Aptos’ Advanced commerce Solutions Changing the Landscape of the Retail Business

CXOToday has engaged in an exclusive interview with Mr. Prashant Kamat, Vice President and Managing Director of Aptos India.

Q: Kindly brief us about the company, its specialization and the services that your company offers.

As one of the largest providers of enterprise software focused exclusively on retail, Aptos offers industry-leading unified commerce solutions that help retailers deliver integrated, seamless experiences – wherever shoppers choose to engage.

As a fully global business, Aptos has operations across North America, Asia-Pacific and Europe with over 1,600 colleagues located in key cities. Specific to India, Aptos opened an innovation center in Bengaluru earlier this year and plans to have more than 200 colleagues in-country by the end of 2022. Our employees in India support key functions including engineering, consulting and customer operations.

With the goal of attracting the brightest technology talent in India and from around the world, we pride ourselves on creating a rewarding, diverse and collaborative work environment where employees want to invest their careers.

Our employees are doing meaningful and groundbreaking work while being afforded the opportunity to grow their skills and careers by working alongside some of the most seasoned technologists in retail.

Q: With what mission and objectives, the company was set up? In short, tell us about your journey since the inception of the company?

In 2015, the Aptos brand was born when we launched as an independent company. Prior to that, we had been operating as a business unit of a billion-dollar ERP provider. Since Aptos was established, we have been laser-focused on our vision to be the global leader in unified commerce. We define unified commerce as the activities necessary to connect customers to products.

Whether we’re talking about blurring the lines between physical and digital, between retail verticals, or even between products, services, and experiences, we see a future in which retailers will need a unified set of services to manage a converged omnichannel experience.

To support that vision, Aptos has developed a next-generation unified commerce platform that allows for an unprecedented level of adaptability and differentiation in retailers’ enterprises. This platform, Aptos ONE, leverages a microservices-based architecture to ensure maximum extensibility; plus, it is built from the ground up to be mobile-first and cloud-native.

With Aptos’ investment in “future-proof” technologies, we are on track to become the market leader in unified commerce solutions and services for modern, global retailers.

Q: Brief us about the proactive Founder/CEO of the company and his/her contributions towards the company and the industry.  

Aptos CEO Pete Sinisgalli joined the company in November 2020. Mr. Sinisgalli has a track record of software, business and technology leadership that spans nearly four decades.

Prior to coming to Aptos, Mr. Sinisgalli served as Chairman of the Board for LLamasoft, which was acquired by Coupa Software. In prior positions, Mr. Sinisgalli was President and CEO of Manhattan Associates, CEO and Chairman of Eze Software Group, and held executive-level roles at CheckFree Corporation, NewRoads and Dun & Bradstreet.

Mr. Sinisgalli has been a tremendous leader in steering Aptos to the future. His proven competencies in areas such as building and uniting high-performance global teams and introducing distributed delivery models produce exceptional results for customers, employees and shareholders.

Q: Kindly mention some of the major challenges the company has faced till now.   

The global pandemic was the greatest challenge Aptos has faced to date. Many of our retail clients’ stores were shut down for months. It was an extremely stressful time for our clients, which presented both significant challenges and opportunities for Aptos as we rushed to find new and creative ways in which we could help our clients manage through an unprecedented level of disruption.

While the pandemic was devastating on every level (lives, businesses, economies), Aptos was fortunate that our business was in a position to continue investing in our products throughout the crisis. Aptos had received a strategic capital commitment from Goldman Sachs in March 2020 – right before the pandemic took hold in many parts of the world.

Q: Please brief us about the products/services/solutions you provide to your customers and how do they get value out of it                                                    

To succeed in today’s competitive marketplace, retailers must be able to fully understand their customers, profitably align products with demand across every channel and touchpoint, and be able to support customer-centric shopping journeys.

Aptos’ portfolio of unified commerce solutions is designed to help retailers keep pace with shifting consumer expectations and thrive in a world of constant change. Our solutions, which include applications for point of sale, order management, merchandising, enterprise analytics and others are trusted by over 1,000 retail brands.

With these solutions, retailers can leverage extensive core POS capabilities and easily adapt to shifting customer expectations; profitably manage orders throughout the order lifecycle; achieve a 360-degree view of customers; manage merchandise in every channel and location; obtain actionable insights across the enterprise; and more.

With each release, Aptos brings to market cutting-edge technologies that have a material impact on retailers’ organizations. From cloud-native and mobile-first technologies to data-science and machine-learning algorithms to microservices-based architectures, Aptos offers a foundation for the future of retail.

Q: What’s your growth plans for the next 12 months?   

Aptos is a stable and profitable organization with annual revenues of approximately $300 million. We are able to achieve strong financial performance while investing up to 20% of revenues in research and development across all of our business units.

Looking ahead to 2023, we expect to see strong demand for our unified commerce solutions and services as retailers’ need to offer shoppers an “omnichannel experience” is no longer a nice to have – it’s requisite for survival.

By focusing on product innovation, delivery excellence and customer delight, it is reasonable to expect that Aptos will retain a healthy rate of growth, even in the face of macroeconomic factors such as inflation and employment shortages that are impacting the retail sector.

Q: How is the Big Data/AI/Robotics industry changing? What are some of the key technology transformations in this space?

When looking at retail, the pandemic was a catalyst to accelerate necessary transformation. As part of that, we are seeing a lot more retailers have an appetite to leverage AI.

This has been most evident in our Revionics business unit, which offers an AI-powered price optimization platform for retailers. In retail pricing, AI can be used to understand consumer price sensitivity, simulate and forecast the impact of promotion and markdown activity, drive real-time price changes in the face of increased competition, and much more.

The value of automating tasks and the ability to scale AI pricing recommendations to every product, every store and every customer as needed is transforming the retail pricing landscape.

Our data science team is at the forefront of that transformation.