Can you tell us about your company?
We are a software product company that started in 1992 in India. We have grown over the years, and now we sell our products and solutions in more than 55 countries. We have been in the Middle East for around 18 years with many marquee clients in banking and financial services sector. Our product portfolio is ideally suited for the digital journey of our customers, be it business process automation or customer experience management. We have around more than 550 customers around the world, and our product portfolio is very well recognized.
Is digital a big focal point for you?
The current ecosystem is all about digital. The way it is disrupting businesses as well as providing new opportunities, all software vendors and providers are aligned with this trend to fit in or leverage it. Broadly, with our product portfolio, we are well positioned to enable the digital journeys of our customers. The way we see digital is in two ways: Inside digital or what you do within an organization, and then how you carry that digital to your customers. Our BPM/ECM suite has traditionally been suitable for inside digital in terms of modernising business processes, automation, and now with our portfolio, we can combine both internal and customer-facing digital for our customers seamlessly. We are one of the core vendors that is driving these transformation use cases, and it is across industries.
Did you start as a BPM vendor?
We have always been a product company and started with ECM, which evolved to BPM and then eventually customer communications management. We are focused on these three product vertical areas.
Do you offer any RPA tools?
There is a lot of interest around RPA now. Though the term itself is not very new, with the progress in analytics, you can do much more with the technology today. As part of our BPM strategy, which is to automate business processes and reduce human labour, RPA is a synergic tech for us. Initially, we have integrated with most of RPA tools, and now we are coming out with our own RPA suite. The focus of RPA is on activity automation and doing away with manual intervention in repetitive tasks, and BPM is about end-to-end process automation, where the activity is only one of the steps. With RPA and BPM together, it offers a much powerful solution to customers. Some of the RPA stories have been very disjointed – organisations would automate an activity, and a few years later realise that it doesn’t really fit into the organizational structure. With BPM, we have been able to automate activities, iron out the kinks, so our customers do not have to redo it. BPM provides the context to RPA.
Now intelligent process automation is being bandied around. Is that something in your radar?
The traditional RPA has been more about non-invasive integration or screen scraping, but the bigger advantage is in areas, which are analytics-driven. It could be content recognition or sentiment analytics, and those have been our core strengths as a content company. We are able to bring all those capabilities as part of the RPA ecosystem.
Scalability is an issue with RPA. How do you plan to address that challenge?
When you look at bots as independent agents, it is like adding workforce – you add 50, and then you don’t know what they are doing. But, if you add them to BPM, the scale doesn’t become as an issue because they are connected in the context of the business process. With that, you can build fail-safe methods and get real-time insights into how well and efficiently bots are running, and the question of scalability doesn’t arise at all because they are not operating independently.
Do you have plans to leverage AI and ML technologies?
All the software product companies are leveraging AI and ML. Analytics is another frontier we have to conquer. In ECM, there are many use cases including content analytics, which is about classification of content, sentiment mining, and easy searches. In BPM, we have process intelligence, which is more about analysing an organisation’s process landscape and getting the most out of them. In CCM, it is about customer profiling. Many of these ML and analytics uses cases are already part of our platform, and there are many more features coming.
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