Rakuten India is the development center and key technology hub of the Rakuten Group Inc. It has depth of knowledge in multiple streams of technology, such as mobile and web development, web analytics, platform development, backend engineering, data science, machine learning, AI, and much more.

Amit Srivastava, Head of Sales and Marketing at Rakuten India, tells us more. Excerpts from an interview:

DQ: How is Rakuten thinking and structuring the organization to drive profitability?

Amit Srivastava: We have a history of creating value through a wide range of services. While our Internet services are focused on creating high economic value for our shareholders drive profitability, our fintech and mobile services are focused on growth and innovation.

We, at Rakuten India align with the global strategy and structure our organization to support existing businesses for profitability through the Tech Division, and drive the externalization of India to build products through Rakuten India Products and Services Division for growth and innovation.

DQ: What is the rationale for the launch of Rakuten SixthSense?

Amit Srivastava: We build products for Rakuten group companies and manage large scale operations from India. In order to support our needs, we built SixthSense, a comprehensive Observability stack, which covers development to operations and business aspects.

SixthSense has been tested by multiple departments within Rakuten, and we thought it was a great time for us to extend it to outside Rakuten. Also, since it is built here in India, it offers a great advantage for Indian customers to experience a Japanese brand with localized support.

DQ: What are the key advantages SixthSense provides to the customers?

Amit Srivastava: Rakuten SixthSense is a software product portfolio purpose-built to help cope with the speed and innovation needs. Our vision for SixthSense is to offer a “code-to-customer” observability platform that will help customers with round the clock observability of dev (development, quality), ops (operations, security), and data.

At present, we have launched testing automation and application observability modules, and plan to launch quite a few solutions in near future.

Our Observability module offers a great alternative to the expensive tools currently available in the market and delivers all major capabilities, including core application performance management, end-user experience, infrastructure, DB, and logs monitoring, along with that our team has been building multiple ML models to accelerate AI use cases.

Incident management will be delivered to our customers who want simple yet high scale notification and incident life cycle management, including managing team rosters, and multilevel escalation rules.

Testing acceleration platform is quite a value offering, with connecting and automating all stages of testing, it helps in accelerating testing and improving application quality.

All of our solutions are available through India hosted SaaS.

DQ: How is the brand functioning in India so far?

Amit Srivastava: SixthSense has been very well received. We are under discussions with multiple customers on signing contracts, and there is a number of trials going on. We have been receiving positive feedback, and growing firm on our roadmaps based on customer feedback.

We are working with multiple companies on signing up partnerships, and hopefully, we will sign up our first set of partners in the coming weeks.

DQ: Are you looking to introduce Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Green Monday in India?

Amit Srivastava: Currently, our focus is to build and grow the SixthSense product brand here in India. We intend to strengthen the SixthSense portfolio by adding more modules to it, and will continue that direction in the immediate future. Having said that, we will continue to evaluate all other businesses and execute on short- and long-term vision.