-look at the way data is analysed. With

Digital First Magazine January 2021

Since the pandemic is expected to last the entire 2021 and most businesses are working from home, automation of key processes within the organization would be a big trend that you could see in 2021

Digital First Magazine January 2021

ABOUT ROHAN SHAH Rohan Shah is the cofounder of Realatte, a pioneer in real estate digital marketing which has 100+ pan-India clients including some of the top listed developers like Godrej Properties, Mahindra Lifespaces, Shapoorji Pallonji, Sunteck, Brigade Group and many more enable and explore the full potential of digital presence and achieve superlative ROI. Having early roots in India’s digital journey, and 10+ years of multiple entrepreneur roles in the domestic and international market, in the year 2017, he co-founded his next venture Realatte where he continues to lead using his in-depth digital knowledge and business acumen. An IT graduate from Mumbai University, a technology enthusiast and passionate marketer, he brought together the best of both worlds to help the company scale and reach the next level.

CRMs in place and loads of data being available now, it is imperative to utilize the insights effectively. Additionally, the brands will need to re-assess the way they are communicating with their customers. It is critical to identify the products and solutions which are the need of the hour. Better strategies will have to be used to achieve better conversion rates. It includes personalized attention to customer requests and queries and using this as an opportunity to up-sell and cross-sell. Therefore, the target market needs to be reassessed too considering the demand is now from different consumer segments, and the right technology has to be used to boost engagement. Automation Since the pandemic is expected to last the entire 2021 and most businesses are working from home, automation of key processes within the organization would be another big trend that you could see in 2021. Technological solutions now enable customers to set up

Digital First Magazine January 2021

ABOUT RAHUL GOYAL Rahul Goyal is the cofounder of Realatte, one of the leading real estate digital marketing companies in India, which has helped more than 100+ top Real Estate brands in India achieve digital expansion goal. Previously, he held a leadership role in the successful start-up Realty Redefined, which is now acquired by Quickr. He was engaged in driving growth and digitization of large integrated brands, leading the company to scale and establish its presence pan India. His relentless passion for offering highperformance marketing solutions to Real Estate brands advanced him to his next venture Realatte, which he co-founded in 2017. With a background in engineering, virtual meetings with brands with just a few clicks of a button, eliminating the need for sales reps or support representative. Similarly, the use of chatbots will continue to increase and improve along with AI and data analytics. Automation is also expected to bring in more sales. Real Estate and FMCG industries, who traditionally depend on offline sales have now developed infrastructure that allows the consumers to buy these products in the comfort of their homes. Data/Cyber Security Data or Cybersecurity is one of the trends that would continue in 2021 as well. The amount of data that brands are gathering every day, and the value that it carries is too big. Therefore a high level of security to prevent breaches is extremely important. Also, brands will require a robust plan to manage this vast data. Furthermore, strong security protocols that enable them to secure data using a highly sophisticated network of secured servers is necessary. Hackers generally target companies’ user authentication and

Rahul has over 10+ years of substantial experience in full- scale Digital Marketing services. He continues to lead and deliver success stories by strategizing, executing and scaling digital campaigns.

Digital First Magazine January 2021

5G is perhaps the most anticipated technology in 2021, and brands should be prepared to leverage it

network accesses that allows them to easily breach the confidential data. Brands will need to implement security solutions like forced regular password resets, two-step authentication, whitelisted network access and multiple data storage servers aimed at making the breach impossible. 5th Generation Internet 5G is perhaps the most anticipated technology in 2021, and brands should be prepared to leverage it. With 5th generation internet, the consumers will now

Digital First Magazine January 2021

have access to a fast internet connection, allowing them to browse, download and stream information at a speed which is 100 times faster than 4G. Moreover, the consumers will be expected to access key applications through their smartphones, explore more information, consume the content faster and would be ready to make decisions much quicker. It opens up a world of opportunities for brands, and one should be prepared to meet the demand that will be generated through high-speed internet access. To meet this change in consumer behaviour, brands will need to enhance their digital platforms or application’s customer interface and make it more smartphone friendly. Also, multiply the information that is currently available on the mobile versions of the interface by adding more videos, virtual tours, 360-degree walk-through, AI-based chatbots and e-commerce. Real estate Technology Trends Digital transformation was the buzz word for the real estate industry in the last decade. 2020 became a catalyst for real estate technology and digital solutions to boom as industries were compelled to use new digital-based business models to achieve operational efficiencies and flexibility. In 2021, the trends already in place will continue to dominate. Some of the innovations like 360-degree drone shoots, virtual walk-through, the online portal for inventory selection and booking, lead nurturing automation tools and advanced analytics for tracking customer journey, will play a key role for business success in 2021. The technology will be key to simplify the engagement and relationship between real estate stakeholders and customers. The digital solutions which are convenient and flexible will result in success. The popularity of technology solutions like Virtual Sales Presentor (an online portal that gives complete information to the property seekers including a direct virtual meeting at the developer’s office) and Virtual site visit experience centre (a solution wherein the property seekers can experience the project neighbourhood through virtual reality) will soar further. Other features like cloud-based meetings and presentations are well on the path to become the common norm.

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Digital First Magazine January 2021

RAJ N Founder & Chairman, Zaggle

THE ODD ONE OUT SETTING UNPRECEDENTED MILESTONES IN THE FINTECH INDUSTRY

aj N was unconventional in many ways. Born to an academic-oriented family, Raj was always spotted not in classrooms and libraries, but sports grounds. While he did score good marks, his affinity to explore the unknown was quite a string. This affinity only grew with time, and soon Raj had a list of ideas that he thought were worth exploring. Meanwhile, his family grew restless with each day that he refused to conform to the family norm. With an exceptional mind brimming with ideas and a vivid rebellious streak to his character, young Raj took part in the antiMandal agitation at the Delhi University. He

Digital First Magazine January 2021

was one of the key leaders in the movement that shook the capital in the early ‘90s. Nonetheless, his political ambitions were cut off when he received news of securing an MBA seat in the prestigious New York University. During his college days, Raj also tapped into his potential to be an entrepreneur and worked hard to push his limits. By the time the offer from the US arrived, Raj was already an MBA graduate from the University of Delhi who had floated his first venture—a financial product company. First Real Corporate Stint Raj’s father, a disciplinarian, was least happy with his son’s political activities in Delhi.

THE TEAM AT ZAGGLE IS EXTREMELY PASSIONATE AND WORKS RELENTLESSLY TOWARDS THE VISION, BUILDING ONE LAYER AT A TIME

Digital First Magazine January 2021

THE ZAGGLE TEAM ASPIRE TO CREATE UNIQUE PRODUCTS AND SERVICES THAT SOLVE THE PAIN POINTS OF BUSINESSES AND CORPORATES BY DEPLOYING WORLD-CLASS TECHNOLOGIES

However, the New York university opportunity made him happy. So, Raj sold his first venture and packed his bags for the US to obtain another Masters in Business Administration from New York University. Soon after, he was cherry-picked by PricewaterhouseCoopers to work for them. This career path boosted Raj’s inclination towards business. He joined their Chicago branch in the Management Consulting Service (MCS) practice, where he advised multinational companies on business process re-engineering (BPR). However, Raj pined for his motherland and longed to return. When he understood he could no longer stay back, he decided to come home, redefine his business ideas and flex his entrepreneurial skills. Touchdown India, Raj N came with a whole new skillset that flaunted extraordinary leadership skills and a flair for entrepreneurship, with a special dexterity to listen to people and help them. Armed with his formidable skillset, Raj established eYantra-a corporate merchandising platform, which is one of the largest in the world and has successfully raised multiple rounds of Private Equity funding where Investors have exited with good returns-in 2001. Soon after, he birthed LoyltyRewardz, a venture raised 750k USD investment when it was an idea on paper but returned 33X back to its investors in 6 years. He also found, Zaggle, a venture that builds world-class financial solutions and products to manage the business expenses of corporates, SMEs, & Startups through automated and innovative workflows. “I believe what is taught in school and colleges need not be the ultimate truth in practical life. Believing in what we think is right builds a strong character. Exposure in the early part of the years allows you to build the listen up capability, which helps later on. I contributed to the Indian startup ecosystem with over 29 investments so far. I provided a platform for SME’s and corporate clients for their employee reimbursements. We also provided a digital platform for their employees to track their expense on a daily ongoing basis so that it becomes easier for them to track their daily expenses in their day-to-day work life and calculate their expenses manually. Bringing in the digital technology, through the Zaggle platform I guess, has helped a lot of merchants over the years,” says Raj. No Hassle, Thanks Zaggle! Raj’s vision while setting up Zaggle was to become a Global Digital Bank. Today, Zaggle eradicates the complex and tedious workflow followed in organisations, discrepancies arising from payments that are still made in cash, issues like no real-time control or visibility over the business spends, manual accounting and a reconciling stack of receipts and spreadsheets, excessive use of human resources, and risk of frauds and duplication.

Digital First Magazine January 2021

“We wanted to take Banking to Corporates and Consumers. Today the Banking processes and workflows are broken, which are mostly manual and partly digital, making Banking an extremely difficult process. With our experience and interaction with various business groups, we realised that businesses face many problems in managing their financial requirements and expense management. We figured out that payments and accounting in conventional ways are broken, inefficient, and sluggish. That is where our core offering came into play,” Raj informs. The team spent months understanding and researching several pain points and successfully started an innovative financial revolution. Under Raj’s guidance, the team directed all their efforts towards building a host of products and services that could solve the financial needs of the businesses. “We ended up completely reinventing the business financial flow and expense management. We aspire to create unique products and services that solve businesses and corporates’ pain points by deploying world-class technologies. We endeavour to achieve this through the discipline of execution, innovation,

and rapid product development. Our major focus has been committed to assisting corporates in creating a productive and efficient organisation. The team at Zaggle is extremely passionate and works relentlessly towards the vision, building one layer at a time,” Raj iterates. Today, Zaggle has 2,600+ clients and over 3.5 million users. With offices across 10 cities, Zaggle has around 200+ employees and is geared towards building Network Agnostic Payment System and Customer Experience. Zaggle’s platforms include Zaggle Propel and Zaggle Save for SME’s and corporates to help them with expense management. While Zaggle Propel is an integrated platform for workforce reward, recognition, engagement and state-of-art AI-powered performance management, helping organisations align their people to the company goals; Zaggle Save is an all-in-one business expense management and employee benefits platform that empowers you to save taxes and spend smarter, therefore saving time and money resulting in a happy and satisfied workforce. The Zaggle team aspire to create unique products and services that solve the pain points of businesses and

Digital First Magazine January 2021

RAJ N corporates by deploying world-class technologies. “We endeavour to achieve this through the discipline of execution, innovation, and rapid product development. Our major focus has been committed to assisting corporates in creating a productive and efficient organisation. Our mission is to build state-of-art financial solutions workflow and products which would help automate and empower businesses to increase efficiency, accuracy, transparency and productivity and which would eventually help us to achieve the goal of becoming a useful global digital bank,” Raj explains. Zaggle’s Team Spirit Just like its founder, Zaggle, with its innovative spirit deeply entrenched in the FinTech industry, ensures an engaging and exciting environment to work in. Although the pandemic has pushed businesses into an accelerated state of digitisation, with Work From Home becoming popular, Zaggle employees have been dedicatedly working in this tough time. “At Zaggle, you will find yourself surrounded by a network of hardworking and likeminded individuals who truly believe in the business’ product and service. The Team Leaders have been digitally in touch with the team members to get the work to deliver, attendance has been marked digitally. It’s great to have such kind of commitment from our team members during such tough times. While making use of tools enabling remote working, cybersecurity is on top of our mind. With FinTech operating at the forefront of innovation, Zaggle is both flexible and

Digital First Magazine January 2021

adaptable to succeed in an ever-changing and dynamic environment,” Raj adds. Raj observes that organisations are counting on a fintech revolution as it can offer solutions to the unprecedented challenges that Covid-19 has brought in. Digital Payments, Open Banking, Mobile Banking/ Internet Banking and Peer-to-Peer Lending are some of the major trends that Covid-19 has accelerated in the FinTech sector. The post-COVID-19 era will bring forward a new normal—continuity in opting digitisation. He claims that payment innovations, rise in digital banking and organisations opting for hyper-personalised tech solutions are some of the trends that the fin-tech industry must watch out for in 2021. “At Zaggle, we are aggressively and relentlessly working towards launching our Neo-Banking platform. This Open Banking Platform will help corporates for all transactions in the Bank and bid in the real-time for loans where all of it will be self-automated and will give a performance, balance sheet in a single rack. On the global expansion front, our next target is London, where we expect to commence operations in the next three months. Technology has been a great enabler during these troubled times for the businesses and we, being a part of the tech community, have helped our clients and constituents with many innovative developments to overcome the business challenges they have faced and have vowed to help more clients in the future,” Raj concludes.

