In the IoT realm, performance optimization is a keyword that holds the capacity to unlock the doors for exceptional results.  Altorum Leren, as an IoT SaaS platform, strives to achieve exactly the same thing. Taking shape in the able leadership of Sandeep Parira and Prateek Shukla, it aims to provide solutions that are simple to apply and equally ensure efficient optimizations across the spectrum of industries. Analytics Insight has engaged in an exclusive interview with Prateek Shukla, Co-founder & CEO, Altorum Leren.

1. Kindly brief us about the company, its specialization, and the services that your company offers

Founded by Sandeep Parira and Prateek Shukla in September 2017, Altorum Leren is an IoT company offering technology innovations and cloud-based automation solutions to clients. The organization specializes in developing concepts and systems that, in turn, help companies to gain more market share and achieve enhanced profitability.

Altorum Leren is a "Product startup" that offers a constellation of services to small, mid-sized, and large companies across businesses and industries. Prominent among these services are solutions that help companies to monitor the health of their assets and automate the operations of manufacturing plants.

Altorum Leren has launched its SaaS platform for IoT – the Alfinity. The platform is industry agnostic and helps industries perform Preventive and Predictive maintenance through Edge computing and Artificial Intelligence. The use of these new-age technologies thus helps companies save a lot of cost and time by reducing the failure of their working assets.

Alfinity is a cost-efficient subscription-based model and its competency lies in helping clients in the early detection of flaws within their systems. This approach leads to proactive course correction and enables the client to work on a 'fail fast' strategy. No wonder, these systemic and holistic efforts thus lead to enhanced Return on Investment and long-term sustenance of the business. The platform has a USP of managing various necessities of clients – ranging from specifying products to delivering insightful information and from generating coherent data to presenting a comprehensive analysis report.

2. With what mission and objectives, the company was set up? In short, tell us about your journey since the inception of the company?

Altorum Leren's objective has been to connect the world by leveraging emerging IoT solutions. The startup's mission is to provide a simplistic approach toward delivering high potential and efficient optimizations across all the IoT industries, successfully addressing the challenges, and maximizing revenue growth.

This is interesting as I and Sandeep both started as individual entrepreneurs. Both were working on our product launches which eventually did not take off. This was not a deterrent though.

We happened to meet through a common acquaintance where Sandeep needed some backend development work to be done which was taken up by me. It was here where our synergies worked as both felt-

• Niche technologies are the future
•  Provide quality services to Organizations looking to launch their products in markets.

Thus, the inception of "Altorum Leren in Sep 2017" happened.

• Tell us how your company is contributing to the IoT/AI/Big Data Analytics/Robotics/Self-Driving Vehicles/Cloud Computing industry of the nation and how the company is benefiting the clients.

The tall standing of Altorum Leren in the industry can be easily gauged from a long list of clients that the startup has in its kitty. The company is making tremendous leaps in growth and performance and its ambition is to carve a distinctive place in the industry. "Think IoT, Think Altorum Leren" is something that Altorum Leren is striving to achieve and the entire team is making utmost efforts to realize this dream.

3. Kindly mention some of the major challenges the company has faced till now.

When we started, the first problem we faced was hiring people. Since we were very new, people were a bit skeptical about joining us. But we continuously made steady progress and were able to hire a few people, but the story doesn't end here. We made a couple of mistakes in hiring the people who were not fit for the job and learned lessons that we implemented in our next hiring. We were continuously failing in having the right set of people doing the right job which affected our delivery process thus leading to delays in software delivery to clients. We continuously dug deeper and started performing the Root Cause Analysis and hence understood the value of the process. After doing the analysis, we found that we hadn't framed out the process for the development and delivery.  We started framing out processes and policies around the same. We initially faced challenges in implementing the processes, but we didn't hide from the challenge, instead faced it by implementing and improvising throughout. Hence, that led to smooth development and delivery cycle which gave us fruitful results.

4. What is your biggest USP that differentiates the company from competitors?

The capability of getting the data from the devices and pushing the same onto the cloud that we have built in the last few years no matter how complex it is and the confidence of performing anything, and everything related to IoT for different industries sets us apart from our competitors.

5. How is IoT/Big Data/AI/Robotics evolving today in the industry as a whole? What are the most important trends that you see emerging across the globe?

The Internet of Things (IoT) and Industrial IoT (IIoT) have developed rapidly in the past few years, as both the Internet and "things" have evolved significantly. The emergence of "intelligent things" (static or mobile) in collaborative autonomous fleets requires new architectures, connectivity paradigms, trustworthiness frameworks, and platforms for the integration of applications across different business and industrial domains. These new applications accelerate the development of autonomous system design paradigms and the proliferation of the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT). New developments in intelligent connectivity enable robotic things to be connected at any time, in any place, and with anything and anyone through different paths/networks and services. In the future, an intelligent network infrastructure that is dynamically enhanced and extended by edge nodes, which are generated by interconnected robotic things, could serve as the backbone for IoRT applications.

The confluence of IoT/IIoT, AI, and robotics accelerates IoRT applications development, which improves the contextually aware decision-making support for resolving complex operations and enabling machine intelligence. This trend allows the convergence of programming systems, tools, and controls, the use of core semantic web technologies, and the interaction with robotic things to be implemented more efficiently.

6. How is Machine Learning (ML) shaping the IT/Big Data/Robotics industry today? How is it changing the role of CIOs and Leaders?

The value of AI is its ability to quickly knead insights from data. Machine Learning, an AI technology, brings the ability to automatically identify patterns and detect a deviation in the data that smart sensors and devices generate information such as temperature, pressure, humidity, air quality, vibration, and sound. Compared to traditional business intelligence tools which usually monitor for numeric thresholds to be crossed machine learning approaches can make operational predictions up to more than twenty times earlier and with greater accuracy.

With the advancements in ML playing a key role in shaping the IT/Big Data industry, the CIO role has shifted significantly from being just a technology provider but a part of a delivery unit to operating as a strategic advisor, business partner, and enabler of new business models.

These major shifts in technology, customer demands, and employee expectations are substantially reshaping the scope and role of CIOs who now collaborate with executives across all lines of business to lead their company through the digital transformation and workplace revolution.

7. What are your growth plans for the next 12 months?

We are completely focusing on strengthening our core competency in IoT as few IoT companies have the number of capabilities that we have built over the past few years, which has differentiated us from other IoT companies. We have also started working on AI which will complement IoT and will enhance our product in a much better way.  We also seek to raise investment for working on technologies like Bigdata and Data lakes.

We are launching our IoT SaaS platform – Alfinity in a couple of months and hope to generate a revenue of a minimum of 3cr from the platform and are eying at a million-dollar revenue for the next 12 months.

8. Which industry verticals are you currently focusing on? And what is your go-to market strategy for the same?

The primary industries that Altorum Leren is targeting include Manufacturing, Utility, Transportation, Agriculture, Pharma, and Smart City.

I strongly feel that Digital Marketing is the best way of connecting with prospects. We have built our Digital Marketing team who is constantly strategizing and working towards making people aware of the brand Altorum Leren and its products and solutions. The outcome of which is that we have been able to partner with OT giants like Rexel India and IoT Hardware company – Teltonika as an exclusive IoT solution provider.

10. What is your Leadership Mantra?

Leadership is a lifelong learning process. I have learned quite a few lessons but the aptest lesson which is very essential for any Entrepreneur/Leader to follow is –

"Hire the right person for the right position". If you have chosen the right person for the right position, he/she will perform the job efficiently which will drive the company towards achieving the goal.