Inception, Improvement, Innovation: What else can better illustrate Trigent’s voyage of sustainability in market

Modernization and industrial automation go hand in hand. Probing application of Artificial Intelligence, Machine learning and Big Data in the industry has become an integral part of business-tech landscape and it is quite engaging to witness the usage of these technologies in vertical industries. Trigent is one such global leader in software solutions that provides technical support services in Cloud Computing, Digital Transformation, Mobile Application Development and Business Intelligence, to name a few. Analytics Insight spoke to Bharat Khatau, CEO of Trigent Software, to attain a deep understanding of company's mission and futuristic strategies and how ML/AI (Machine Learning-Artificial Intelligence) and Big Data are tapping in with the industry requirements.

Analytics Insight: Kindly brief us about the company, its specialization and the services that your company offers. With what mission and objectives, the company was set up?  In short, tell us about your journey since the inception of the company?

Bharat Khatau: While providing strategic consulting in IT Outsourcing in 2002, I believed that IT will transform the way we live – work, learn, and play. I was eager to play a bigger role in this transformation. All I required was a little positive nudge from existing customers to plunge into the world of entrepreneurship. I questioned that what better encouragement one can get when customers want to move ahead. It was then that I established Trigent's first offices in Bengaluru and Massachusetts in 1995.

I assess myself as a long-distance swimmer who learnt early to balance not only long-term survival but also remains competitive, whether in a calm swimming pool or a turbulent ocean. I have had the good fortune of being part of a competitive entrepreneurial landscape in the Boston area. I drew a lot of the inspiration from my colleagues in the Boston area, many of them are very successful at what they do, be it VCs, customers, business, research, teach, social work or associated with institutions like the TiE.

Analytics Insight: Brief us about your role as a Founder/CEO of the company and contributions towards the industry.

Bharat Khatau: I have been a practitioner of offshore software development since the mid-1980s. Prior to founding Trigent in 1995, I headed Technology Resources International, a software consulting firm specializing in offshore development to U.S. clients. I have started and run a number of product and services companies since early 1980s. My background includes process control, enterprise software, and process automation, systems design in the telecommunications and computer industries.

Analytics Insight: With what mission and objectives, the company was set up? 

Bharat Khatau: Over the last two decades, Trigent Software Ltd has established its position a trustable IT partner of choice by offering services and solution in sync with the evolving IT outsourcing industry. From our humble beginning in Custom Application Development, Outsourced Product Development (OPD), Application Maintenance and Support (ADM) we have expanded to offer value-added services like Cloud, Mobility, BI & Analytics, QA & Testing, Infrastructure Services etc. Now we enable clients to embark on a digital transformation journey to embrace new business model/strategy, offer superior customer experience to end-users, adopt better and efficient customer and employee engagement models.

Today, Trigent is a full-service technology consulting company offering services and solution to hundreds of clients across industry like Transportation & Logistics, Manufacturing, BFSI, CPG&R, Real Estate, Healthcare, Education, etc.

Trigent with its technology expertise along with deep domain knowledge is helping large, medium and small enterprise not only overcome complex IT challenges but also meet new-age business objectives like actionable insights to take strategic decisions, faster time-to-market, seamless collaboration across office in different geographies, etc. along with traditional metrics of improve efficiency and lower TCO.

Examples of the difference Trigent has made to customers' businesses:

•  NEPC is a large independent, full-service investments consulting firm headquartered in Massachusetts, services 360 retainer relationships, representing assets of $1 trillion with approximately $63 billion in alternative assets. The company experienced a reduction in production time from several days to 2 or 3 hours from Trigent's new application development solution.

•  PG Calc, a global gifting company, is impressed by Trigent's demonstrated expertise in Microsoft Stack and extensive insight into a niche industry. It benefited from a quick and efficient transition of 600 existing customers to the new platform.

•  A US-based legal services firm acknowledges Trigent's flexibility with handling changing requirements and a hands-on approach to brainstorming with the client to ensure that the final product was fault-free.