Digital First Magazine January 2021

RAJAT SINGHANIA Founder & CEO, SocioRAC – HyLyt

HYLYTING CONSTRUCTIVE INFORMATION FOR A PRODUCTIVE WORKFORCE

magine you are in a meeting where key matters are being discussed, and important decisions are being made. Your phone pings. It is an important piece of information, but your priority is the meeting at hand. You swipe and make a mental note to get back to it later. After the meeting, you take your phone and scroll through to access the information you had received earlier. To your horror, you are unable to retrieve it from the deluge of data that your mobile device holds. Yes, you could have handled it better, but to err is human. When Rajat Singhania was faced with such a dilemma—he swiped and lost a key byte of information—he was perplexed, to say the least. Although he did

Digital First Magazine January 2021

worry about it, it is the thought that nothing had ever been done to remedy such situation that took the front seat. So, he asked around if anyone knew of a solution that could help manage information in such a situation, and he realized there was no such solution, yet. The exceptional technopreneur that he is, Rajat’s next question was ‘If there existed a solution, would they avail it?” The answer was unanimous—there were quite a lot of people who had faced such data losses before. And that is how he got the brainwave to come up with a simple, easy and unified way for people to manage information from multiple channels and sources of information. Thus, was born HyLyt.

WE HELP PEOPLE FIND INFORMATION WHEN THEY NEED IT, SAVING TIME, AND LETS THEM MAKE BETTER DECISIONS

Digital First Magazine January 2021

FOR HYLYT, SUCCESS IS MAKINGPEOPLE POWERFUL, PRODUCTIVE AND PROFITABLE, HELPING THEM DO BETTER IN ALL THEY DO The App to Manage All Other Apps HyLyt, a patent-pending unified information management and business collaboration platform empower individuals and teams to make better business decisions and work effectively in the face of information overload, by pulling the information that matters, from whatever source, into a single robust repository that is secure, searchable and shareable. HyLyt is the only product that offers a complete 360-degree solution for information management. It operates on top of the clientâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s current apps to help them manage important information, converse and collaborate in a controlled environment, thus giving enhanced

Digital First Magazine January 2021

control how this is used by the various stakeholders. The biggest challenge has been to create awareness about our product, its usefulness and benefits. Being a unique startup solving a common everyday problem, making people aware we have a product to solve their problems was difficult. But now they are seeking us out because of the service that HyLyt offers. Collaboration, content management, video conference, file storage, reminder, calendar— all your productivity tools at one place with additional innovations on top of it. They now realize that with HyLyt they can have peace of mind while the information from their apps is being managed to make them powerful, productive and profitable!” says Rajat Singhania, Founder, HyLyt.

productivity, data leakage prevention and a bird’s eye view of information that matters at one place. Simply put – the client can get different types of data from any source at one place easily and instantly, interconnect them on multiple parameters, retrieve information instantly when needed, access anytime across multiple devices, share seamlessly with various stakeholders internally and externally, control how recipients can use it and pull it back when they want. “With HyLyt, we integrate and have unified information management with innovative ways to manage the information from the unlimited app and data silos and

Digital First Magazine January 2021

RAJAT SINGHANIA

Boosting the World’s Workforce With over 35+ years of experience in the business and tech domains, Rajat was there when the world used BASIC, COBOL & DBase3 for coding. He explains that managing time and information are the 2 biggest challenges plaguing humankind today. They transcend all boundaries of ethnicity, economic status, country, profession, business vertical, vocation etc. Time lost can never be regained, and information is said to be the new gold. Efficient and meticulous management of these can bring exponential growth to any business. “Today’s information workers wage a losing battle against information overload. Not only is most of the information they receive uselessly, but managing the useful part is inefficient. In fact, research shows that they spend 25% of their entire work time searching, saving and managing the information they own. Accessing information held by co-workers is even harder. Did you know over 70% of departing employees admit to taking the company’s data? HyLyt, a single point integrated solution has the simplicity, power and ability to help you do this. Complete control over all your information that matters! Needless to say, this would save you a huge amount of time and result in better decisions—revenue too! A more organized, efficient and productive world is a much better world on multiple counts, is it not?” he asks. With the pandemic creating havoc, everyone around the world is going digital. With the deluge of information and an app for everything, Rajat perceives an environment where too much data becomes counterproductive eating up precious time, creating pressure and

Digital First Magazine January 2021

triggering decisions based on incomplete information. He forecasts that 2021 is the year of the consumer and their experience. For HyLyt, success is making people powerful, productive and profitable, helping them do better in all they do. “We help people find information when they need it, saving time, and lets them make better decisions. We are here to make a difference and help people. We aim to be the go-to product for people when they think about information management. While most products work vertically, we are working horizontally, which is our USP and gives us a unique place in the minds of the consumer,” he iterates. It is no wonder that the HyLyt team is a formidable group of individuals as they strongly believe in Rajat and his mission; they all connect to the problem and the need for a solution. They have helped HyLyt evolve, pivot and set milestones; especially Chirayu, the tech head and CTO. “Once your team is aligned with your vision and objective, then the support comes automatically. Interesting and innovative ideas and solutions to problems then become a byproduct,” Rajat adds. With a vision to generate 2.5 billion man-hours of productive time by the year 2025, HyLyt considers their biggest challenge today is people spending as much as 25% of their productive time on managing information. HyLyt is on a mission to help reduce this number significantly and help generate productive man-hours. Under Rajat’s expert guidance, the team is treading purposefully to leverage technology and offer solutions that help people gain a holistic view of what to do and excel in whatever it is they intend to do.

Higher Digest DigitalEducation First Magazine October 2021 2020 January

EXPERT

OPINION

Companies Need to Develop an Invisible Sense of

Unknown Cyber Threats Jaydeep Ruparelia, Co-founder, Infopercept Consulting Pvt. Ltd.

t has been nearly nine months since the Coronavirus pandemic struck out of the blue. Remote working or work from home as it is commonly described has become the new normal. Since we are still months away from a vaccine, work from home will continue to be the case for the foreseeable future. A lot has been said and written about how this has given rise to new challenges for companies. Cybersecurity is one of the very major challenges the Covid-19 pandemic has given birth to, and ensuring the safety and security of digital assets has emerged as one of the biggest, if not the biggest, priorities of companies in the last few months. With digitization on the rise and work from home expected to continue for a large majority of the companies, they need to prepare checklists about the routine tasks assigned to respective departments as well as functions within companies. Prioritizing security strategy depends on how well the leaders can define the criticality of the cybersecurity signals and threat intelligence and collate it into a business context that can be customized to enterprises. Moreover, there is also a strong scientific

Digital First Magazine January 2021

Jaydeep Ruparelia is the Co-founder and Director of Security Strategy at India/ Ahmedabad-based Infopercept Consulting Pvt. Ltd., a leading Managed Security Services provider with footprints across India, Middle East, Africa, and the US. Jaydeep has an experience of more than 15 years in the cybersecurity and strategy domain. As the Co-founder of Infopercept, he is involved in driving the firmâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s operational strategy, and developing and nurturing business relationships across the globe.

Digital First Magazine January 2021

ABOUT JAYDEEP RUPARELIA

Jaydeep is blessed with strong entrepreneurial skills and instincts, and a unique ability to build world-class teams, particularly in multi-cultural and geographically diverse environments. He has worked with some of the smartest and rocking characters to build teams and companies in India and other countries. He specializes in establishing cybersecurity vision, conceptualizing cybersecurity products and services, and guiding and inspiring people to achieve the best results. He has been instrumental in setting up and managing the Security Optimization Centre (SOC), Technology Optimization Centre (TOC) and Compliance Optimization Centre (COC) for customers and Original Equipment Manufacturers.

Digital First Magazine January 2021

logic behind having checklists and prioritizing, as it helps us concentrate on the core tasks that require our attention to achieve the daily plans. When it comes to cybersecurity, the most important checklist is to be in a position to be able to foresee any existing or looming threat. Cyber-attacks are growing steadily in number, strength, and variety. In parallel, even the most sophisticated adversaries are using surprisingly

Having a shield to protect the business from the growing number of cyber adversaries is not just recommended, but is a must

unsophisticated means to wreak damage. In many of the cyber-attacks, cybercriminals have been successfully able to mimic legitimate user actions and avoid being spotted on the radar of protective measures. Many organizations are starting to realize that a proactive cybersecurity strategy is one

of the best defences. Organizations should see where the threats are coming from, how they can move within their network, find out where the vulnerabilities in their defences are, and close them before cyber attackers can take advantage. To give a corollary, in a Formula 1 car race, each participant is trying to zip through the race track in his bid for the checkered flag. A winning game plan or strategy is a must to perform well on the race track, and car companies spend heavily to chart these plans. When it comes to the actual race, failure to keep a close eye on the racer trailing him can lead to the leader being left behind or worse going out of the race. The trailing racer also has the advantage in the sense that he can easily observe how the leader is manoeuvring his car, and look for any weaknesses or misstep that he can exploit to get ahead. In the same way, companies need to be prepared with their cybersecurity strategies and always be on the lookout for cyber adversaries. During a cybersecurity incident, acting quickly is critical. It can be the difference between surviving and perishing. Also bear in mind that unlike Formula 1 car race, where the drivers and teams are bound by the same set of rules, no such regulations apply to cyber adversaries. Their sole aim is to inflict the maximum damage possible on the target company. Having a shield to protect the business from the growing number of cyber adversaries is not just recommended, but is a must. Our Observe, Orient, Decide & Act loop is designed to help people make decisions and take action rather than freezing up and doing nothing. This process can be invaluable to an information security practitioner and has numerous applications, both offensive and defensive. As a cybersecurity company, we are seeing highly potent and multiple attacks being launched against target companies. We believe in not just negating the attacks, but counter-attacking the cyber adversaries with a unique combination of services, solutions and strategies wrapped in a perfect sense of cybersecurity. With our new product Invinsense, we have taken cybersecurity to the next leg of the warfare where we create traps, and once the cyber adversaries have walked into it, we strike them.

