According to an IDC survey more than 60 per cent of Indian companies are aiming to use cloud platforms for digital transformations due to the COVID19 pandemic. Businesses will increasingly leverage cloud platforms to make their IT operations more scalable and flexible.
India’s cloud computing market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 28.1 per cent during the forecast period. The high concentration and increasing number of small and medium-sized businesses in India that are rapidly shifting towards cloud computing are emerging as the major driving factor for the market. Furthermore, growing investment in the construction of cloud data centers is expected to boost the Indian cloud computing market in the forecast period, a BlueWeave consulting report added.
Major focus areas
Paul Merchants Limited is a Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) listed company and operates mainly in the BFSI vertical. Many financial services have seen tremendous transformation around digitalisation and digitisation. The entire economy has moved from cash to cashless.
“Some of the key digital initiatives we have taken in these past couple of years and continue to leverage, are around cloud adoption, application modernisation, mobility, analytics, AI/ML and others,” said Shweta Srivastava, CTO, Paul Merchants Limited.
She further explained that the traditional model of service delivery at Paul Merchants has been through shop floors as we have our presence in around more than 150 locations across the country. With time, the importance of technology was realised and multiple such initiatives were taken to improvise the service delivery and enhance customer experience.
“We continue to leverage the strengths of available technology tools and have plans to extend our services on digital platforms in order to expand our reach to multiple geographies. These web platforms will be our touchpoints and shall connect us with our end customers efficiently and effectively. This can be achieved through cloud migration,” said Srivastava.
Efforts are being made wherein products like forex, travel packages, loans and others are being offered through mobile platforms. Automated bots shall enable customer engagement and shall help in quick delivery of service as well as prompt support to our customers.
Using analytical tools the organisation is also slicing and dicing the legacy customer data in order to draw meaningful insights which can be effectively utilised by business, sales, and marketing teams.
“We are also using AI/ML in some areas wherein based on predictive analysis of customer behaviour, product/service recommendations can be based,” Srivastava pointed out.
Change in priorities?
“I won’t say that the priorities have changed. At Paul Merchants, we have always embraced technology for enhancing customer deliveries and increasing employee productivity. However, it will be prudent to say that pandemic has definitely been the catalyst in this direction which has accelerated the adoption and acceptability within the organisation,” said Srivastava.
She further pointed out that the COVID19 pandemic has made the organisation realise that service delivery cannot be restricted to the boundaries of the offices and needs to be made available from anywhere anytime. Paul Merchants has developed multiple web platforms from where customers can reach out and fulfillment can be ensured.
With changing market trends and increasing competition, business teams are also approaching endless requirements which are majorly revolving around tech solutions. Customers are more aware and expectations have become really high. In the era of 15 minutes delivery commitments, patience and tolerance in customers have gone down which is making survival and sustenance a big challenge.
IT Budgets for the year
“Budgets definitely will need to be allocated for newer initiatives and luckily this is no more a choice that management is well aware of. Investment in technology is directly proportional to future revenue streams,” said Srivastava.
According to Srivastava, a few things that one needs to be sure of before making technology investments include the decision of taking a digital initiative should be driven by answering the question as to what business problem is getting addressed, identifying measurable KPIs which are expected to be achieved by adopting a certain technology, do a thorough cost-benefit analysis and try to arrive at the ROI and IT spends need to be reviewed periodically and measured against their contribution to the top line as well as the bottom line.