•  A non-profit center impressed by Trigent's QA & Testing says, that Trigent covered over a dozen test scenarios and hundreds of thousands of processed user sessions.

•  A civil engineering firm acknowledges Trigent's careful project scoping which it found very impressive.

•  A leading catalogue manufacturer says that Trigent's software development service helped to reduce report processing time from several days to a few minutes.

To summarize, Trigent has helped clients' balance their cost-performance parameters for IT projects via sustainable, long-term relationships.  We have helped increase our client's development bandwidth, build and launch products faster, and transform legacy applications or just maintain them. We provide offshore development services to hundreds of large, medium and small companies from requirements definition to design, development, testing and launch.

Trigent's delivery model includes leveraging proprietary technology and standard tools as needed. Trigent has also made substantial investments in our own IP in emerging areas such as rules engine and semantic technology, with six patents awarded.

Trigent has multiple development centers in India and provides development and support services from our US headquarters at Southborough, MA and other regional offices in the US.

Trigent's strength lies in our belief that people with diverse skills and knowledge come together to build a good technology company, one that helps clients to success.

Analytics Insight: Mention some of the awards, achievements, recognitions and clients' feedback that you feel are notable and valuable for the company.

Bharat Khatau: Over the last two decades, Trigent has received several accolades and awards from leading industry and analyst bodies such as IAOP (since the year 2015), Software 500, Clutch, Silicon India and CIO Review. Some of the notable ones include:

•  For being featured as CIO Review's `20 Most Promising SharePoint Consultants' the reasons cited were: "Trigent has lived up to its mission to enable customers 'Overcoming Limits' of competitiveness, productivity, technology complexity, time, and budget constraints through offshore software development and outsourced product engineering."

•  Time and again by Clutch, a data-driven field guide to business buying decisions, for being a top performer for Industry and Technical Specializations

•  Top company for customer references on the Global Outsourcing 100® for superior customer references and the value being created for them.

From one of the oldest multinationals – a consumer packaged goods Fortune 50 company, to the world's leading genetics information company, Trigent's services have benefited companies of all sizes across various industry segments including healthcare, fleet management, insurance, real estate and healthcare.

Testimonials:

"We've been working with Trigent ever since 2001, building, maintaining, and improving the bill of materials system. Trigent rewrote the existing program, developed an algorithm and custom inventory system, and over the years continues to provide, unsurpassed quality and support. They are receptive and foster a proactive, problem-solving partnership." Tom Gidley – Process Information Officer, Navistar

"The Trigent team's organized approach to project management and driven work ethic has led to a lasting partnership. Trigent met each challenge I threw their way." Adam Macek – Business Analyst, Quaker Special Risk Insurance.

"Trigent developed a SharePoint tool meant to manage custom health and safety plans for designated environmental waste clean-up sites. Scalability was a critical focus of the project. The initial rollout has been successful and has led to insights on future enhancements. The system is easy to use. Trigent was responsive and communicative."  Manager, Corporate Health & Safety – Geotechnical Environmental Engineering Firm

"I would put Trigent in the top one or two percent of all software companies I've worked with for support, overall responsiveness and quality of work! Trigent developed our complex inventory platform to help accurately track over 15 million issued catalogs per week. The application allowed us to view actual costs and profits across each job by collecting data on each area of the process — from layout to paper costs. It also automated data input, reducing manual tasks from a day and a half to 45 minutes. We are extremely satisfied, and have to add that Trigent always delivered on time and within budget."  Michael Martell – Systems Manager, Dingley.

Analytics Insight: How is 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?

Bharat Khatau: CIOs look for short-term and long-term goals that are aligned to business success. AI, Big Data and Robotics fit into this plan. However, having said that, how much value or how soon this value can be achieved depends on which state of the AI journey an organization is in. In a recent Gartner Symposium in Orlando, VP Analyst Janelle Hill pointed out the importance of setting executive expectations even as the groundwork is being laid for short and long-term AI programs.