Digital First Magazine January 2021

SADIYA KHAN Founder, Akund Communications

THE UPCOMING PARAGON OF NEOTERIC DIGITAL MARKETING SOLUTIONS

ublic Relations is an important facet for every organization. A team dedicated to putting out the word, informing the customer base about the company’s latest developments, and setting up avenues for the company to be visible is very important. With the advent of technological revolution, PR agencies have had to drastically up their game or be left out. However, one company, Akund Communications, has been sailing the dynamic technology torrent with aplomb. How did it manage to do so? The answer is quite simple; if the ship captain knows what they are doing, the ship shall sail smooth. Young, determined and forever optimistic, Sadiya Khan began Akund as a small boutique firm, strictly limiting itself to PR activities. The

Digital First Magazine January 2021

company was cooped away in a small rented and shared office space in the Mumbai suburb. Although they were just a handful, she was lucky to have clients that trusted her capabilities. Their trust helped keep her flame burning. The teething challenge, according to her, was her will to prove her capabilities. As her agency had no positioning in front of giant players whose clientele spoke for themselves, she decided to apply her strategies to Akund, as a brand, and create a niche for Akund and herself. “I learnt the power of networking, taking a share of voice, being opinionated, being approachable, offering a free consultation, make interesting collaborations, etc. All this helped me create the goodwill and credibility that Akund enjoys today,” says Sadiya Khan,

I AM FOCUSSED ON UNDERSTANDING THE MARKETANDHELPING CLIENTSBYADOPTING STRATEGICSOLUTIONS TO BOOST SALES

Digital First Magazine January 2021

SADIYA KHAN

Founder, Akund Communications. A Mass Media graduate from the South Indian Education Society (SIES), Sadiya comes from a humble, typical middle-class family. She grew up believing that no dreams are beyond achievable with hard work and smart work. Her modest upbringing gave her the ability to adapt to quickly changing times. Her mantra is work towards where you want to be instead of lamenting where you came and where you were. A powerful testament to her resilience is that today, Akund has grown to be a full-

Digital First Magazine January 2021

fledged 360-degree communications agency that offers a host of marketing solutions, from managing social media and PR, to providing creative video production and animated content. What makes Akund click is that it is a win-win for both parties—the client and company—as clients are happy to deal with a single agency and the agency can research and align an efficient strategy across all marketing channels, for the benefit of the client. When the Going Gets Tough… But the question is—compared to its peers, how did Akund fare during the pandemic? Quite well! Because while Sadiya does not downplay the impact the deadly pandemic had on the corporate world, she was nifty enough to focus her energy and resources on matters that would ease the blow. “Indeed! The pandemic was a contingency that none

SADIYAâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S MANTRA IS WORK TOWARDS WHERE YOU WANT TO BE INSTEAD OF LAMENTING WHERE YOU CAME AND WHERE YOU WERE

Digital First Magazine January 2021

of us was ready for. We just didn’t know what to expect, and I guess most businesses took the natural course and evolved. As more and more people started to spend time on social media, I knew that’s exactly where I had to be. I started creating informative and interesting content videos for knowledge sharing, and I am pleased with the views and leads that it has generated so far,” remarks Sadiya. Akund enjoys the exceptional leadership of Sadiya and the boost of its efficacious team of experts. She feels fortunate enough to have the backing of a team comprising industrious and resourceful industry specialists. This team and their shared vision have helped Akund land bigticket clients, shift to a full-fledged office, and successfully hold industrial press conferences. “We have celebrated all our milestones with equal enthusiasm and pride. After all, it’s these little milestones that keep the energy going. Although we are all now working from home, we hold regular review meeting and brainstorming session with our team and clients so that there is accountability at all fronts. Moreover, we all inspire each other by sharing interesting industry articles, trends, and stories we come across during the day. Sometimes, they turn into an interesting debate, while other times they serve as a pool of information to keep us abreast with what’s happening,” adds Sadiya. Akund has marked 2021 as the year where businesses will take the road to recovery, recuperating from the massive hits due to the pandemic and global recession. Although Akund has quite a few elite clients, Sadiya still holds herself and the company as a learner in the industry. “If 2020 was a year of uncertainties, 2021 is the year where companies, those that evolved, experiment with collaborative and remote workspaces and incorporate artificial intelligence, online gamification, and voice assistance. I still consider myself new in this sector and am learning, relearning and unlearning a lot! I am focussed on understanding the market and helping clients by adopting strategic solutions to boost sales. I am also shaping myself to join Digital Marketing experts and expand into diverse marketing offerings. I am hopeful that all this will lead to making Akund a formidable player in the industry, and I shall hopefully help more clients achieve their digital marketing needs” she concludes.

Digital First Magazine January 2021

Digital First Magazine Higher Education Digest January October 2021 2020

SANDEEP KUMAR Founder, LingerTech

USING TECH INNOVATION TO MAKE HOSPITALITY INDUSTRY FUTURE READY

he impact of the COVID-19 pandemic is being felt by all businesses around the world. Leaders are navigating a broad range of interrelated issues that span from keeping their employees and customers safe, shoring-up cash and liquidity, reorienting operations and navigating complicated government support programs. Kickstarting businesses after lockdowns lifted, has been a slow and tedious process. People are looking at 2021 with hope, amplified by the announcement of a vaccine roll-out across the world. The hospitality industry has been badly hit by the pandemic, and tech solutions are being

Digital First Magazine January 2021

percieved as a game-changer as travel kick-starts again. The industry will have to make quick changes to adapt to this very volatile situation, and keep themselves relevant. Technology is the key to most things now. LingerTech is a Cloud Based Technology to optimize hotel processes and help them be future ready. An integrated hospitality management technology startup, LingerTech has launched a one-stop-shop with solutions to optimise the entire property management processes. Helping small and medium hotels adopt technology easily and seamlessly, the software enables budget hospitality groups to have one system

WE AIM TO OFFER A CONTACTLESS HOTEL EXPERIENCE TO THE CUSTOMERS AND INCORPORATE A PMS AT AFFORDABLE COSTS

Digital First Magazine January 2021

which will enable them to manage their day to day hotel operation, as well as distribution of inventory to all Online Travel Agencies (OTA) through an integrated channel manager. The LingerTech Property Management System (PMS) includes Payment Gateway, contactless check-in and check-out, digital food menu and many more digitised services. “We aim to offer a contactless hotel experience to the customers and, for

SANDEEP KUMAR

hotels a PMS at affordable costs. LingerTech aims to equip the Indian Hospitality Industry with technology to enable them to meet the ‘travelling in the COVID era’ challenge head-on”, states Sandeep Kumar, Founder, LingerTech. A team of self-motivated individuals who aim to create a big disruption in hospitality technology, the core team of LingerTech, put their 100% in challenging the market. “Everyone travels to at least one hotel every month to see how they are serving the customers and whether they are tech-enabled or not. Everyone has to share one great idea, which is unique in the market, every quarter. The feasibility of the best idea is worked upon with our tech team and incorporated in our growing portfolio”, shares Sandeep.

Digital First Magazine January 2021

A TEAM OF SELFMOTIVATED INDIVIDUALS WHO AIM TO CREATE A BIG DISRUPTION IN HOSPITALITY TECHNOLOGY, THE CORE TEAM OF LINGERTECH, PUT THEIR 100% IN CHALLENGING THE MARKET

Helping Hotels Choose The Right Hotel PMS Initially making software for use in their own hospitality brans The Ayali Hotels, Sandeep soon realised that their technology could solve property management issues for so many hotels who couldn’t afford the systems that are currently available in the market. Making a complex yet affordable system within a year against many odds was a challenge. Having been in the hospitality and travel business for many years, Sandeep had seen the market gap, but driving tech with like-minded folks was challenging. LingerTech was launched on 14th August 2020, because “We could see that only about 30 per cent of Indian hospitality units were using technology to drive their business. As the industry started struggling back on its feet , we became more sure that only technology would help revive the devastated industry”. A mathematics graduate, Sandeep had no plans of becoming an entrepreneur during his college days. “I chose to take up a job in the travel industry because I like to travel and wanted to see this industry from close quarters. Seeing the gaps that existed, especially in the application of technology, I decided to do something about it and jumped into my own startup,” he shares. The technology created by LingerTech is simple to apply and use. Also, it can be customused to any segment : Larger hotels, Homestays, Boutique properties or B&Bs In travel and hospitality, tech innovation has not really happened for the customer barring the rise of OTAs. Says Sandeep, “If we talk about a hotel’s customer experience, then it’s not even taken off yet. There has been technology available, but it was being used largely by premium brands due to the cost factor attached to the integration of a Property Management System. This is what we are planning to disrupt. We will change the market by making make tech driven hotel management systems easily available for everyone.” LingerTech is offering a simple system to ensure that all processes in a hospitality unit are carried out remotely, efficiently, and safely, at very competitive rates. This will greatly affect how guests view a hotel and it’s accommodations. It will also ensure for the hotel: Increased Housekeeping Efficiency, Improved Revenue Through Distribution Manager, Customer Data Management and Cost Reduction. “With Covid impacting travel, hoteliers are very focused on either increasing or stabilizing hotel occupancy in order to maintain revenue. Safety & Security will become a prime focus for both the Traveller and the Hotel Group. Our plan is to make LingerTech available for all categories of properties and prepare them for the future. We have set a target of getting at least 30% market share in the coming year. Travellers are changing, and so are their requirements. We are going to disrupt this in coming months with something no one has tried yet. We are the tech innovation to watch out for in 2021!”.

Digital First Magazine January 2021

EXPERT

OPINION

2021 Predictions: Mobile is the Future of TV April Tayson, Regional VP - INSEA, Adjust

OTT is a Channel Marketer can no Longer Afford to Ignore With revenue in the video streaming segment expected to grow to $30.4 billion by 2024, the opportunity that Over The Top (OTT) media affords mobile marketers is enormous, yet largely untapped. Whether in the living room or on the move, mobile is an increasingly important component in the OTT mix. Recent research conducted by Adjust showed that younger consumers lead the pack in mobile streaming, with Gen Z and Millennials most likely to pay for streaming and ondemand entertainment services than any other generation. And as mobile marketers tap into OTT and ratchet up their spending on advertising for user acquisition, the question for 2021 is really how they’re spending and how they attribute users. Many companies are investing heavily in OTT, but often have no way of understanding what drives value — measurement is the answer.” Subscriptions become the ultimate monetization model for apps across verticals The growth of subscription-based apps has intensified this year as users look to their mobile devices for a broader array of activities,

Digital First Magazine January 2021

April Tayson is Regional VP INSEA at Adjust. Based in Singapore, April is responsible for Adjust’s SEA sales operations, go-to-market strategy and growing the company’s market share and revenue. With over 15 years of experience in digital marketing, April is passionate about promoting Southeast Asia’s vibrant and fast-growing mobile ecosystem, while bringing more transparency and trust to the industry.

Digital First Magazine January 2021

from entertainment and e-commerce to fitness and push forward the app industry as a whole forward. finance. This is also being driven by changing user In 2021, we are expecting to see more verticals habits that point to the ‘stickiness’ of subscriptions. looking to the gaming industry and applying the As subscriptions become a regular expenditure, we same level of data-driven thinking to their own have seen that older consumers, especially, are more marketing strategies. willing to pay for a premium app product or supporting brands they love. Battling bots will be key to improving Recent research conducted by Adjust found that user experience 25 - 34-year-olds in Singapore spent the most on The pervasive problem of in-app bot fraud is a trend we subscription apps — $34,78 a month — compared have been following closely in gaming, ecommerce to $27,45 for respondents between and other industries. It is aged 55+. Overall, around a quarter becoming a big business, of Singaporean consumers also where professional bot said they have stopped paying fraudsters aim to provide The growth of for other services in order to buy bots-as-a-service for subscriptions on mobile app services unscrupulous customers. subscription(for example, subscribing to fitness Bots are designed apps over going to the gym). to be faster and more based apps has We expect an increasing efficient than humans, so intensified number of apps will be looking to bots can easily beat human diversify their monetization models players when competing this year as beyond ad revenue in 2021 — and against them in games, subscriptions will become the for example. Our research users look to ultimate income stream for many found that more than 40% their mobile publishers and advertisers. of the respondents have paid for bots when playing devices for a Sophistication of the mobile mobile games, spending gaming industry driving an average of $65. This broader array of Southeast Asia’s app market becomes an incredibly activities, from forward, with other verticals to frustrating experience for follow suit in 2021 honest players who do not entertainment 2020 has been a breakout year cheat. In ecommerce apps, for mobile gaming apps across bots can be used to snap and e-commerce Southeast Asia, with gaming studios up limited edition items to fitness and such as Indofun, Gamejam, SHINin one go, or even use Agency and publisher Storms stolen log-in credentials finance making huge inroads across the to take over accounts region and internationally. With and make purchases so many hot new gaming studios with the saved account producing innovative and highinformation. A breach quality games, user acquisition is aided by the buzz like this can destroy user trust for years and high-quality apps on offer. to come. Their success is also in part down to the Unfortunately, many companies still do not sophistication of their marketing: developers in the fully understand the threats posed by bots, which region are renowned for making clever use of data to can have a big impact both on their financials and better target and segment users, improve ASO, and reputations. Going into 2021, we recommend brands master ad monetization. safeguard their business - and their users’ experience This laser focus on analytics and return on - by making sure battling bots is top of their investment is paying dividends and is also helping priority list.

