Uncertainty is biggest challenge faced by the market

Vuram is a Tamil word that translates to ‘manure’ and implies ‘nourishment’. Vuram always stands by its core principle of nourishing its people (employees), its customers, and the society.

Here, Venkatesh Ramarathinam CEO, Vuram Technologies, talks about the journey into BPM and RPA, and the challenges ahead. Excerpts from an interview:

DQ: What are the key growth driving factors in the BPM and RPA segments?

Venkatesh Ramarathinam: Today, there are more products offering similar capabilities, thereby driving the cost down and increasing the awareness among the technology leadership in organizations. This increases the overall adoption and market for the BPM and RPA tools.

With AI gaining prominence, it is now imperative that organizations have good data habits and processes in place, which are fundamental to do anything with AI and gain meaningful insights, patterns and predictions on organization and customer behavior. The continuous demand from the management to drive down costs, while improving speed and quality of customer service, product delivery and governance necessitates that organizations adopt BPM and RPA to stay relevant, and certainly to stay ahead of the curve.

DQ: How are you facing the current challenges due to Covid-19 in the market?

Venkatesh Ramarathinam: Uncertainty is the biggest challenge. The truth is: no one really knows how the current situation will end, or how long it will last. There are many predictions, and one or few of them will come out true. But, that would be more of a lucky guess, rather than the result of accurate modeling and intelligence. This uncertainty is what is the biggest challenge faced by the market.

Customers react to this uncertainty in one of many ways. Some are stopping all technology spending except for what is critical to keep the business running. Some others are continuing with reduced spend, and some are continuing with the same speed and spend.

There are also a handful who look to increase their spend, use the downtime to better shape their organizations, and have better systems in place to help them run with greater speed when things turn around. These handful of companies could end up dominating the market when things rebound, as they will appear the most prepared.

DQ: What has been the impact on demand from global companies?

Venkatesh Ramarathinam: The Indian IT sector caters to a wide variety of industries and use cases. The overall demand might marginally slump, but this would mainly be due to organizations pausing their technology spend to understand the direction in which the market would move. The drop would not be due to a lack of "necessity" for process improvement, automation or modernization.

There are certain sectors that are bound to see increased tech spending. Certain sectors that are impacted by the current situation, will take a pause on most technology spend. Process improvement initiatives would certainly be one of them. When the situation tides over, the companies in the highly impacted sectors could potentially prioritize their BPM investments to safeguard themselves against a similar future situation.

Innovative ways that are being developed like video bots, quick help applications and remote troubleshooting, etc.

DQ: How are you seeing the immediate future?

Venkatesh Ramarathinam: Companies will look to go where the money flows. This could mean an increase in the number of applications catering towards the broader healthcare industry, with specific focus on patient care, remote health monitoring, assessments, triage and recovery support. Banking applications would be another focus area for BPM/RPA companies.

They will look to produce rapid applications to support with refinancing, disbursement of Government initiatives and the likes. Another sector that might see newer applications and renewed focus would be the Government. The public health and organizations, and commerce departments could see a potential surge in the number of applications targeted towards them.

Product vendors are most likely to tailor their messaging towards how their platform could help tide the crisis. Services organizations will look to innovate and come up with newer delivery models and service offerings such as quick time to market delivery and assurance programs.

Venkatesh Ramarathinam, CEO, Vuram Technologies