– By Sandhya Malhotra
Bangalore-based Happiest Mind Technologies, a new-age internet company, not only offers innovative digital services to its customers, but is also using digital as a key to its internal growth.
At the recent held Frost and Sullivan Digital Enterprise Transformation 2015, Puneet Jetli, President and CEO, Digital Transformation and Enterprise solutions, Happiest Mind Technologies talks about how Digital is changing the role of CIOs.
Our focus on digital transformation
The company is focusing on digital. When we started three and a half years back, there was no point in trying to do everything for everyone. So we asked as what would the customers look for in terms of next phase of business value creation using technology and IT, and we realized that digital is going to happen. We as a company are focusing on all facets of digital, be it cloud, infrastructure or security, applications can be transformed using digital as a technology, says Jetli.
“We help our customers leverage the potential of digital but from multiple dimensions not just from technology standpoint like what they need to do in terms of process, platforms, integration, data insights, combining all of this to help improve customer experience or bring business efficiency. These are the two outcomes that we try to influence our customers to use digital as a technology,” he says.
According to Jetli, every project today is ROI-driven. ”Digital projects are not like large ERP projects, which go on for long period of time where companies are investing multi million dollars. They want to take small steps but they want to measure as whether it is creating business impact before putting in more money,” he states.
Digital As An opportunity
Jetli believes ‘Digital’ is still in its infancy. Therefore, this digital as an opportunity area is going to get pervasive and bigger.
“The market that we are addressing is going to get large. We are trying to see is how we can productise some of our services, to either in the form of PaaS or be it at as SaaS, so it would be easier for us to take it multiple customers in a short time rather than doing it as turnkey projects. Today, 10% of our revenues come out of IP or platform influenced solutions,” Jetli mentions.
The company aims to increase it to 25% in next three years.
“That will only happen, when we continue to observe the market needs are and what we can service, and what lends it self to covert into SaaS and PaaS space across security, infra and software solutions,” he explains.
Changing Role Of CIOs
It is changing dramatically. The CIO has now become an orchestrator of this change from a technology point of view. Their job is no longer around technology. They need to be much more business aware and need to become multi disciplinary, as it is not just serving one customer at a time but the ability to integrate expectations from different and multiple functions in an organization and seeing as to how the technology they are working on can actually facilitate all of them, believes Jetli.
They have to become much more cross functional in their thinking and we are seeing the leading CIOs are beginning to make this change. They are becoming business partners in a much bigger way than they had been in the past.
Road ahead for CIOs
Talking about challenges, Jetli states CIOs were not used to this sudden shift from cost to
business impact. Answering questions from just SLAs to ROI is not easy.
Understanding of business needs and how innovations can be brought about to business models, is not something which the CIOs have traditionally done. So it is a learning curve for CIOs. I think the only way to do this is to conduct small experiments, prove it and them make the next move.
Presently, the company has formed alliances with IT and software companies as well as it is building in house solutions. “We are building engine and use tools for vitualization and educating customers in taking right direction,” concludes Jetli.