Digital First Magazine January 2021

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Digital First Magazine January 2021

SATISH KANNAN Co-Founder & CEO, MediBuddy

FACILITATING RURAL INDIA ENJOY THE WEALTH OF HEALTH

t seems absurd how less than a year back it was normal to take your sniffling noses to a packed hospital to consult a doctor and wait near another patient, someone who may be suffering from a long-term illness and may have come to consult another doctor. It was considered ineffective to consult a doctor online because how could a doctor properly evaluate you if they don’t see you in person? However, 2020 proved so many of such notions kaput; putting popular beliefs to rest and demonstrating with amazing results that the transition to going completely online was possible, effective, and saved many resources! Nevertheless, a couple of years back, when such a notion was ‘unthinkable’, Satish Kannan and Enbasekar D envisioned the

Digital First Magazine January 2021

need for a safe and online consulting platform where doctors and patients can communicate without worrying about privacy. Thus, the duo joined hands in 2015 and launched DocsApp. One of India’s first online doctor consultation platforms, DocsApp has revolutionised the healthcare space by adding new channels of communication among patients and doctors. Before social distancing became the norm, Satish observed another, pretty evident, yet neglected distance between the common man and healthcare. He witnessed the Indian healthcare industry grappling with the skilled workforce in skewed doctor-patient ratios that forced other medical professionals and rural Indians to bear the maximum brunt. He also

I STRONGLY BELIEVE THAT WE SHOULD VALUE OUR EMPLOYEES THE SAME WAY WE VALUE YOUR CUSTOMERS SIMPLY BECAUSE THEY ARE OUR COMPANYâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S BIGGEST ASSETS

Digital First Magazine January 2021

SATISH KANNAN

feared that if this situation were to continue, the gap between rural India and access to quality healthcare might never be bridged. â&#x20AC;&#x153;In the absence of doctors, the patient is often treated by whoever is available, irrespective of their qualifications. Enbasekar D and I put our heads together to leverage technology to provide quality healthcare to millions of Indians

Digital First Magazine January 2021

irrespective of their geography. With DocsApp, we proved that almost 70% of health issues can be diagnosed and treated online. However, when we started online consultations, it was a whole new concept in India, and Indians were hesitant about the same. The biggest challenge initially was to make people trust the platform and make them believe that the doctors on the

platform are real doctors with experience. To strengthen our services and capabilities, DocsApp recently merged into MediBuddy, creating an entity that sits at the pinnacle of the healthcare industry,” says Satish Kannan, Co-Founder and CEO, MediBuddy. Being a customer-centric organisation, MediBuddy regularly takes feedback from customers and try to incorporate them. Having customers at the centre and being the leader in the industry, MediBuddy believes in building products and providing solutions for customers. For instance, they partnered with multiple payment gateways to facilitate a seamless payment experience. Additionally, the duo leaned heavily on social media to reach out to users and communicate with them as per their preference. From curating content in multilingual languages to creating insightful campaigns that connect with users and crafting the MediBuddy UI similar to WhatsApp, MediBuddy is built on a strong foundation customer-centricity. A Bundle of Medi Solutions Satish and his team have equipped MediBuddy to be at the forefront to help millions of Indians to access highquality healthcare. MediBuddy is a partner to several leading enterprise customers in the country and helps millions of users access a wide range of sponsored healthcare services. MediBuddy members have access to inpatient, outpatient, wellness, fitness, and preventive care services offered by their healthcare providers’ network. Accessible both as an online portal as well as a mobile app, MediBuddy gives members unparalleled, real-time access to all their health benefits anytime and from anywhere. With a partner network of over 90,000 doctors, 7000 hospitals, 3000 diagnostic centres and 2500 pharmacies covering over 95% of all pin-codes in India, MediBuddy has helped over 1.27 crore Indians in the year 2020- an impressive feat! The brand has ensured that even small towns like Bishrampur and Manwath have access to healthcare and medicines and labs. Additionally, to make healthcare more affordable, MediBuddy implemented a value-based subscription- MediBuddy Gold, that addresses the healthcare needs of the user & his/her entire family. A gold user can avail the benefits for consultations, lab tests & delivery of medicine and save up to Rs 9976 annually. Keeping the customer’s need as the number one priority, MediBuddy focused its efforts on raising awareness and ensuring the availability of trusted medical advice to help control the spread of the disease and panic

KEEPING THE CUSTOMER’S NEED AS THE NUMBER ONE PRIORITY, MEDIBUDDY FOCUSED ITS EFFORTS ON RAISING AWARENESS AND ENSURING THE AVAILABILITY OF TRUSTED MEDICAL ADVICE TO HELP CONTROL THE SPREAD OF THE DISEASE AND PANIC DURING THE DEADLY PANDEMIC

Digital First Magazine January 2021

SATISH KANNAN

Digital First Magazine January 2021

during the deadly pandemic. Moreover, to ensure quick access to medical expertise, MediBuddy added a unique feature, a medical department dedicated to Coronavirus on their platform, where medical consultation was provided free. “To help contribute our share, we also partnered with various accredited labs to provide home pick-up of the COVID-19 lab test. Additionally, we launched a Coronavirus Risk Assessment Tool to help individuals assess the level of possibility of them being affected. MediBuddy also introduced a new feature on its app to locate an available bed and ease difficulties. The MediBuddy COVID-19 Hospital Bed Availability Checker provides complete details regarding the availability of beds in real-time at nearby hospitals for COVID-19 patients,” adds Satish. Offering credit where credit is due, Satish says that the company is blessed to have a team of experts who work in unison for the company’s progress and share the same vision and mission as the founders. “Enbasekar and I worked towards putting together a great group of talented people. I strongly believe that we should value our employees the same way we value your customers simply because they are our company’s biggest assets. Customers may be why our company continues to shine, but without our employees’ dedication and hard work, we would have not gained customers in the first place. The outlook that I share with my team is that we can provide quality healthcare access with technology by our side. What motivates us is the direct impact that we create in making our customers’ lives healthy and happy,” Satish points out. With a vision to make high-quality healthcare accessible and affordable for billions of Indians, Satish and his team are currently focusing on further strengthening their doctor base, patient reach and developing their products. As someone who has his eyes and ears tuned into the healthcare sector’s nuances, Satish states that there has never been a more exciting time to be in the digital healthcare space than right now. He explains that AI, Blockchain, Voice Search, Chatbots and VR are among the most promising health technologies in 2020. “Health technologies encompass all the devices, medicines, vaccines, procedures, and systems designed to streamline healthcare operations, lower costs and enhance the quality of care for individuals. Given the impact of COVID-19 on the Global and Indian digital health industry, we expect the Industry size to grow up to a worth of US$ 6 billion (INR ~431.97 Bn) by 2021, expanding at a rate of 40%. The Indian digital healthcare market is expected to grow by 6x with a record CAGR of 25% by Dec 2021; based on the forecast that digital adoption will be faster than that of traditional,” Satish concludes.

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Digital First Magazine January 2021

LEADERâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S

INSIGHTS

Trends in Advertising for the Year 2021 Arun Fernandes, CEO, Hotstuff Media Group

hile there were several memes that went on to amusingly take pot shots on the eventful year 2020, those were dark humour that actually went on to portray how the year panned into appalling uncertainty. Many of these memes have actually been used by advertisers to engage with consumers. Does this go on to signify that as dream merchants, we have always made the best use of adversity, confronted challenging situations and stood as shining examples to the society? If it were not for us, the length & breadth of India would not have connected in virtual concerts, stood in solidarity with frontline workers through our remote habitats, portrayed how complex problems could be resolved in spite of social distancing and above all made every person in the country aware of the safety measures that one needed to undertake during the pandemic. We, as a clan, are no strangers to disruption and turmoil. We have overcome economic pressures, political tensions and even natural disasters. With the outbreak and the global spread of the pandemic resulting into a complete shut-down, mega-events, gatherings and such

Digital First Magazine January 2021

Arun Fernandes is a printing technologist who leveraged his design expertise to bring campaigns and events to life, working with Indiaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s leading financial brands on National and International Campaigns for 30+ years.

Digital First Magazine January 2021

platforms that engage with brands and consumers, advertising agencies had to rejig their strategies and work doubly hard to make things happen in shoe-string budgets and remotely placed production equipment & operational teams. The world of advertising is heavily dependent on interpersonal, and human connects, but we are rethinking the way we are operating. Some of the trends that would not just dot 2021 but a new era, since there will be no going back in order to fortify the future of the planet in the first place. These could be listed as below:

The world of advertising is heavily dependent on interpersonal, and human connects, but we are rethinking the way we are operating Forging partnerships with data and tech platforms: The pandemic and the ensuing lock-downs in various phases have not just impacted the manufacturing sector & supply chain of companies but also impacted the consumer demand. Consumers have become very stringent, and most of the buying patterns are seen only in essential goods. Brands have and would in the future look at cutting down their offline budgets and invest in online, which has become essentially the market place across sectors. That apart the digital space is also a veritable consumer touchpoint for news & entertainment consumption. So a digital explosion is on the cards sooner than later.

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Hyper-engagement model Agencies would need to offer more to its clients and create Intellectual properties on the digital platforms, that would enhance the relevant consumer touchpoints. These would be engagement tools that will have to focus on creating long-term relationships with the sharply targeted audience groups instead of making ads and hard-sell. A casein-point is “Tattva” - a platform that is being created as a ‘centre of excellence’ for the BFSI segment audiences; IFAs and buyers simultaneously. A property like this is a boon to the myriad financial brand that is looking for a market place! B2B2C models through e-commerce solutions One specific surge that has been noticed and that which we will notice as a trend is the B2B2C models of businesses with a focus on e-commerce. Agencies would have to actively work with advisors and data-driven firms to create bespoke solutions for buyers. With an eye on efficiency in cost-savings, value-driven approach and gains in the short-term and sustainable growth in the mid to long-term. Focus on the experience Interaction and engagement on the virtual platforms would be key to everything. From brand launches to sporting events, the entire ecosystem is moving online, and consumers are going to engage with the brands from the comforts of their homes. Experiences, therefore and virtual transportation to another world wold be important for advertisers. Fantasy games, virtual concerts or for that matter retailing of fashion & food would all need to give the relevant experience for the consumers to buy into that experience and thereby the product. Although one may not be sure, whether all these innovations would figure out a way to negate the huge accumulated losses the industries faced this year but it is surely the right time for advertisers and advertising agencies to build capabilities in areas that would be primary in the new era. The agency of the future would need to be futuristic!

