The Covid-19 and ensuing lockdowns have disrupted businesses across the world and in India. But some enterprises are clearly burning bright despite the pandemic. Bengaluru-based Avaali Solutions, a company that enables digital transformation for large enterprises, believes it has a clear path ahead for scale and growth. The company is not only banking on its Velocious framework, which uses multiple technologies to drive process transformation for clients at a faster pace, but is targeting doubling revenues this year. In an exclusive interaction with CXOToday, Srividya Kannan, Founder, Director – Avaali Solutions Pvt Ltd., explains how the company is offering digital solutions to large enterprises to help them deliver faster turnaround for their operational processes and reduce costs.
CXOToday: What was the inspiration and motive behind starting Avaali Solutions?
Srividya Kannan: Since the company’s inception in 2013, I’ve been engaging with large enterprise customers for a long time during my various corporate stints. One of the factors that has always been intriguing is that even though they spend a lot of dollars on transactional systems, they still have 80% of their processes which are handled manually – business users must deal with a lot of documents in various formats (both in physical and electronic) and workflows as well as approvals are via emails and typically manual in nature. Process stakeholders spend a lot of time looking for information that are typically lying in bits and silos across the enterprise. Governance and risks are huge because confidential information could be accessed by unauthorized users and when a knowledge worker quits the organization, unfortunately a lot of information is lost. These factors have a huge impact on productivity and cost and in turn presents a big opportunity for improvement. That really led to building a purpose for Avaali.
We’ve now executed assignments for over 120 large enterprises to help them accelerate cycle time to process and consequently reduce costs by leveraging emerging technologies. These solutions are even more important in the context of the current pandemic that has taught us a several lessons on benefits with automation with some of these significantly increasing in terms of scale of adoption as enterprises learn from one another.
CXOToday: What are the current challenges IT companies facing in India and globally?
Srividya Kannan: The economic slowdown has prompted several enterprises to re-examine their investments to ensure that it is relentlessly focused on driving immediate outcomes be it for cost reduction, customer outreach or improved supply chain. Projects that are not driving these kinds of immediate outcomes are being cut down or postponed. On the other hand, there is a lot of customer interest in automation to build resilience and bounce back to efficient operations. IT companies who quickly navigate these challenges to realign their offerings for relevance in this new are going to be able to deliver well.
Delivering work fully remotely is most definitely possible for IT companies but enterprises in several traditional industries may not be ready for this kind of immediate change making projects more difficult to execute. Also the infrastructure requirements for enabling effective work from home means ensuring adequate internet connectivity, hardware and so on in addition to ensuring that cybersecurity issues if any are proactively addressed as employees connect to client networks remotely from their homes. These challenges will need to be carefully addressed. Keeping a close watch of collections and cash flows is now only more important given that there could be requests for extended payment terms or a back ended payment milestone structure.
CXOToday: What has been the biggest learning’s so far?
Srividya Kannan: I would say a lot of strong reinforcements rather than learning. Some of these include the fact that great talent can deliver high impact results quickly, challenge status quo and make a huge difference. Also while scale is important, it cannot come at the cost of profit and positive cash flows.
Another key lesson is that enterprises are no longer so much worried about how big or how many years their vendors have been in business – they more value how their business partners and vendors could add value to meeting their financial and other goals by being a knowledge partner.
CXOToday: What are the future plans?
Srividya Kannan: Avaali has a clear path ahead for scale and growth. We will continue to invest in our Velocious set of solutions that leverages a confluence of various technologies to significantly accelerate the pace to business process transformation for large enterprises. We will continue to stay focused on expanding our share of wallet from existing customers as well as deepen our presence amongst enterprise customers in our existing geographies. In addition, we’re also focusing to increase our presence in parts of Europe.