Some of the trends that we see are chatbots, neural nets, intelligent apps, machine learning, commercial drones and natural language generation. Also, agent-based technology will probably give way to deep neural networks in the future.

Analytics Insight: Tell us how your company is contributing in the AI/Big Data Analytics/ industry of the nation and how the company is benefiting the clients.

Bharat Khatau: We have seen how Artificial Intelligence (AI) has injected new sources of business growth for our clients.  We work with clients to help them rethink existing business models and add an AI product to the same. This has helped clients to enhance and customize customer experience. Equally importantly, it has helped to transform decision making by inducing intelligence into existing processes.

Data science is helping our clients to arrive at qualitative answers for questions such as, how much inventory is required to meet future demand, how should the pricing structure be to ensure future profitability, where should a shipment depart from and come into in order to de-risk the estimated time of arrival? What products should we recommend to customers to increase the probability of a cross-sell?  These questions require answers which only data science can provide. Our clients, in most cases, already have data and we show them the power of this data to transform business models.

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

Bharat Khatau: Machine learning has evolved and there is a proliferation of commercially usable machine learning frameworks such as sci-kit-learn Python library, Tensor flow from Google and so forth. Amazon Web Services offers machine learning specific services. This just shows how machine learning from being limited to elite scientists is available even for those who don't fully understand the science of deep learning algorithms. Machine learning is therefore available for anyone who wishes to seek patterns from data. Today, machine learning is seen as the means to fulfil objectives based on data and reasoning. It has impacted most if not all industries. However, as far as AI is concerned, we are still not in a place where we can claim to have the data or the understanding to build machines that can mime human decisions. This kind of super-intelligent computation will become a reality in the future, but for now, CIOs can focus on all the possible achievable that machine learning can provide them. In the next decade, machine learning and AI will revolutionize business models and help to reach the right information, at the right time to the right people.  Machine learning will discover patterns and automate intelligence extraction and provide hyper-individualized solutions based on consumer preferences.

Analytics Insight: How are disruptive technologies like Big Data analytics/AI/Machine Learning/ Cloud Computing impacting today's innovation?

Bharat Khatau: Global organizations both small and large are utilizing AI for business and operational efficiency. Advances in the field of AI and data analytics have displayed profound implications for businesses. Along with AI, cloud computing is empowering innovation and the two are connected. Huge amounts of data which is used for machine learning is now cloud-based. Intelligent databases, IoT, container operations are some of the offshoot innovations from the cloud.

To get into details, in healthcare, for example, AI supports diagnostics by identifying variations in patient information, shifting the overall industry focus from cure to prevention. In the automotive sector, predictive maintenance, and driver assistance are already the drivers load and responsibility. The financial industry is benefiting from unexpected quarters such as personalized financial planning for customers. In transportation and logistics, we see autonomous tracking, helping in precision planning. Customized content creation will lead to target media planning for telecommunication companies. Retail has already experienced the impact of technology, AI will continue to take center stage and help the retail industry to anticipate customer demand. Across all industries, big data will help with predictive infrastructure planning. From there the next step is to move to the cloud and bring down infrastructure costs.

The cloud is empowering innovators to leverage its power to create new products, services, payment options and business models. Cloud as an innovation helps businesses to expand their product and service portfolios. It helps them to design highly customized customer journeys for preferential sales.  It helps to rapidly prototype and deploy to gain more customers and reach new geographical frontiers.

Analytics Insight: Predictions/ The Promise of Artificial Intelligence (AI)/Big Data Analytics/ Machine Learning.

Bharat Khatau: Everyone is talking about AI but to understand how it can be applied in practical life is still hazy. In our daily life, we use technology regularly in some form or another. AI in the future will augment our ability to understand and improve the world around us. It will help to automate complex jobs, provide meaningful solutions to macro issues, and help humans to find solutions from complex data. Data that is so complex and large that drawing intricacies from it can be beyond the capacity of human minds. To summarize, its power is vast and its uses are unlimited.