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SHIVJEET GHATGE CEO & Co-Founder, StepSetGo

REWARDING PEOPLE TO TAKE A STEP TOWARDS FITNESS

he online fitness industry has seen a significant boom since the COVID-19 outbreak. For brick and mortar gyms, franchises, and boutique fitness studios, the damage has been devastating. The almost $100 billion fitness industry has quickly shifted into a virtual world for those who have been able to adapt swiftly. However, those who haven’t implemented a digital strategy may not make it out alive, and if they do they may never be able to fiscally recover. Now the spotlight has come down to at-home equipment, streaming services, and virtual trainers. Virtual fitness has experienced major growth this year, and we feel it will continue in 2021. With people being restricted to their homes, the online fitness

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community grew by a large number, thanks to the age of the internet and smartphones. Fitness app downloads grew by nearly 50% in the first half of 2020. Everyone is trying to look for that one-stop-shop solution for fitness and the product that has it all will be closer to success soon. A simple and unique fitness application that counts your steps and rewards you for it. StepSetGo rewards the users with SSG coins (the in-app currency), which can be redeemed for exclusive discount coupons and even gifts the in-app marketplace called the ‘Bazaar’. The app rewards its user with 1 SSG coin for every 1000 steps taken, and users can purchase various products like skincare, gadgets, and

IN SEPTEMBER 2020, WE ENTERED THE TOP 50 FREE APPS IN INDIA ‘ALL’ CATEGORY AS WELL AND REACHED #2 POSITION IN THE HEALTH AND FITNESS CATEGORY IN INDIA

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apparels, and so on. “We have collaborated with leading brands like Bewakoof, Bajaj Avenger, Skechers, and Puma, among others to reward its users for walking. To build a fitter community, we also offer gamification and social engagement aspects to the users. The ‘Arena’ section in the application has various challenges for users to be a part of creating a sense of competition”, points out Shivjeet Ghatge, Co-founder and CEO, StepSetGo.

FROM 200 USERS TO 7 MILLION + USERS, STEPSETGO HAS MANAGED TO GROW ITS USER BASE SUCCESSFULLY

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A Venture by Chance The idea of StepSetGo came to life when Abhay Pai, Cofounder, and CTO, StepSetGo, randomly mentioned that he should be paid to go to the gym as fitness requires commitment and dedication. This thought made them realize that users would be continuously motivated to exercise if a reward component was added. Being a bootstrapped startup, one of the initial challenges StepSetGo faced was convincing brands to partner with them. Having been a part of the advertising and branding world, Shivjeet did manage to use his experience and build long term relationships with brands across genres. After a year in the making, they decided to launch the application on the 10th of January 2019, and with that came the challenge to make people believe in the concept of getting rewarded for walking. Shivjeet recalls, “When the app was launched, we went to NMIMS College in Bombay to do a test run. We showed it to a few students, and the reaction we got was ‘this can’t be true’, but when they took a closer look they understood the concept, and the idea was sold. By the time we came back, we had about 200 downloads through the simple refer and earn program”. What started as a conversation between three friends has now turned them into entrepreneurs. Talking about his journey, Shivjeet knows what he was getting himself into, and he was glad he was able to do it with like-minded people right from the start. What initially started as a hobby, StepSetGo has helped Shivjeet and the co-founders, Abhay and Misaal Turakhia grow their business and grow as entrepreneurs. StepSetGo emerged from them working in their homes individually to working out of Misaal’s father’s old office and finally moving to find a space big enough to accommodate 30+ team members. “The problem that we aimed to solve was simple. A large portion of the population wants to integrate fitness into their life but lack motivation. There were mainly two specific reasons: one, the lack of motivation to start and two, lack of discipline to continue once they’ve started. We try to solve both the problems by integrating rewards system, simplicity, and social interaction targeting these exact set of people”, opines Shivjeet.

Initially, StepSetGo was looked after by the cofounders in all areas of the business. Misaal, CPO and Co-founder, took care of everything from the user journey to the evolution of the product as a whole, as he already received a lot of praise for the application he had built for his father’s company. Abhay, CTO, and Co-founder handled the backend architecture of the application and made sure the tech behind the app was strong enough. Lastly, Shivjeet, CEO and Co-founder, was essentially into the marketing and finances of the business. With all three having a defined set of roles and responsibilities, StepSetGo managed to function well and now houses a team of 30+ members. By hiring people with the right attitude, the company has managed to grow its team despite most businesses laying off employees. Including everyone in their growth journey, a lot of responsibility is handed down directly to the team members, where they are given problem statements, and the best solution is picked out after coordinating with different teams and work on the solution implementation and impact. “This handing down of responsibilities has

worked for us so far. This is also manageable because we make sure the talent we hire is motivated by the concept of what StepSetGo is setting out to achieve. As we are always swamped with work, I believe that the team always puts in more work to make sure the load is shared”, opines Shivjeet. Encouraging Fitness Despite all Odds As the pandemic hit the nation, there were major challenges that StepSetGo faced during the lockdown. Initially, the app was created to count the steps that are being taken outdoors. However, with the nationwide lockdown, there was a decrease in the number of steps taken by their users. At this point, their go-to strategy was to innovate and adapt to this change. Realizing that walking is a form of exercise that can be done anywhere, whether indoors or outdoors, StepSetGo decided to change their app algorithm to calculate indoor steps. “We have also increased the reward for steps that were taken indoors. The user would now get 1.5 coins for 1000 steps if the steps were taken indoors and 1 coin for outdoor

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SHIVJEET GHATGE

First Magazine 106 Digital January 2021

steps. We also introduced a gamification aspect to the application and created hyper-casual games which gave the users more chances to earn rewards by walking”, adds Shivjeet. StepSetGo also had to build the application according to the Android system for each mobile phone as it differs for various companies. “The most prominent issue that we faced was, in the beginning, we didn’t have any ads on our application. People used to think it’s fake and used to ask why we don’t have ads on our app, and therefore we had to put sufficient ads on our app for people to know this is true and authentic”, quips Shivjeet. Nearly two years later, StepSetGo has managed to overcome these challenges and has now crossed 7+ million registered users on their application. Since its inception, StepSetGo has experienced an exponential yet stable growth. From 200 users to 7 million + users, the company has managed to grow its user base successfully. Being a bootstrapped business, StepSetGo used the most traditional form of marketing, i.e. Word of Mouth and to date, 95% of the user base is organically acquired. The most recent achievement for them has been StepSetGo’s win under the health and fitness category of the Digital India Aatmanirbhar Bharat Innovation Challenge that was announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. “Additionally, as per Similarweb’s data, we have managed to cross Aarogya Setu in user engagement under the free apps category in India. In September 2020 we entered the top 50 free apps in the Indian ‘all’ category as well and reached #2 position in the health and fitness category in India”, adds Shivjeet. From a business perspective, Shivjeet aims to build a robust team to speed up the operations and scalability of the platform, marketing the right type of message, and rapidly rolling-out innovations in solving the problems that plague the online fitness industry. Focusing on improving the app’s technology and working on using the front camera to authenticate different movements, StepSetGo aims to integrate more fun activities into the platform which will help the users stick to their planned fitness goals. “We are working towards building a comprehensive tracking ecosystem on the platform and planning to go just beyond walking so that no matter what the fitness activity is StepSetGo will be able to track and reward its users for it”, concludes Shivjeet.

DigitalEducation First Magazine Higher Digest January December October January2021 2019 2020

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SRINIVAS CHITTURI Co-Founder & CEO, MTAP Technologies

FINDING INNOVATIVE SOLUTIONS IN THE TRANSPORT AUTOMATION & OPTIMIZATION SPACE

TAP Technologies is a startup that began with one product, an automated app for Employee Transport Services (ETS) and is now a company that offers a wide range of transportation management products. Srinivas Chitturi, CoFounder and CEO of MTAP Technologies and team have created multiple applications that have revolutionized the world of B2B transport today! Despite facing severe setbacks during the onset of COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Srinivas wisely chose to reconsider MTAP’s business module, tweak the existing software to incorporate social distancing rules, and also launch new products into the market.

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Srinivas’s brainchild and the flagship product of MTAP Technologies – ‘Safetrax’ is an app that enables quick and easy scheduling, tracking, and monitoring of employee transport taxis. While Safetrax allows users to customize their User Interface, SafetraxGo is a standard, inexpensive tracking app for clients who do not require customizations. ‘Safebus’, a school bus tracking app, was launched when Srinivas noticed the need for greater optimization and safety in school bus transport. The app provides a host of security features to protect students from accidents and COVID-19 related dangers worldwide. Autologix, a rental taxi booking app that handles ad hoc travel requests for multiples types

WITH JUST 3 CLIENTS IN 2014, WE HAVE COME A LONG WAY DRIVING VALUE, INCREASING PROFITABILITY, AND SCALING AND IMPLEMENTING INNOVATIVE SOLUTIONS FOR THE PROBLEMS OF 120+ CLIENTS ACROSS 6 COUNTRIES

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of travel needs, was recently launched. Autologix empowers startups and fleet owners to scale up their transport services and stand on par with giants like Uber and Ola. Another recent launch, Autoroutes, is an API for Route Optimization and Management Software catering to different types of delivery-based businesses A True Fighter! Srinivas has evolved not only into a relentless survivor but a tough competitor during the COVID-19 pandemic! Apart from the above applications, he plunged into the e-Commerce sector and catered to small companies with 100-200 employees in the essential sectors that could not function on a work from home model. The latter was possible only after personally adopting a new perspective towards work from home and adapting it across their system. This way, Srinivas has grown MTAP Technologies to the forefront of revolutionizing Transport Automation in the world today. Srinivas articulates, â&#x20AC;&#x153;100+ Corporates and Schools, 10,000+ Vehicles, 100,000+ Passengers, 100,000+ SMS per day, 2 Million+ Calls per day, 70 Million USD monthly invoices being processed, 80 Million+ Location coordinates per day and much more milestones portray the success we have been relishing so far!â&#x20AC;? Inspirational Journey Wondering what inspired Srinivas to keep going ahead? The unrelenting passion for always solving problems around him since his school days in Aanakapalli, a small town in Andhra Pradesh! In later times, his postgraduation studies in IIT Madras and work experiences in various MNCs (General Electric, Siemens, Mentor

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Graphics UK and others) helped him hone his skills better. Srinivas chose to return to India to kickstart his entrepreneurial journey by solving India-centric problems and building solutions for them. Especially, during his tenure at iOPEX Technologies as the Director of Research and Development, he was working with various companies to help them in optimizing their operational costs across various company functions and noticed the extensive volume of trips and the complexity of transport operations. This experience, along with the sheer dearth of organizations in the ETS industry that focus on women employees’ security features, triggered Srinivas to start a venture of his own. In 2014, Srinivas and his team created a routing algorithm to enable planning, management, and optimization of iOPEX’s employees’ transport operations. Post a series of tests and its results, he launched this product as Safetrax with an initial seed round from the iOPEX founding team. Safebus was launched within in the next 18 months. Srinivas adds, “With just 3 clients in 2014, we have come a long way driving value, increasing profitability, and scaling and implementing innovative solutions for the problems of 120+ clients across 6 countries. In fact, it is a mark of pride for us that our very first customer from SAP is still with us because of our transparent approach and robust technology”. Today, Srinivas’s MTAP Technologies is at the forefront of the Transport Automation & Optimization space with 4 prime attributes: Optimization, Transparency, Safety and Digitization. Optimization for reducing the number of vehicles and trips required for both economic and ecological purposes, transparency

SRINIVAS HAS GROWN MTAP TECHNOLOGIES TO THE FOREFRONT OF REVOLUTIONIZING TRANSPORT AUTOMATION IN THE WORLD TODAY

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across every step of the management process to gain the clients’ trust, safety to lessen the violence against women through stringent safety features and emergency protocols, and digitization to make everything simpler, quicker and in the moment. Behind the success of MTAP stands its team of ace experts, especially the tech team who have been with them since inception. Thanks to its entrepreneurship model, flat organizational structure, ownership in jobs, motivation to stay innovative, and fun activities to relieve stress and build team spirit; the company has witnessed flying colours so far. Srinivas is accompanied by Satvir Kohli (Vice President & Head-Sales, MTAP Technologies), a postgraduate at ICFAI with 13 years of business development experience across diverse fields. At MTAP, he spearheads new product launches and business acquisition and drives growth, strategy and global expansion.

