Exclusive Interview with Dr. Milind R. Agarwal, Founder & CEO, Quickwork

Workflow automation, in recent times, has gained immense popularity among business houses as it saves precious resources, and brings in better customer experiences. Quickwork develops interfaces for such business operations providing no-code enterprise operation tools which require the least technical expertise. Analytics Insight has engaged in an exclusive interview with Dr. Milind R. Agarwal, Founder & CEO, of Quickwork.

1. Kindly brief us about Quickwork, and its services across segments.

Quickwork provides a no-code enterprise-grade platform to enable any enterprise to connect or integrate 2 or more applications and automate all kinds of business and consumer workflows quickly and affordably. Enterprises worldwide are looking for tools to create and offer better customer experiences using digital transformation by unlocking data from legacy and unconnected systems and taking action on it; it offers a ready platform that can be used by non-IT or citizen developers to solve such problems.  There are 1,000+ pre-integrated apps on Quickwork from various categories which are ready to use, a few of which are

• Business (CRM – Salesforce, Hubspot, ZohoCRM; ERP – SAP; HRMS – PeopleSoft; Enterprise – Google, Amazon, Microsoft)
• Consumer (e-commerce, payments, weather, news, location)
• Artificial Intelligence (Dialogflow, IBM Watson, Google Vision, Amazon Rekognition)
• Business Intelligence (Microsoft BI, Tableau, Metabase)
• Conversational (Messengers – WhatsApp, FB Messenger, Slack, Line, Google Chat, Microsoft Teams, IoT devices, and Intelligent Chatbots)

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

Our vision is to 'Democratize Automation' with a mission To Make Automation Easy, Affordable, Accessible, and 'Compliant'. 

We strive every day to make automation

• Easy – By making the no-code user interface and user experience easier, simpler, and delightful for citizen developers with every updated release for our platform.
• Affordable – By continuously striving to drive the unit transaction cost of automation to the lowest level possible, so that more businesses worldwide can afford to adopt automation.
• Accessible – By making our platform available in real-time, in multiple languages, on-premises, on-cloud, and hybrid formats, so that it can be accessed by anyone anywhere in the world.
• Compliant – By proactively implementing the best practices around information security and privacy policies and safeguards, so that our users feel comfortable and assured about accepting and adopting automation.

Our journey so has been an exciting one where we have grown from an app company to a platform company, as shown below year-wise

2015 – Product: A predictive performance management app in a conversational format

2018 – Pivot: Build an enterprise-grade integration platform that is DIY and easy to use

2020 – Launched No-code integration, API, and workflow automation platform

2022 – Launched Embedded integration and Embedded workflows platform

Future – Working on some first-of-its-kind innovative feature releases, currently being tested in stealth mode

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

Quickwork integration, API, and automation platform work in 'real-time'; this unique capability makes our platform very useful for enterprises with use-cases that need transactions and messages to happen in real-time. For example, chatbots and IoT devices work seamlessly with other apps on Quickwork; similarly, fintech like building their automated workflows on Quickwork because they need their money flow transactions and related information to execute in real-time.

4. 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?    

Quickwork is fully compatible with all RPA, Big Data, AI, and Robotics applications; we build connectors for any app in 48 hours if we get a well-written API document and test account credentials.

Many analytics or Business Intelligence apps like Power BI, Tableau, Google Data Studio & MetaBase are already integrated on Quickwork and we keep adding more as per customer requests.

5. What are some of the challenges faced by your company today?      

Our key challenges have been educating enterprises about integration and cloud – 

1. Enterprises lack awareness about how significantly large amounts of engineering time and effort are required to build and maintain native integrations.  A powerful scalable platform for integration helps in scaling rapidly while keeping operational costs low.
2. Educating customers on cloud security, specifically for enterprises which are accustomed to using on-premise or desktop class software.

6. How do you see the company and the industry in the future ahead?     

The market opportunity for integration platforms is expected to exceed $9 billion in revenue by 2025 and will continue to grow. (Source – Gartner Forecast: Enterprise Infrastructure Software, Worldwide, 2019-2025, 2Q21 Update). We believe that our platform offered in SaaS- and Embeddable- formats will power the integration, automation, and digital transformation journeys of many growing and large enterprises across industry verticals and SaaS app product companies worldwide.   

7. What is the edge your company has over other players in the industry?        

Quickwork is unique because it works in 'real-time', which makes our platform very useful for enterprises with use-cases that need transactions and messages to happen in real-time. For example, chatbots and IoT devices work seamlessly with other apps on Quickwork; similarly, fintechs like building their automated workflows on Quickwork because they need their money flow transactions and related information to execute in real-time.

To summarize, Quickwork is different from competitors because it has – 

• Real-time transaction capability which makes it distinctively attractive for messaging, IoT, supply chain, and fintech companies
• Any enterprise to scale to infinity without disruption while maintaining low unit costs.
• Affordable pricing for our customers who need to benefit from our platform.
• Rich library of 1,000+ connectors
• High-quality, dedicated support

8. What does your technology and business roadmap look like for the rest of the year?

We strive to continuously improve user experience in line with our mission where we state that part of democratizing automation is by making it easy and simple to use.

This year we will surface the first-of-its-kind innovation on our platform which will immensely benefit many enterprises who are struggling to maintain and manage their legacy systems; currently, this innovative feature is under testing in stealth mode.

9. Kindly share your point of view on the current scenario of Big Data Analytics and its future.

•  Data of modern enterprise with its sheer volume, need for faster velocity in storage, retrieval, and sharing, and disparate variety in terms of structure and source has made Big Data Analytics a very specialized, growing, and priority sector.  
• Apps and services are continuously improving the ability to make sense out of complex and large data sets and the need of the hour is to integrate data sources, databases, and data lakes with other apps & services running on the cloud, in hybrid and on-prem environments in a reliable, fast, secure, and scalable manner.
• Results of analytics need to be pushed and shared in a customizable manner with multiple stakeholders in a business workflow for better decision-making and faster action. 
• The Big Data and Analytics ecosystem must democratize itself in terms of accessibility, and ready availability of trends, patterns, and data-based insights and outcomes for the end-of-chain users directly in the field, complementing the top management in faster reporting and decision making.