CXOToday has engaged in an exclusive interview with Mr. Arjun Ramaraju, CEO, Conneqt Digital
- Give us an overview of how the Conneqt Business Solution pivoted from its traditional BPM to a diversified range of business services?
A year after completing the acquisition of Conneqt Business Solutions from the Tata Group, Quess Corp diversified the operations firm’s service portfolio into that of a digital solutions provider. One key reason for this was to delve deeper into the Indian IT space, while most large IT services companies cater to customers outside India.
Today, Conneqt functions as a completely digital native IT services company. Through Conneqt Digital’ we build advanced platforms using next-generation technologies that help our clients achieve tangible outcomes. We aim to improve the customer experience by offering hyper-personalised technologies that focus on agility. With a team of almost 500 digital IT services consultants and several senior talents from various companies, at Conneqt we have about 15 key leading OEMs with whom we have set up alliances to fuel our competencies. We have also set up six competency centres that are empowered by our tech partners, and have partnered with 17 companies, such as UiPath and Salesforce.
- When it comes to talent do you see any bottlenecks in attracting the right people?
Conneqt has been ranked in the Top 50 amongst India’s Best Companies to Work for 2022. We are consistently making efforts to be able to attract the right talent and give them a host of opportunities within the company. We are consciously looking to enhance the employee value proposition and we will continue to strengthen it. At Conneqt, we are also hiring campus recruits who have undergone on-campus training programmes designed by Conneqt in partnership with Big Tech companies like Microsoft, Salesforce and ServiceNow.
- What are your company’s expansion plans for FY23? What proportion of revenue do you hope to achieve by the following fiscal year?
Currently, a significant part of our top line is coming from the legacy BPM services, namely Conneqt Business Solution. As far as contribution to revenue is concerned, Conneqt Digital is going to form a big component of our overall revenues over the next three years. We are looking at an excess of 70 percent from digital IT services. With a number of updates for digital IT across customers in India and Middle East, we are also looking to venture into the US market in the near future. We are also looking into investments in startups to gain skills or competencies. These investments could be a mix of partial investments and acquisitions.
- Emerging technologies are making businesses more agile world over. Which are the technologies that you see making a difference to enterprises?
Emerging technologies have created a disruptive impact across domains. Industry 4.0 in manufacturing and digitization in all other industries are accelerating the implementation of IoT, Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), cognitive intelligence, deep learning, etc. In addition to this, Low-Code-No-Code application platforms are making a significant impact in rapid application development and process automation, which will facilitate end-to-end development and deployments across domains in around a third of the time. Another emerging trend is data analytics utilising AI/ML, which forecasts future results using past data paired with statistical modelling and data mining techniques. Hyper automation – end to end business process automation using a combination of automation platforms such as DPA (digital process automation), RPA and AI /ML/DL (deep learning)-based cognitive intelligence have also garnered massive popularity in recent times.
- How are you helping your customers to modernize and re-engineer their technology landscapes?
At Conneqt, we help customers with consulting services on their application portfolio rationalization and consolidation based on CIO’s priorities including TCO, ROI on recent software investments, protection of existing software assets, and the like. Cost effective rapid development platforms such as Low Code platforms are preferred over traditional grounds up dev/enhancements for app modernization.
Cloud native app development/migration into any of the hyper scalars (Azure /AWS /GCP) is another avenue of app modernization we are seeing rapid adoption for by non BFSI customers especially.
Our Customary Journey Management (CJM) offering based on Total experience (TX) transformation paradigm adhering to Customer experience (CX) + Employee experience (EX) + Multi-channel experience (MX) + User experience (UX) principles which helps enterprises enable customer access to their products and services in optimal no steps or zero interactions.
- How is automation replacing & augmenting the human effort in ITes service industry firms?
RPA based digital workforce (bots) enable mid /back offices process automations freeing human workforce to take up value added activities. End to end contact center automation solutions and CLM life cycle processes across the entire life cycle are tailor made for end to end automation using automation platforms such as low code, COTs platforms like Salesforce, Service now, Adobe etc.
- Tell us about the company’s latest offering of ESG as a service, a much-needed intervention as organizations look forward to tech-enabled systems monitoring their ESG compliance
At Conneqt, we believe that the rules of the game have changed and organizations need to prioritize ESG now more than ever to accelerate adoption. Profitability, sustainability and value has become interlinked to the growth of business, brand and customer loyalty, investor confidence, and to attract and retain talent. The core of ESG is customer, society, and investors and ESG acceleration will lead to significant business advantage. Value creation, access to markets, increased market share, increased access to capital, reduced financial risks, and sustained returns with responsible investments is absolutely key in today’s business environment.
We have partnered with Billion Lives to launch “ESG as a Service”. With a deep tech platform that helps customers and enterprises addresses ESG right across the value chain, we are focused strongly on building and strengthening adherence for companies. We have a very structured game plan with an innovative approach to transform, modernize, and run ESG programs while simultaneously monitoring industry trends using sentiment analysis technology. We are redesigning ESG processes for companies with a holistic strategy that includes analysing ESG readiness through maturity surveys, materiality assessment, and sustainability strategy and reporting, as well as assurance reporting and ongoing performance monitoring.