SRINIVAS CHITTURI

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Going Ahead Srinivas asserts, “Our short-term goals are to build our client base, fine-tune our services further, and launch Autologix internationally. Our long-term goals are to achieve 10 times growth in the next 3 years with new products and regions”. He plans on foraying into the indoor tracking, and the logistics space, offering 360-degree transport management solutions, evolving into a public company, and establishing a strong presence across the Middle East, Malaysia, China, Qatar, New Zealand, Singapore and others in the next 18 months. Moreover, Srinivas’s main goal is to build a Shopify environment enabling fleet operators to survive and flourish with technology on par with large transportation as a competitive service platform player. He also believes in going green at MTAP by working with some of the largest EV fleet operators in the world to help them leverage technology to make it more adoptable.

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LEADER’S

INSIGHTS

How the

‘New Normal’ will impact Industrial Parks across India Prakash Patel, Founder & Managing Director, Bhumi World

he COVID-19 pandemic has brought global manufacturing and supply chain realignment into sharp focus, with the outbreak accelerating a wide array of established trends. In particular, we’ve seen supply chain vulnerabilities exposed. This is owed to over-dependence and over-centralization causing massive disruptions to the production cycles as we face an unprecedented health crisis. From strategic risk diversification to cost considerations and business continuity concerns, businesses are increasingly looking for alternative global manufacturing destinations, with manufacturing in India set to benefit. There are a lot of factors here that are working in favour of manufacturing in India. India has the 2nd largest labour pool globally as per the International Labour Organization 2018 statistics and while it is extremely competitive on hourly wages comparison, the regulatory reforms and initiatives that have been undertaken over the past 3-4 years have set the ground for the Indian manufacturing ecosystem going forward.

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Known as the Industrial Real Estate Entrepreneur, Mr. Prakash Patel, the Founder and Managing Director of Bhumi World is a young and dynamic leader. Mr. Prakash Patel ventured into the business at a rather early age and already has a decade of work experience behind him. This has given him a phenomenal advantage in managing business and implementation of strategies. He has led Bhumi World to new heights with his profound business knowledge and industrious attitude and it is his endeavour that has made Bhumi World the best real estate developer for industrial parks in Maharashtra. He aims to continue building exclusive and well-planned private industrial parks across India, which will cater to increasing demand for quality manufacturing, warehousing and commercial spaces, hospitals and educational institutions and more. It is through these industrial parks that Mr. Prakash Patel envisions to contribute to the economic growth and employment opportunities across the country. Mr. Patel has received the Bharat Gaurav Award for his distinguished services to the nation and outstanding Individual Achievements at the House of Common British Parliament -London. Additionally, the Government of India has also felicitated him for Excellence in MSME growth.

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Factors contributing to the growth of manufacturing in India India’s rise to 63rd position in the 2019 World Bank’s Ease of doing business rankings from 142nd in 2014, ensured it is one of the most improved nations on the list. Secondly, the push to lower corporate taxes has resulted in India offering one of the lowest corporate tax rates globally, at 15% for new Indian manufacturing firms. This demonstrates the goal of ramping up manufacturing to make greater contributions to GDP. From a comparative perspective, India’s manufacturing sector accounts for around 1/6th of the GDP, compared to China where manufacturing accounts for a 39% share of the country’s GDP. In particular, India performed exceptionally well in the cost scenario, which includes indicators such as labour, electricity, construction costs, ranking third after China and Vietnam. Although in the risk scenario, which considers economic, corporate, energy, natural disaster risks, India ranked relatively poorly in 30th place, the continued shift up the Ease of Doing Business rankings and the continued regulatory support for manufacturing should do much to assuage concerns. At the heart of Atmanirbhar Bharat and Vocal for Local is the drive for indigenization of manufacturing, supporting not only the vast domestic demand but also attracting manufacturing firms to the large consumer base that the country offers. In particular, India has identified key industry clusters in which it has been performing well, including hardware and electronics, and rolled out incentive schemes like the PLI (Production Linked incentives). This supports the re-shoring of large-scale electronic manufacturing to India. The move follows the earlier implementation of the 100% FDI in contract manufacturing and the National Electronics Policy 2019. The results of these policy decisions have been encouraging, with global OEMs and component manufacturers making a beeline to set up shop or expand capacity in India. Global players such as Wistron, Pegatron, Foxconn and Hon Hai from Taiwan, Samsung from South Korea, as well as firms from Germany and

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India has an estimated USD 1.5 trillion expenditure planned for the next five years towards capacity building and augmentation in its infrastructure

Austria have applied for benefits under the PLI scheme so far. Indeed, from complete assembly to component manufacturing we’ve seen India shift to being considered a key part of global supply chain realignment. Further PLI schemes have been rolled out for medical devices manufacturing and incentives offered for pharmaceutical bulk drug production, automotive, textiles and food processing, all of which have a strong domestic consumption component as well. Finally, there is also a renewed emphasis on making India self-reliant in defence equipment manufacturing, as well as becoming a global exporter. As a result, FDI under the automatic route in defence manufacturing was eased to 74% from the earlier 49%. The future of manufacturing in India There is a need for trunk infrastructure development to power the growth of India’s manufacturing sector. It has been established that investments in infrastructure have the potential to yield multiple results in how private investments chase such large public investments. India has an estimated USD 1.5 trillion expenditure planned for the next five years towards capacity building and augmentation in its infrastructure. The target of doubling the existing port capacity of 1,500 MT, which has already doubled in the last five years, bodes well. An increasing port haulage, shipbuilding capacity and using the portland for green energy generation will push the manufacturing agenda even further. The investments in highways, road capacity increase, railways and the setting up of industrial corridors, thus connecting the industrial/manufacturing enclaves to trunk infrastructure, will greatly improve speed to market and support reduction in logistics costs. The government needs to push ahead some key reforms to attract investments and boost India’s manufacturing sector. Easier land acquisition rules for the industry and

labour reforms need urgent attention. The government has moved to consolidate 44 labour laws into four labour codes but, at present, only the Code on Wages has been passed by Parliament. The other three codes – Industrial Relations, Social Security, Health & Working Conditions – are still pending. Implementing a nationwide Investment Clearance Cell and National Logistics Policy, which were announced in Union Budget 2020-21 will create a more favourable investment scenario. The Central government has made overtures to global firms who are looking to diversify their manufacturing supply chains in the post-COVID-19 world. Certain state governments have taken steps to reduce investment bottlenecks and boost investments. Karnataka has amended its land acquisition law and made it easier for companies to directly purchase land from farmers. Gujarat has announced that it will allot land to companies in 7 days and all necessary approvals will be provided in 15 days. Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and Telangana are preparing dedicated incentive packages for electronics manufacturers. Despite these state-specific measures, the central government will have to take the lead in key structural reforms and policies for long term manufacturing growth in India. Tax reduction and related incentives though may not be enough. Becoming taxfriendly and by extension, industry-friendly is more critical. From the simplification of the GST code to improving tax transparency and certainty in taxation policy and procedure are critical factors. While tariff barriers on imports may support the local manufacturing industry, mutually favourable trade agreements with other countries and regions will go a long way in giving a push to India’s manufacturing ambitions. The window of opportunity is small and agility is needed to translate the efforts being made to woo the world’s global manufacturing giants into the reality of India becoming a prominent manufacturing nursery for the world.

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SUDHIR KOTHARI Founder & CEO, Embee Software Pvt Ltd

OWNING THE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION CHRYSALIS

nspiration and motivation are everywhere; only if you would just look would you see. Years back, a young 12-year-old boy found his inspiration to achieve greatness while he was in the company of an individual working for Tata Steel. The said individual would speak laurels of Shri JRD Tata, and this influenced the young boy’s mind so much so that he grew a passion for creating something unique. However, it is one thing to have a plan and passion, it is another to follow through and materialize these ambitions. This young boy grew up to be Sudhir Kothari, CEO and Managing Director, Embee Software Pvt. Ltd., and boy did he follow through! A Commerce graduate from St. Xavier’s College, Calcutta, Sudhir believed that

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kindness and teamwork marked the success of any project, plan or business. It is a testament to this belief of his that Embee Software successfully completed 34+ years. In 1986, when India was far from tech-savvy, and smartphones were unheard of, Sudhir keenly followed technological advancements and had an eye for envisioning tomorrow’s needs today. As mentioned earlier, Sudhir brought with him a commerce background and not something shiny from the tech stream. Nevertheless, under his guidance, Embee took its first steps and sold global licenses of Microsoft and Lotus, whose proposals were prepared on typewriters. In 2010, the company gained ranks and became a global Microsoft strategic partner.

I HAVE ALWAYS BELIEVED IN BRINGING DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION TO THE COMPANIES TO CONTINUE TO GROW AND EVOLVE SUSTAINABLY

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Acting on the Vision As the organization grew, he envisioned Embee as the technology partner for all its customers. However, to further his vision, he had to hire the right employees and streamline the processes. It was incredibly important that he get a team who share the same vision, as the company was looking forward to rapidly extend its operations. So how did he navigate these challenges? In his own words, “It can be solved by being exclusive in terms of ultra-specific advertisements that assist in pre-qualifying candidates. The employee hunt needs to be approached in the same manner as that of a customer-centric marketing campaign. I am thankful to my entire Embee team to ensure we continue to grow even at these unprecedented times. I believe in giving complete operational freedom to my team members to not hesitate to come up with new ideas and try out of the box things. I am here just to guide them and provide a vision for future goals. I strongly believe in ‘Intrapreneurial’ way of working. Every BU leader is the owner of his or her business.” This open-mindedness and appreciation environment is another reason why most of the employees that the company had onboarded initially continue to serve the company even today. During the pandemic, even with all of its 500+ employees working from home from 10 different cities around the country, there has been no significant hiccups in the business process. This is where the marvel of the technopreneur that Sudhir is come to show. “We clearly defined goals, values, and accountabilities for employees so that they can move the business forward with agility. They can make their own decisions quickly and operate with confidence and use this opportunity to learn and develop,” he says. It is no surprise that Embee could transform 1000+ companies with deep expertise in Cloud, data and apps in the last 4 years. With a mission to enable organizations transform with technology in a digital, mobile-first, data-driven world, Embee Software Pvt. Ltd today stands as a leading technology partner in India, delivering digital transformation solution to its 2000+ customers. Embee specializes in Cloud and Datacentre Technologies, enabling clients to leverage the latest resources on various Cloud platforms while optimizing costs, through application modernization and serverless computing. Embee also helps customers do more with their data, enabling data warehousing and business intelligence solutions. Embee collaborates with customers to help adopt the most advanced technologies around mobility and security, enabling new-age collaboration in an organization while maintaining information security. Moreover, Embee has a wide portfolio of app offerings for

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STAYING TRUE TO HIS MOTTO OF CHANGING RESPONSIBLY WITH TIME, SUDHIR WAS ABLE TO WITNESS EMBEE ENJOY A GROWTH OF 25% CAGR FOR LAST 4 YEARS REACHING USD 100M REVENUE BY FY20, WHILE THE SERVICES REVENUE IS GROWING AT 100% CAGR

the years, I have successfully run Embee on a self-sustainable model, so we don’t need to acquire new customers every time just to survive. This is something that I want other companies to achieve. I have always believed in bringing digital transformation to the companies to continue to grow and evolve sustainably. Building a strong company culture and creating something from nothing has been some of the key significant milestones during my entrepreneurial journey. I feel overwhelmed to have a team of having a team that trusts and moves forward with the same goal. “he adds.

