Strategic Partnerships and New Product Offerings – Key Pillars of Indium’s Digital Engineering Practice

According to a report published by research firm Zinnov, the market spend on Digital Engineering touched USD 404bn in 2019 and is expected to grow at 19% CAGR and reach USD 1141bn by 2025. Currently, India accounts for US $10.6bn of the digital engineering market share and this is expected to grow four to five times in the next few years. Thanks to availability of high-quality of digital engineering talent pool, India is expected to contribute 41% to the total digital engineering services market.

Of course, the pandemic accelerated the need for digital adoption across sectors and this trend is here to stay. The key tailwinds for driving this growth include the need for building new digital infrastructure in addition to the development and re-engineering of products and services. There are several sectors that are ripe for disruption by adopting and embracing next-generation digital engineering including manufacturing, retail, BFSI and healthcare.

From a business perspective, leadership teams are looking to drive improvements across both customer experience and operational excellence.

Indium Software is a leading digital engineering solutions provider, with the experience and expertise needed to transform businesses and help them leverage next-gen technologies for their growth. Satish Pala, who took over as the Chief Technology Officer at Indium recently, is a digital transformation leader with over 2 decades of experience in the IT industry, he has extensive knowledge in data & analytics solutions across domains. He has delivered many cutting-edge analytics solutions for some of the top Fortune 500 companies. Satish is a passionate technologist with a keen interest in analytics, cloud and next-gen business intelligence..

In this conversation, Satish shares his views on key digital engineering trends and Indium’s digital engineering practice

Excerpts from the interview:

In your new role as CTO, what would be some of your key focus areas? How will this impact Indium’s strategy and approach?

My key focus areas include strategy, technology, innovation, and people. The main objective is for Indium to exceed the business goals through revised strategy, delivery process excellence and digital engineering capabilities. This changes Indium’s approach to growth in multiple ways. Some include strategic items like partnerships, new packaged solution offerings, capability development in next-gen technologies, establishing centers of excellence, dedicated labs, etc. On the people front, we’re planning a series of initiatives to continue to build and enhance our digital talent pool through certifications and training.

Are projects in emerging technologies like AI and blockchain still “projects” by specific teams or are we seeing enterprise-wide adoption?

We are definitely seeing a trend in enterprise-scale adoption of AI, not so much in blockchain. Here at Indium, our AI-based solutions focus on use cases across the board. One example is our AI-based accelerator teX.ai, which is being leveraged at a real estate enterprise for their core business operations on text extraction from the documents like agreements, thereby making it a highly efficient process. There are several other examples of how teX.ai is being used by companies in BFSI and retail segments.

Based on your experience, what are some of the common challenges businesses face when it comes to digital engineering?

A few common challenges companies have to tackle when it comes to digital engineering include:

• Identifying the right set of technologies and tools for the businesses to be efficient and agile.
• A culture shift in moving from a legacy paper or physical process to a digitized process. If the transition is not handled well, there will be chaos and businesses getting stuck in between.
• Training and education to mitigate this challenge.
• Policies & controls around privacy, data, intellectual property, and security.
• Accumulation of Digital Assets and lack of information governance.

How can digital engineering help businesses accelerate change while operationalizing their business value?

Deriving value in terms of direct business outcomes is a critical requirement of any digital effort. It must move the needle in terms of driving growth, improving competitive advantages for the company or streamlining operational processes.

• Digitization makes the business processes quick and efficient, thereby enabling businesses to make better use of available resources
• The right use of tools, technologies and innovations help drive competitiveness in the market and reduce time-to-market
• Proper use of digital engineering solutions will help enhance end-user experience and increase retention

How do you see digital engineering technologies evolving and how can businesses keep pace? Can you share some key emerging trends?

Digital Engineering technologies are evolving at a rapid pace due to the vast increase in innovations by the technology community. There is a variety of options to choose, whether a business is starting the digital journey or already a digital business. These technologies include building applications for user interactions, for back-office operations, data exchanges, API gateways, data and AI-based for decision making, or supporting technology services like DevOps and cloud.

Adoption of low code platform development has increased rapidly as well. In the manufacturing industry, factories are embracing Industry 4.0 with renewed focus. For example, building a digital twin makes the process smarter, optimizes performance across the manufacturing lifecycle, and drives product enhancements due to AI-based insights.

Please tell us about Indium’s partnerships with AWS, Striim, Mendix and Denodo and how Indium will deliver a service layer on top of each of these?

Indium has several partnerships with some of the top players in the digital engineering space. We partner with them and take the solutions to our clients either in consulting, implementation and/or maintenance. Some key partnerships include:

• AWS – We are a Select Tier Partner focusing on cloud migrations, application modernization, data analytics and devops

• Striim – We are a professional services partner helping in build real-time data streaming solutions between heterogeneous data platforms, thereby enabling businesses to obtain value from data quickly

• Mendix – We are one of the top Mendix services players in the world with vast experience in building low code platform-based solutions and also possess a large community of highly qualified low code developers

• Denodo – We are a services partner for Denodo, which is the top data virtualization player in the world