Exclusive Interview with Selva Ganesh - CEO, Bautomate

In this exclusive interview, He shared his experiences in IT and several more things. Let’s check his success story and thoughts.

1. Tell us about yourself how did you start your career in the IT sector?

Information technology has changed the world like no other technology. It is enriching lives. It is taking education and medical care to the remotest corners of the planet. The most advanced business management software is available on mobile phones practically free of cost. Hence, I have always been drawn to IT. I’m a software engineer by qualification and an entrepreneur by profession. I started Bautomate in 2014 with just a handful of programmers and now it is a {mention the number}-strong organization providing process and robotic automation tools to a worldwide clientele.

2. Tell us in brief about your company and the leadership.

We are a true-blooded technology company building solutions that solve complex business problems through automation, artificial intelligence and machine learning. Its leadership consists of software engineers, experienced CEOs, visionaries and entrepreneurs who are experts in creating future-ready solutions with contemporary practicality.

3. What is your outlook for 2021?

We are living amidst a pandemic that has shaken the entire world. Technology, again, has come to the rescue. Millions of people are working from home. Hundreds of thousands of employees may even never return. Companies are adopting work cultures that will allow their employees to work from home. For the IT sector, the outlook for 2021 is bright. Many tasks that were difficult to imagine being digitized, are being digitized now since it is becoming difficult for people to move in the outside and work in closed spaces. Online retail is booming. Remote health monitoring is becoming a norm. People want to travel less and as a result, entertainment consumption is increasing. Hence, for every closing door, there are scores of other doors that are opening. We just need to keep our minds receptive to all the opportunities that we are coming across.

4. How do you assess the role of research agencies like TopappFirms in bridging the gap between clients and service providers?

To tell you the truth, they are providing an invaluable service. The World Wide Web is chaotic. The amount of information that exists out there is staggering. In 2018, in just two years, 90% of the information that exists on the Internet, was created. So, you can easily imagine how difficult it is to find the right information, no matter how advanced Google and other search engines become. Research agencies like TopappFirms eliminate the need to scour through the Internet and get down to business immediately. Looking for a competent mobile app development company but don’t want to find one through trial and error? Just log onto TopappFirms and you can go through detailed profiles of companies along with the reviews and testimonials left by their satisfied clients. What more could you ask for?

5. Any particular technology or industry you would be targeting? How do you plan to prepare your workforce for the upcoming technology upgrade?

We have already deployed intelligent solutions for as diverse industries as healthcare, insurance, educational sector, retail sector, manufacturing sector, banking, HR, supply chain management and general administration. We are fast adding new industries to our kitty. Basically, wherever there are repetitive processes and routines, there is scope for AI-powered automation. We are always in a no-holds-barred outreach mode. How do we prepare our workforce for upcoming technology upgrades? This is inbuilt in our organization. Our programmers and software engineers, by sheer habit, adopt new technologies. Of course, we have internal processes. Disruption is good, but we just make sure that this disruption does not become an interruption. Our employees routinely go through orientation programs and up-gradation courses where they are introduced to new technologies and new ways of programming.

6. What all products and tools do you think you could be adding to your offerings in 2021

Business process automation and OCR are highly competitive fields. New technologies are continuously being introduced in the market that make it easier to capture highly complex data with unprecedented accuracy. Hence, in the foreseeable future, we will be augmenting the capabilities of our existing offerings.

7. What are the challenges you see in the outsourcing industry and how much are you prepared to face those challenges?

For us, as an IT company, outsourcing has two facets: augmenting our existing workforce to meet technological challenges, and helping companies augment their workforce by offering our skills. Many of our IT solutions are geared towards automating business processes and outsourcing is a big part of business process operations. These tools make it easier for the companies and for the businesses the work is being outsourced to, to collaborate and complement each other. With rapid changes in the work culture in the wake of the pandemic, we foresee a seismic shift in the way outsourcing industry collaborates with different organizations. This is a great opportunity.

8. How helpful are the web and mobile apps developed by your team, for enhancing your client’s business?

Well, it depends on what one is looking for. Our OCR technologies give more than 90% accuracy so that our clients can capture vital information from scanned documents and PDF files and store them for business analytics. These technologies can be embedded in web and mobile apps. They can automate tasks and reduce manual work by 50-60%. Business process workflows can be created using a drag-and-drop interface in record time, using the web interface. So yes, I can easily say that our tools are quite helpful provided our clients know what they’re looking for and what they intend to achieve.

9. What, according to you, are the best practices to attain client satisfaction?

Solve people’s problems without beating around the bush. Create an attractive and engaging UI/UX but make sure that it is a part of the solution you are providing and does not stand simply to look good. Make it easier for people to use your technology. For example, a client can create business process workflows mainly by using a drag-and-drop interface through a web app. Always be there.

10. Tell us about some of your successful projects?

We are into product development. We create embedded solutions for our clients, but mostly, we are developing products people can directly use. For example, our most successful products are optical character recognition software as well as business process automation tools that people can use with minimum fuss.

11. How do you help your clients in choosing the right yet profitable platform for web development?

The web development platform must deliver the maximum to the clients. It should be able to leverage the native capabilities of the devices on which the web app is going to be used as well as provide hybrid characteristics for maximum experience. Most of our clients are more interested in the solutions and then leave the selection of the web development platform on the capable shoulders of our team.

12. Please describe the operational structure of your company – from the moment a client walks in, to the product deployment.

Our basic tools are already there. Rather than building applications and web apps from scratch, we use our technology to empower existing or upcoming solutions. The moment a client walks in (or contacts us) our first step is to understand what he or she aims to achieve with our collaboration. We follow a problem-solution-centric approach. Being a company that thrives on offering AI-powered technology solutions, we strongly believe that every deployment needs to evolve with changing and growing needs. This characteristic is built into our system. After understanding the problem, we develop a thorough understanding of the existing legacy systems whether these systems are deployed on local servers or in the Cloud. We get a grip of the architecture. On the drawing board we align the capabilities of the existing architecture with the capabilities of our solutions. Through multiple meetings with the client, we arrive at a common ground and start embedding our solutions into their existing software. We can do it iteratively or in one go. Once our solutions have been embedded, we help the client with transition and provide ongoing support on need basis.

13. After-sales service is a necessary part of development. How do provide customer support to your clients?

Our intelligent bots themselves are developed to solve people’s problems in a timely fashion and we apply the same approach with our own clients. We know that after sales service is very important for client onboarding and we give it as much importance as product development and innovation. By the end of the day, whatever work we do, we do it for our clients. We have multiple support channels for our clients. We have international clients so we know that they live in different time zones and at the same time they shouldn’t be put at a disadvantage just because of that. Our highly evolved support bots can solve 90% of their problems and the remaining 10% problems are handled by our expert staff.

14. Android or iOS, native or hybrid – which platform is best to use to build your app? What are your recommendations?

They all have their advantages with few drawbacks, at least among the niches that they serve. Android is a huge market, and many legacy applications seamlessly work with Android apps. Although iOS has its own whims but still, it is a preferred choice among many professionals. When you are aiming for specific environments (let’s say, just Android) it is better to go native because then you can leverage the great capabilities of Android. Similarly, iOS has some exceptional features that come handy when you build native applications for iOS. Hybrid is preferable if the benefits of using a common ground outweigh the benefits of utilizing native capabilities.