SUDHIR KOTHARI start-ups, ranging from solutions on the Microsoft platform, to integrated ERP solutions on SAP Business One, and a home-grown modular IP, Octane HRMS. To top it all, Embee is regarded for its support services, which includes a remote 24×7 managed services for all its solutions. Staying true to his motto of changing responsibly with time, Sudhir was able to witness Embee enjoy a growth of 25% CAGR for last 4 years reaching USD 100M revenue by FY20, while the services revenue is growing at 100% CAGR. From being a software reselling to becoming a front runner in the technology solutions and services industry, Embee has now matured into being a trusted technology and strategic partner that’s enabling organizations to leverage a wide range of technologies towards their own transformation. Having successfully run Embee for close to 3 decades, Sudhir says that his entrepreneurial journey has been an amazing roller coastal ride. Fuelled with a passion for learning, re-learn, unlearn and grow, Sudhir is a prime example that one must transform with time to avoid being left out. “Transformation is crucial to survive and succeed in any situation. Over

Future Goals and Aspirations Sudhir iterates that the future is digital, and this disruption that the pandemic has forced upon should be wisely used by businesses and institutions to adapt and transform with technology. He says that Cloud computing has become a big gamechanger in all the sectors offering the benefits of flexibility, scalability, remote work management, data security, unlimited storage, easy access, pay as you go model, and data analytics. Many organizations are even shifting to hybrid cloud models to address the need to analyze data closer to the source. Big Data including Application Modernization, Data security and backups will also be important pieces of the digital transformation puzzle in the coming years. “We are geared up to bring Embee’s transformation 2.0, orchestrating solution and services to help make businesses smarter and grow faster. Our long-term goal is to make Embee a complete consulting, solutions, and service provider with industry domain expertise. We are gearing up to be ready for the next wave of transformation by embracing new technologies and enhancing the customer’s value proposition. We also plan to upgrade the skills within the teams to dive deeper into data and app modernization services such as AI and ML and create managed services annuity revenue service stream, which also gives complete visibility,” concludes Sudhir Kothari.

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THIRUKUMARAN NAGARAJAN Co-founder & CEO, Ninjacart

REMOVING THE OBSTACLES BETWEEN FARMERS AND CONSUMERS THROUGH TECHNOLOGY

onsuming a significant part of 2020, the pandemic and lockdown have proven to be a testing time for various businesses across sectors. Challenges like transportation, limited working hours, labour shortage, and restricted market access disrupted daily essentials deliveries, including fresh produce. The situation was challenging, there were many variables in terms of rules and regulations that we had to adhere to. Nobody was sure which part of the supply chain would be operational. Although entrepreneurs have come across many roadblocks, right from

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developing an efficient supply chain model to executing operations’ daily functioning, the pandemic turned out to a feat in itself. For many entrepreneurs and startups, the pandemic provided an opportunity to see the bigger picture. At the outset of the pandemic, Ninjacart started engaging with stakeholders to boost their confidence and recruited a workforce. The company has launched multiple initiatives during the lockdown to try and stabilize or rather help the ecosystem. With a vision of ‘safe food to billion people,’ Ninjacart started delivering

AS A TEAM, FOR US, A SENSE OF PURPOSE TO DECODE CRITICAL REAL-WORLD PROBLEMS TRIGGERS IDEAS, INNOVATIONS, AND OPPORTUNITIES TO GROW

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THIRUKUMARAN NAGARAJAN

fresh produce to housing societies, colonies and extended a helping hand to Orphanages, Old-Age Homes, and Slum Areas. “We launched Harvest The Farm initiative to help farmers find buyers by partnering with Hyperlocal platforms like Swiggy, Zomato, and Dunzo. The intention was to deliver fresh produce to end consumers directly from farms”, says Thirukumaran Nagarajan, Co-founder, and CEO, Ninjacart. Making Fresh Produce Easy to Consume Changing the way Indian consumes fresh produce, Ninjacart empowers farmers in numerous ways by solving their problems or issues through their tech-

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enabled supply-chain along with increased benefits. The company sources fresh produce from farmers and directly supplies it to retailers, grocery store owners, and small businesses across 11 cities within hours of being picked up from the farms. “We work closely with farmers, providing data-driven recommendations on what crop to grow and communicate accurate pre-harvesting pricing information and demand patterns. We are a one-point sale, so farmers can focus on farming, spending more time learning new farming techniques, and retailers can enjoy the convenience of receiving fresh produce delivered at their doorstep without visiting the market in the morning”, adds Thirukumaran.

varying capabilities. After completing his MBA, Thirukumaran began his career as an infrastructure desk indicator at Axis Bank. Planning to build something that could contribute to make a difference, he says, “When I finally had the opportunity, I decided to build something that will contribute to society and also add towards self-growth, simultaneously. Many business plans went from the drawing board to actually executed concepts like a CFA Coaching Institute which my co-founder and closest friend Sharath and I started, a Biryani Cloud Kitchen long before the ‘no physical dining space’ became a trend and EduRaft Solutions Private Limited an education and schooling company. However, sustainability and scalability were major concerns that unfortunately prevented us from really moving forward with these projects”. Building these companies came with its own set of challenges and learnings. Still, it was only until Thirukumaran landed on the premise of Ninjacart that they realized that they had something impactful and bridged a muchneeded gap in an ecosystem flooded with flaws.

Technology is the core part of Ninjacart, the company leverages deep machine learning, data science, and mobile app-based platforms for the smooth functioning of farm to fork. Each crate has an RFID tag attached to it, which identifies easy commute routes providing realtime location information to various centres and retailers. With traceability infrastructure in place, we keep a tab on the movement of fresh produce across the supply chain, from being delivered to the Collection Centre by farmers to the end consumers or businesses. Completing his PGDM in Finance and Operations from IIM Kozhikode, Thirukumaran has worked with ABB, Axis Bank, Aavishkar & TaxiForSure in

Making Complicated Processes Seamless Learning how to build a robust startup during his time in Taxi4Sure for 9 months, Thirukumaran started Ninjacart, an e-commerce platform, after converting a location-based social network app, Shout App. The journey of Ninjacart started when Thirukumaran decided to address the challenging reality of India’s disrupted Sabzi Mandi. Farmers used to sell the harvested produce to a middleman, and since their produce was perishable, they often had to compromise by selling it for a lesser value. “At the initial stage of our operations, for months, we did overnight trips to the fruit and vegetable markets to learn and understand the complicated supply chain framework. The process went from farmer to middleman to aggregator to retailer and then finally to the consumer, which was an unnecessarily complicated process”, reminisces Thirukumaran. Eliminating the middleman and any unfair trade practices followed by various stakeholders at every stage of the supply chain, Ninjacart successfully standardized every small part of the supply chain.

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TECHNOLOGY IS THE CORE PART OF NINJACART, THE COMPANY LEVERAGES DEEP MACHINE LEARNING, DATA SCIENCE, AND MOBILEAPP-BASED PLATFORMS FOR THE SMOOTH FUNCTIONING OF FARM TO FORK

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The core team involves six Co-Founders, including Thirukumaran, Sharath Loganathan, Vasudevan Chinnathambi, Kartheeswaran KK, and Ashutosh Vikram, and Sachin Jose, who met through CommonFloor. Joining together in 2015, they built a team that would make decisions in the company’s interests. From day one, they made sure to have a transparent relationship where one can initiate a candid or open conversation and talk about problems. “Over the years, we have nurtured a relationship of brotherhood amongst us. We are a family-like partnership, who are honest with each other, and collectively working towards building a large company. The inspiration to solve complex problems in the supply chain motivates the clan of Ninjacart. As a team, for us, a sense of purpose to decode critical real-world problems triggers ideas, innovations, and opportunities to grow”, says Thirukumaran. Challenges experienced during the pandemic accelerated the urgency of adopting technology at each level of the supply chain, building an infrastructure that will withstand the unexpected disruptions. Technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), remote sensing, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and data analytics are some of the most innovative technologies that are changing the way we consume fresh produce making daily tasks more automated. It has proven effective in reducing food wastage, preserving quality, improving traceability, etc. “We have used sophisticated algorithms, leveraged big data, created a harvest the farm calendar and a mobile app-based platform. The sector is emerging but is still evolving at a very nascent stage, and technology will continue to play an important role in this transformation”, opines Thirukumaran. Setting a goal for themselves to provide safe food for a billion people by integrating the process of residue-free farming methods, Thirukumaran concludes, “We are heavily investing in Machine Learning (ML) to improve forecasting, pricing engine optimization, and crop recommendation to farmers based on our 5 years of data and research. We look forward to adding more farmers to the Ninjacart family and associate with other partners who believe in growth and a sustainable approach. Leveraging strengths and resources to innovate for new product categories and customer segments while solving complex supply chain problems remains of prime importance to the platform”.

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Digital First Magazine Higher Education Digest January 2021 October 2020

LEADERâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S

INSIGHTS

How India Based MSP are Outperforming

Global Competitors? Prateek Garg, CEO & Founder, Progressive Infotech

t is expected that by the end of the year 2023, the managed services market will be growing from USD 180.5 Billion in 2020 to USD 282 in 2023, at a CAGR of 9.3%. By the end of the year 2020, the Global Managed Services Market is expected to reach USD 245 billion. As reported by experts, the managed services market is anticipated to witness a CAGR of 11.27% over the forecasted period of 2020 to 2025, of which Indian MSPs are going to be a trendsetter. With the world witnessing a paradigm shift in terms of recent technologies and trends, businesses have redefined their way of working. The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in disruptions in various sectors such as Retail, Hospitality, Aviation or Automobile, etc. The outbreak has brought the economy of the country to its knees. But the IT sector has managed to stay afloat and become a leader during these difficult times. The work-from-anywhere culture, technological advancement, rising competition, and most importantly, the pandemic situation has made it more challenging to run a business. With the enhanced aspects

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Prateek Garg is an entrepreneur and a technology visionary. Prateek was felicitated at the 9th ‘Asia Pacific Entrepreneurship Awards-2018’, where he received the award for his continued efforts and innovations in the field of ‘IT, Internet and Telecommunication’. Prateek has chaired the Western UP Zonal Council- Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) as Vice-Chairman (2013-14) and as Chairman (2014-15). He is the CII Co-Chairmen Northern Region (2019-20) for Artificial Intelligence (AI).

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of business operations, managing unpredictable expenses and their complexity under a single umbrella becomes backbreaking and hefty. This is where Managed Service Providers (MSP) serves as a true IT partner.

