Many Indian businesses have come to be familiar with disruption in recent years: Milan Shetti, Rocket Software

Rocket Software is a privately held software development company that provides predictive analytics with deep data, develops artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities, and designs mobile and browser applications. Recently, Milan Shetti, president and CEO, Rocket Software spoke to Dataquest about what the company does, and its plan for the India market.

DQ: Tell us a little bit about Rocket Software and how it's grown over the last couple of years.

Milan Shetti: Rocket Software is a global technology company that partners with the largest enterprises to solve their most complex IT challenges across infrastructure, data and applications with solutions that simplify, not disrupt. We enable our customers to modernize in place with a hybrid cloud strategy, so they don’t need to re-platform or build from the ground up. 

We entered the Indian market about 5 years ago and built our research and development center here. With over 2,600 global employees and 650 in India, affectionately called Rocketeers, our team loves a challenge and are deeply committed to solving our customer’s most complex IT challenges through modernization and making the difficult, simple.

Today, Rocket is trusted by IT and business professionals globally. Together, our team continues to support over 10,000 customers across the globe with innovative and intelligent solutions for each unique challenge faced by our customers.

DQ: Who are some of the customers that Rocket serves and which verticals are they primarily involved in?

Milan Shetti: Rocket Software customers are some of the largest and most systemically important organizations across the world. Our over 10,000 customers keep planes in the air, trains running on time, financial transactions moving seamlessly and critical systems like healthcare and insurance systems secure. Our customers include 46 of the Fortune 50 companies, including top commercial banks, aerospace and defense companies, healthcare companies, discount and department stores and auto and truck manufacturers on the Forbes Global 2000.

In India in particular, Rocket Software works with seven of the top Indian insurance companies, one of the top payments bank operators, one of the top five private sector banks, one of the top three home finance companies, and two of the top payment and financial technology providers. 

DQ: What is the competitive advantage that you have to offer?

Milan Shetti: In recent years, many Indian businesses have come to be familiar with disruption - from the health crisis, economic slowdown, regional conflict and supply chain meltdown. Why add another disruption to your digital transformation? 

Rocket Software is able to solve any IT challenge for your business, regardless of your infrastructure, data or applications. This simple, and yet effective solution lets our customers modernize with a hybrid cloud strategy, without having to rebuild or re-platform their entire business.

Additionally, Rocket provides the business with the ability to scale, and thus, accelerate their modernization journey - a desperately wanted and needed feature. We have the skills and value to help our customers solve holistic versus tactical problems, and provide real world value, actualized and measured with the business' share of wallets. 

DQ: What is the key to successfully managing critical data?

Milan Shetti: At Rocket Software, we measure the success of managing critical data by improving information usage by people, processes and applications - and how businesses can successfully navigate their data to get the exact information they want. 

Data modernization solutions help our customers gain better insights to optimize their day-to-day business performance, while providing the vision for businesses to reimagine their customer interactions; getting rid of silos that hinder, as well as accelerate the return of investment in a shorter timeframe. 

Through Rocket Software, we empower our customers with 4 necessary components of data management - secure and simplified usage across all touchpoints, hyperautomation to mitigate risk and apply governance, comprehension from insights for data-driven decisions, and elimination of data bloat and redundant sources.

As a result, our customers transform their business, make more informed decisions, and deliver superior content and experiences to their customers. All of this, backed by business-ready data and metadata intelligence, also provides the foundation to automate and modernize processes, letting our customers focus on what they do best.

DQ: What are some of the approaches or strategies that businesses can take to harness better value from their data?

Milan Shetti: Firstly, brands need to prioritize modernizing their mission-critical technologies - especially the infrastructure, applications and data architecture. Businesses using Rocket Software with a hybrid cloud strategy could modernize their business according to priority, with infrastructure modernization focused on boosting business performance and productivity; enabling automation across the organization, while keeping the infrastructure secure and risk compliant. Concurrently, this also helps the business improve their workload performance and increase the storage capacity through the cloud. 

Mission-critical focused businesses are also looking at ways to meet their customers where they are. Modernizing their enterprise applications enables the business to deploy and engage easily with their customers across every digital environment, improving engagement and responsiveness while minimizing disruptions. The ability to harness data for insights also ensures that the business is always developing towards future-proofing with next-generation and meeting customers' needs every time. 

DQ: Tell us about R&D that India is leading for Rocket software globally

Milan Shetti: For Rocket Software to continue focusing on our customers as our North Star, we are continuously looking into ways to simplify the modernization experience of our customers. Simplification is a hard and long process, but this provides our customers the confidence to press forward with peace of mind without fears or concerns about privacy and security. 

In a world where human interactions continue to be the forefront of inefficiencies, our research and development are always looking at new ways to help business processes become more straightforward and streamlined - so well, that it can be facilitated through automation seamlessly. When we take away the processes from the human being, we can empower the creative processes in our customers' businesses, and thus make better use of their time. 

Each business has different processes, and for Rocket, it is always important to us to be able to quickly and efficiently address the low-hanging fruits for faster transformation. This quick digitization will provide the foundation for customer confidence, and provide the customer to explore further with further stages of modernization in the long term, and avoid the fear of being 'locked in' to a single provider. 

DQ: What are the technology trends that we can expect next year?

Milan Shetti: As a company with a strong track record in governance and security, we are challenged to make technology convenient and simple for customers. We believe that the marriage of convenience and security will ultimately win in the marketplace, and is a core philosophy to our software design and development.

With many industries sounding the recession alarm in recent months, we expect businesses to take proactive measures to reallocate resources, and minimize operation costs and time; optimizing ways for the enterprise to be productive and profitable - with increasing use of technologies that enable automation, data-driven insights and data proliferation.

The increasing number of cyber attacks and outages will also nudge the whole industry towards greater focus on governance and security, essentially creating new winners in the marketplace for players already well ahead in these areas. With more bad actors in the space, the battle of tech companies in the cloud space will be all about preserving governance, security and IP protection - a concern that will be a multi-year challenge. 

Hybrid workplaces will also become the preferred norm, as businesses unlearn how to operate, manage and deploy infrastructure with new tools and software arsenals. This increased focus will shift the employer mindset towards hybrid policies and work environments that are reflective in the business infrastructure itself.