DECODING INNOVATION

SURESH SAMBANDAM, CEO OF KISSFLOW, EXPLAINS HOW LOW CODE/NO-CODE PLATFORMS BOOST DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

What can you tell us about your company?

Kissflow has a bit of a long history. We were pioneers in the low code/no-code space, and we launched in 2012 as a no-code platform for workflows. We were one of the first companies to launch at the Google I/O event because they had never allowed third-party products to be launched before. We got to our first 100 customers in 2013, and we succeeded in penetrating 160 countries. Now, we have around more than a million users, including 50 Fortune 500 companies using our software.

In fact, we are in a unique position in the Middle East with some really big enterprise customers. This includes the global FMCG company Reckitt Benckiser, which has more than 10,000 licenses of Kissflow, and the multinational food company Danone.

Another reason why the Middle East is very strategic for us is because we have many oil and gas companies that use Kissflow. These are names like McDermott, Total Oil, Abraj Energy, and even one division of Saudi Aramco. So that is why we started operations in the region with Dubai as the HQ, and we have some key people coming on board now.

What has been the impact of this pandemic on your business? Do you see increased demand for your solutions because of remote working?

The impact has been twofold. First, initially, we feared that there would be a loss in productivity due to remote working, but our productivity actually went up by 15-20 percent.

In terms of business, there was a little bit of panic in the first six months since the outbreak of this pandemic. But soon after, people realised that they needed to embrace this new normal and digital transformation initiative. As a result, in the second half of the pandemic, we registered a 20 percent growth in business compared to the same period last year.

Now, companies want to automate their business processes and move to digital operations. And because we are in digital workplace and low code/nocode space, this situation is ideal for us. So we have actually benefited from this pandemic because we sell primarily to large enterprises looking to automate their processes.

How can CIOs embrace innovation and disruptive technologies when they are faced with budget constraints?

The answer is they need to look at modern, non-classical approaches to innovation. For example, the classical approach to IT innovation is to conceive a project, engage an IT services company to build the solution for you, and then go through six months to one-year deployment cycle. But, the non-classical way of doing that is to bring your business users who understand the domain and your technology people who know how to translate their vision together to build working applications. This is the paradigm shift that IT needs to embrace. So if I am a CIO in the retail sector, one way to differentiate from the competition is to embrace a modern way of approaching digital transformation, bringing IT and business together to transform operations. And this is where the world is going now, and you need low code/no-code to achieve this.

The premise of any low code/no-code platform is creating software quickly. Is it a good idea to rush software development?

I would say quickness is not the value proposition. The fundamental value proposition of a low code, nocode platform is ongoing change management. The challenge is you develop software, deploy it, and then suddenly the business environment changes. You are left with no choice but to approach a software company, and they will ask you for a change request, which costs money. It can be chaotic. That’s the real problem low code/ no-code solves. Although initially, the accelerated time to market aspect might look attractive, the real value of the low code/ no-code platform is that it is resilient to ongoing business rule changes. And how your software can continuously accommodate those changes because you are not hard coding it into a program. When you have a no-code, low code environment, everything is visual; you want to change something, you go back to the drag and drop environment and make those changes with the push of a button.