India was hosting more than 1,150+ global inhouse captive centres, which allow almost half of the top 500 global companies to work in India

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What Is A Managed Service Provider? A Managed Service Provider offers managed services to end-users and organizations on a proactive basis. It is an outsourced third-party company that manages and assumes the responsibility of providing day to day IT services to the customers. The term MSP traditionally was applied to IT infrastructure or device-centric types of services but has expanded to include any continuous, regular management, maintenance and support. MSPs have been in action since the 1990s and were responsible for remote IT infrastructure management (RIM). However, now with the advancement of technology, their portfolio of services has been expanded. MSP’s have become an integral part of the progressive IT companies. The requisite services that Managed Service Providers provide are● Service Desk ● Digital Workplace Services ● Data Centre Management ● Disaster Management ● Cloud Services ● Network Management ● Cybersecurity & GRC Services ● Data Analytics & AI/ML Services When you have outsourced your managed services, you can then focus on your core business –vision, strategies, and growth, instead of being bogged down by operations. A managed service provider can handle one or more aspects, especially the supporting areas so that the businesses can focus on its core competencies. They guarantee round-the-clock availability, security, and experience management and improves flexibility, reliability and performance for your business while being a single point of accountability. As per conventional wisdom, people believe inhouse operations are always cheaper than outsourcing, but conventional wisdom forgets to discount the cost of time involved in carrying out repetitive routine functions. Therefore, MSPs serve as an efficient option for carrying out routine functions. Nowadays, the cost of setting up and maintaining an IT infrastructure is too high, especially if you are a small business operating with limited resources. Also, you have to keep on investing additional amounts

ABOUT PRATEEK GARG AND PROGRESSIVE INFOTECH

Prateek has seed funded and is currently mentoring a Silicon Valley startup called Centilytics (www.centilytics.com), which is an intelligent cloud management platform (CMP). The startup is part of the tier-1 global accelerator, StartX at Stanford University, Palo Alto. Prateek holds a bachelorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s degree in Electronics and Telecommunications Engineering from the National Institute of Technology (NIT), Kurukshetra, India. He has attended the Management Development Programs at XLRI, Jamshedpur and INSEAD, Singapore. Unflinching commitment toward customer success continues to remain Prateekâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s core belief. Trusted IT partner since 1998, Progressive Infotech is a next-generation managed services company that provides a comprehensive suite of IT transformation and support services. Progressive is constantly redefining the way IT services are being delivered and consumed with assured outcomes. Headquartered in the National Capital Region (NCR)Noida in India.

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in keeping the systems updated. MSPs are considered to be a strategic method feasible for enhancing daily enterprise-related operations, and by doing so, companies can avoid the direct cost of managing the program themselves.

The future of service levels will be measured by experience, not SLAs

How Indian MSPs Are Outperforming Global Competitors Indian MSP has a greater focus on partnership, i.e. they act as a partner who understands the business goals of their customers and are better equipped to improve their partner’s business strategically. They are more willing to conduct in-depth discoveries to understand and provide tailored solutions to their customers. India was hosting more than 1,150+ global in-house captive centres, which allow almost half of the top 500 global companies to work in India. Focus towards offering cost-effective solutions with the available pool of local IT talent and the emergence of innovative IT startups. Thus ● Controlling IT costs ● Increasingly specialized technologies with the primary focus on operational efficiency ● Domain experts managing the IT operations ● Innovative solutions fueled by startups ● Stable Government and Supportive Policies ● Second-largest English-speaking population in the world after the USA

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Service providers maintain service relationships with their customers based on agreedupon service levels called SLA, which is an agreement between the service provider and customers to define key service targets and responsibilities. The future of service levels will be measured by experience, not SLAs. SLAs measure the process or completing an objective. Experience Level Agreements (XLAs), on the other hand, measures the outcome and value. MSPs should quickly imbibe XLAs to deliver positive end-user experiences and drive productivity and business value; thus, MSPs need to constantly monitor, manage, and maintain experience. With the rising competition, rapid progress in technology, shrinking of capital budgets, it is difficult for businesses to keep up with the trends. However, even in such case scenarios, Indian managed service providers with the help of their gamut of services, predictable expense, and a large pool of talent, are a boon to organizations who are looking forward to implementing cutting-edge business practices for enhancing revenues. Without any doubt, partnerships with Indian-based managed service providers have optimized their operations and fostered innovation without having the organizations alone to fight an increasingly uphill battle.

Higher Education Digest September 2020

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VENKATESH RAO Founder & Managing Director, Xfurbish

THE ENGINEER ENCOURAGING IT COMPANIES GO GREEN

-waste is a threat that has been challenging the world for quite some time now. In 2020 alone, the world generated a record 53.6 million tonnes of e-waste, with India standing as the third biggest contributor. The countryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s share, as per a recent report by the Central Pollution Control Board is that India generated 1,014,961 tonnes of e-waste in 2020. Sending e-waste to dump yards wastes an opportunity to recycle valuable materials inside them. Why is reuse/ recycling important? The part of the whole is as useful as the whole; especially when it comes to electronics.

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For instance, in the service sector, the availability of electronic spare parts is always a challenge. As humans, we cannot predict which spares will fail, and despite all planning, we could still fall short and end up buying a new appliance. Usually, this requirement for a new appliance can be avoided if the part could be acquired from a trustworthy reseller who is adept t recycling and reusing. This could not only save money but also save the environment a great deal. This is where Venkatesh Rao K got his idea to bring e-scrap resellers under one roof and provide a virtual marketplace that can provide electronic spare parts that are refurbished, from

WE ARE INTO PURPOSEDRIVEN BUSINESS. ACROSS THE GLOBE, THERE IS HUGE E-WASTE GENERATED

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VENKATESH RAO

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trustworthy sellers. He named this virtual marketplace Xfurbish, launched it in January 2020, and has not looked back since. “We are into purpose-driven business. Across the globe, there is huge e-waste generated. When disposed of, these electronic devices contain many toxic components capable of destroying the environment by leaking into the soil and poisoning the water. This can affect plant and animal habitat and will cause severe effects when consumed by human life. Xfurbish identifies that possibly one of the best ways to give a product a “Second Life” is through refurbishment because it helps you to buy an equally new product and also contributes to our planet,” says Venkatesh Rao K, Founder, Xfurbish.com. Venkatesh started his career in 2006 from a reputed company. Three years later, he found his calling and started his venture with his partners, Sureworks from a humble one-room office. Today, Sureworks Group of companies have 315 resources and 27 offices across India. He started by taking care of the engineering department at Sureworks, gradually moving on to don the hats of Technical Director, Business Director and, at present, heading the Strategic & Planning Division as Director, responsible for the expansion of our business model and growth. It was Sureworks that helped build eMazel Tech Pvt Ltd, under which Venkatesh launched xfurbish.com. Today Xfurbish is the largest refurbished online marketplace in India for IT refurbished products like servers, storage, networking, laptops, desktops, printers and peripherals. Following strict diligence in seller enrolment, Xfurbish does not compromise on the quality of service. A testament to this is that despite being new to the business, the company enjoys 500+ sellers, 3000 happy customers (40% repetitive), and has more than 1,50,000 products listed on the xfurbish.com site. “We work as a team, with each performing in various roles, driven by a set of business processes and values, making a more efficient, streamlined organization overall. After extensive research, we found out that there was no market information about the resellers of IT products. The sector is highly scattered,

XFURBISH IS THE LARGEST REFURBISHED ONLINE MARKETPLACE IN INDIA FOR IT REFURBISHED PRODUCTS LIKE SERVERS, STORAGE, NETWORKING, LAPTOPS, DESKTOPS, PRINTERS AND PERIPHERALS

and resellers are only dealing with a fixed customer base, not reaching out to market at large. We also observed that neither there exists proper education nor information about the refurbished IT products for the public at large. The buyers are forced to buy only new units, even if they canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t afford it. Given a chance, they would happily go in for refurbished equipment, if they are convinced about the quality. Xfurbish focuses on customer-centric imperatives that provide various categories of products, enhanced customer support, adaptability, security & compliance,â&#x20AC;? he adds. Venkatesh and his team are now working towards an online service portfolio of engineers in the service field so that anyone can book any technical resource for onetime service in the IT sector via online. It could be any service related to desktop, notebook, installation, Linux resource, CCI resources or skills that require a skilled IT technician. Launched simultaneously in India and UAE, trustworthiness and reliability are two important aspects that they stress on. Therefore, Xfurbish ensures that with every purchase, the seller offers a warranty period. Moreover, the huge price difference between brand new and the refurbished IT equipment is an added bonus! Having just entered the market last year, Xfurbish, under the guidance of Venkatesh, has already proved its mettle as a trusted brand among customers and suppliers. The company has grown its network over a year and looks forward to increasing its bandwidth in revenue and services in 2021. The company expects a 300% growth in revenue and is working towards establishing its presence in Nigeria in February, soon to be followed in the USA, other African Countries, Europe and Asian countries.

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EXPERT

OPINION

Integrated Campaigns: How to Create O2O (offline to online) Experiences Rohit Sakunia, Co-Founder & CBO, Art-E Mediatech

he whole world is adjusting to the disruptive role of technology, and marketers are now finding various ways to utilize it to grab the attention of the endconsumer. In under a decade, we have experienced how people have moved their average shopping experiences online. Beginning with procuring groceries, gadgets, and clothing, to consuming content for entertainment, online mediums have diversified the engagement touchpoints through a plethora of marketing campaign ideas. In India, we are undergoing a digital transformation unlike anything seen in history, with projections indicating that millions more will be added in the coming years, taking the total tally of active internet users past 800 million. With this potential staring at brands, they are keen to explore several opportunities, including integrated O2O (offline to online) experiences, which can direct even first-time users towards online modes of operation, thereby elevating the chances of brand recall.

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As one of the co-founders of Art-E Mediatech, Rohit Sakuniaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s journey began in 2018, as 4 friends came together to establish a newage digital marketing firm. The ambition was to develop digital and technology-led brand solutions using a consultative approach for rapidly evolving needs of brands. As CBO of Art-E, Rohit is responsible for the communication and business development, spearheading long term strategies, stakeholder management and everyday operations. Within 2 years, his leadership has ensured scaling-up 4-member founding team to the current 100 artists at Art-E, while expanding within the country and internationally.

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While the utilitarian nature of online campaigns to drive purchases offline has observed success qua industry, it is offline to the online experience that needs some awareness among end-users. We often hear about users checking out product reviews or information online before they visit physical stores to finalize on a purchase. Similarly, brands will be keen to adopt offline techniques to draw customers to increase online sales, provided it begins to show the desired results.

The top priority for every brand is to be remembered as a market leader in the product or service they deliver Using offline tools to connect users to products and services online There are numerous examples that showcase how this can be achieved. For instance, if we were to take promotions for a TV show into consideration, interest can be generated through the physical display of ads on billboards, public transportation etc. Information can be made accessible through the clicking of a picture on a mobile phone, QR code scanner, or by typing-in a code. Brands can assure users of discounts, offers, or even surprise them with prizes, as a part of their efforts to create brand awareness. Moreover, since the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, a whole host of everyday services have moved online. In the F&B industry, public displays about brands can lead the user to a restaurantâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s menu, including the

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opportunity to avail discounts, while ensuring contactless and socially distanced servicing. Pizza franchise chains often operate in this sphere, providing attractive offers to anyone who accesses their online portals through brickand-mortar stores or physically promoted ads. On similar lines, print ads on newspapers, brochures and magazines can be direct users seamlessly to online e-commerce portals, where traction is increased through an upward trend in online traffic. Additionally, in a post-COVID scenario, brands must also conduct campaigns that allow customers to willingly provide details such as e-mail, or those which encourage them to follow social media handles, thereby creating a space for the user to associate a particular brand when they think of purchasing the product. For gaining a perspective, an example would be of a niche merchandise store conducting promotions at airports, malls, etc. where they promote app downloads to customers so that they receive offers in return. The future of technology in delivering integrated solutions The top priority for every brand is to be remembered as a market leader in the product or service they deliver. In meeting the expectations of users, brands have begun to use new-age technologies to excite them about new launches. Since the advent of machine learning, AI, and data analytics in online shopping, brands are able to decipher to the T, which demographic to target, price expectations of customers, and behavioural patterns pertaining to product purchases. However, a world that remains deeply connected in the physical realm still requires a personalized experience that involves direct interactions. Be it URLs or product links accessed through public displays, VR (virtual reality) experiences at malls or AR (Augmented reality) experiences through code scans, the next generation of technology will enhance the human-centred design interface, in a bid to connect the physical with the digital in a far more sophisticated and aesthetic manner. Whether brands indulge in flashy promotions, or simple and agile offline campaigns leading to online sources, the experience is enhanced only when the end goal happens to meet the consumersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; requirements. Using out of the box offline promotional ideas can still create the desired impact on the customer to go check the products online, considering that people are yearning to interact in current times, and engage socially in public places.

Powerful protection designed for PC gamers

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