This is a TechGig Exclusive interview ofSrividya Kannan, Founder and CEO, Avaali Solutions . In this interview, she talks about the top technologies, new-age tech hiring solutions like hackathon and the existing underrepresentation of women in technology.
#1. Please give us a brief overview of your company and about yourself.
Avaali is a consulting and professional services company focused on supporting upper mid to large enterprises to create and execute their Digital roadmap. We are headquartered in Bengaluru, India. We believe that Digital is going to be the biggest enabler of revenues for enterprises. We support our customers to maximize value from digital and help them translate this value in the form of innovative customer experience, highly engaging customers, internal process efficiencies, reduced costs and delivering our customer’s stated objective.
We’ve worked with over 120+ large enterprises to leverage digital technologies to help them significantly accelerate process agility and reduce costs. We have subsidiaries in Singapore and UAE and our clients are spread across Asia, Middle East and Africa. Our Avaali Academy provides training to build capacity of people with knowledge on technologies such as Information Management, RPA and Chatbot.
#2. Prior to founding Avaali Solutions, you were working for large enterprises like Wipro and SAP. What are some of the challenges a tech startup like yours faces when compared with these big tech companies?
Our focus segment are large enterprises as they have the process and technology maturity to adopt our solutions focusing on unstructured content. Being a startup, the initial set of challenges included building enough trust for our customers to engage with us for their requirements. This takes time as one needs to consistently demonstrate results by delivering business outcomes. It took us 18 months to get our first client. As we get into new geographies, this continues to be something we will have to deal with quite regularly.
#3. Can you tell us about some of the top technologies that you are betting big on to develop your tech solutions?
We believe that when technologies like RPA, AI, Chatbot, OCR and Information Management solutions come together, they could be extremely powerful to deliver process agility for large enterprises. We’ve therefore invested in our framework called ‘Velocious’ that brings together these technologies to offer a set of ready-to-deploy solutions for enterprises.
It is estimated that by 2021, the RPA market will reach $2.9B. Enterprises are sitting on large volumes of structured and unstructured data and they recognize the need to have visibility and availability of this information to their process owners as and when they need it. More than 80% of enterprises will use conversational AI to engage with their stakeholders and deliver tasks.
Velocious will connect to our customer’s applications thus making the best use of their existing landscape while filling in the process automation gaps with emerging technologies.
#4. For a bootstrapped venture like Avaali Solutions, how difficult was it initially to attract top tech talent to work for you?
It was quite difficult during our initial years to attract talent. We made pitches to prospective employees as much as we made to prospective customers. Eventually, as we started acquiring customer logos and got better at our share of market presence, it started getting better.
#5. What are your views on hackathons which are fast-emerging as the go-to platforms to find quality tech solutions, especially in emerging technologies for which there exists a talent crunch?
Hackathons are a very powerful way to attract good quality talent. They help identify people with innovative ideas, technical and entrepreneurial skills. They also stimulate innovative thinking, collaboration and problem solving amongst developers. It is a great way to connect with great talent and make lasting connections.
#6. At TechGig, we are behind India’s largest women-only coding competition called Geek Goddess. As an accomplished women technology leader and if you could do a root cause analysis of the issue, what will be some of your suggestions to improve the underrepresentation of women in technology?
It is quite unfortunate that the ratio of male to female workers is quite skewed in the STEM field. This only gets worse in terms of leadership positions. We absolutely need more women in technology. There are still glaring gender discriminations and biases. There are only one in five countries that achieve gender parity where women make close to 45-55% of researchers. The irony is that there are adequate number of young girls aspiring for a career in STEM during their education years and several do pass with high rankings. However, as they progress in their career, there are many who choose to step back due to family and other personal commitments.
The first step is to recognize this as a serious issue to be able to make the change happen. There needs to be a concentrated effort to attract more women into STEM education. Enterprises could execute mentoring initiatives where their female workforce could get to speak to other successful female mentors in the industry. Enterprises would need to put in specific methods to recognize subconscious bias in their HR processes right from recruitment through to reviews and promotions. Having a good balance of female to male decision makers will certainly help.
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