Our customers are Fortune 100 brands in Retail and Manufacturing: Option3 Founder

Dataquest spoke to Payeli Ghosh, Founder & Director, Option3, an analytics solution provider in order to understand their business and focus areas.

1. What does Option3 provide?

Option3 is a niche automation and data analytics product company. We are a trusted partner for large global organizations to automate complex tasks that require deep cognitive capabilities and that do not typically fall under traditional rule based automation. Our suite of products is customized for retail, supply chain, payments, manufacturing and banking domain. The company has been in business for more than five years and current client list include multiple Fortune 100 retailers, large European retailer (shoes, clothing and accessories) and large European corporation involved in production and sale of trucks, buses and construction equipment.

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2. What's so different about the company when there are endless big data analytics providers in the market?

The difference we have always been keen on, and what we have brought out is to add intelligence to automation. Traditional rule-based automation is limited and can never move further than being a tactical solution. Adding a cognitive layer to our RPA platform enabled our clients to achieve human like decision making capabilities while automating complex processes. Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Neuro-Linguistic Programming expertise that we had invested in helped in the platform being able to reduce the human intervention as much as possible wherever implemented. We have also gone further by integrating our analytics platform to the automation suite – this helped in tracking and streaming data in real time, and visualize it to generate insights to monitor and optimize the processes.

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3. Can you tell us about the customers who you serve?

Our customers are leading Fortune 100 brands in the Retail and Manufacturing space. They are organizations who faced challenges in improving their automation processes, or were facing productivity issues due to complexities of not having an automation platform in place.

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4. How do you plan to tap the market? What are the verticals you are aiming for?

The surge in digital transformation has seen various strategies that have come to the front with the need for automation to deliver more accuracy, compliance, cost savings and scalability – which is gaining momentum. RPA is still considered as a disruptor, and early adopters have realized its strategic importance after having visible results in no time. This is positioning RPA as a must have which will define survive or perish for industries in the coming years. Where RPA is going to be the game changer is by bringing in true automation – that is human like decision making. RPA is now treated as a tactical solution rather than being approached from a strategic angle, but it’s slowly changing with more cognitive capabilities that are evolving.

The RPA market is projected to cross $9 Bn within the same period. At Option3, we believe that Jiffy is uniquely positioned to play in this space due to its cognitive capabilities – which is where automation is going to define itself. We expect to be among the top 5 players in the next 36 months. This would mean at least a 10% share on the overall market.

Our customer acquisition strategies are through strategic alliances and partnerships with major service integrators. We have also onboarded channel partners with a focus on Europe, Middle East and APAC for RPA for Finance & Accounting, Manufacturing, Shared Services, Business Process Management and IT.

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5. Are you bootstrapped or did you have funding? Please elaborate.

Our decision was to be bootstrapped and push a unique product to the market. The product required 2 years of R&D before it could be released to the market, and during this time we were providing specialized services in niche technology and supply chain domain for enterprises, and this helped in raising capital which was invested back into building our products.

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6. How many people do you have? Where are they based?

We are a 50+ member strong team, and we are based out of Bangalore.