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‘Blind cost reduction can be detrimental’

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DQI Bureau
New Update

An IIT Kharagpur alumni, an avid technology contributor, a strong open source proponent, Amod Malviya has played an instrumental role at Flipkart's engineering division since its infancy. Malviya, SVP and head, engineering, Flipkart currently heads the engineering setup that powers Flipkart.com. Having joined as a senior engineering manager, his contribution has been immense. He has facilitated several technological innovations that are developed in-house; he implemented business intelligence and analytics in service which enabled the company to empower its customers with new tools to innovate alongside tracking performance in real time. During his decade-long career journey, he has successfully set up java based engineering infrastructure and scaled research algorithms for mass traffic.

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Malviya shares the strong and everlasting bond between Flipkart and technology; and the key technological focus areas with every passing year with VOICE&DATA. Excerpts

The e-commerce industry and ICT are inseparable. What has been the role of ICT in Flipkart's great progressive journey?

Technology has played a central role in the success of Flipkart.com. E-commerce is about the end-to-end experience that a customer goes through. That is the reason our technology investments have pervaded every aspect of the business-website, supply chain, business intelligence, and even customer service. Today, we are able to make better and faster decisions because of the technology investments we chose to do in the past and the investments we are making in technology today will help us scale the business to the next level.

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E-commerce technologies allow two-way communication between e-retailers and consumers. And another unique feature of e-commerce is that, it enables personalization and lets sellers to target marketing messages to a person's name, interests and post purchases. It enables e-retailer to change the product or service to suit the purchasing behavior and preferences of a consumer.

What are the key ICT trends in e-commerce, and the key ICT challenges faced by the industry?

Technology continues to evolve at a very rapid pace even in some of the older e-commerce economies. That makes trending difficult. However 3 trends that have mostly withstood the test of time are:

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Technology pervading every aspect of the business, from website to supply chain to business decisions

Distributed systems-as they allow scaling a lot better. SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) is a model of distributed systems that a lot of companies follows

Metrics-technology increasingly provide more visibility into the business operations and driving more effective decision making

The rapid pace is simultaneously a challenge as well. Scale and agility are usually conflicting concerns. This becomes particularly amplified in a rapidly developing economy such as ours. Thankfully, we have invested in experimentation at the core of our technology platforms-though there are a number of challenges that we still face.

Have you opted for outsourcing with respect to ICT related work? Which are the areas identified for outsourcing and how is it working for you?

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We do not outsource our technology work. Every organization focuses on its core differentiators while outsourcing all the other pieces. For us, most of our core differentiators are around technology and hence developed in-house.

Has Flipkart deployed mobile applications for internal working?

Yes, there are areas where we are experimenting with mobile devices. Logistics and warehouse are 2 areas that easily come to mind.

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How is mobile commerce working out for Flipkart?

While the numbers are still lower; given the infancy of the mobile internet, the sales happening through our mobile channel looks promising.

Mobile as a traffic channel is growing extremely fast. Bearing that in mind, we have a dedicated internal technology team focusing on this aspect of the business.

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How is ICT facilitating smooth business production such as procurement, customer focused processes, and internal management processes?

We have custom built in-house technologies for all these, with dedicated technology teams focused on these individual processes. We expose our engineers to a very large amount of business context and empower them to build the right technology solution for a given problem.

What is the investment planned for ICT in FY14?

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Being a privately held company, we are unable to comment on internal investment numbers.

There is pressure on CIOs/technology heads to reduce costs. What are the strategies planned for your company?

Blind cost reduction can be detrimental. At Flipkart.com, we recognize that the primary way for us to be cost efficient is through technology. So our investments into technology have grown over time, and we will continue to do so in the foreseeable future.

At the same time; within the technology setup, we are very efficiency conscious and rely on a set of independent and very lean teams to get the task done. Engineers are able to focus better in a smaller setup and are able to take decisions and move fast.

This also has the added benefit of retaining and growing our start up culture-people have high exposure and accountability. They are able to make a visible impact and are not lost in a crowd.

Being pioneers of technology adoption, what are the new technologies that Flipkart is planning to deploy in the next couple of years?

We deploy something new almost every single week. Some of the areas I see a lot of innovation around large scale analytics, warehouse automation, web technologies, and intelligent systems.

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