Exclusive Interview with Suman Akula, Founder & CEO, StackNexus Inc

Salesforce management is a critical area that many businesses take for granted. Most of them would be under the misconception that designing a sales strategy is enough. However, the ground realities talk otherwise. It is only data-defined planning, pivoted on smart analytics that can yield the expected results. In this view, having a platform to automate the complex policy-based rules, accelerates their businesses with one click. StackNexus is one such no-code salesforce solution provider which well into leveraging data. Analytics Insight has engaged in an exclusive interview with Suman Akula, Founder & CEO, StackNexus Inc.

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

StackNexus is a global no-code technology services company. Founded in 2017, StackNexus helps organizations attain operational excellence through Digital Transformation.

StackNexus essentially is a no-code technology services company. We give power back to the businesses by making sure IT acts as a true accelerator for them. We help transform businesses through rapid deployment of no-code IT solutions that help them realize returns faster.  

StackNexus helps organizations attain operational excellence through Digital Transformation, by helping them to do things declaratively, i.e., build enterprise-grade software at scale easily through drag and drop, helping the businesses be efficient, scale, and sustain.

We have our services divided into three vertical CoEs (Center of Excellence): Each CoE has subject matter experts who deep dive into the problems of our clients. 

2. 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.

We have come up with a unique No Code Data Solutions that will help organizations easily adapt and scale their data practices to realize returns faster.  Every organization, be it a startup or a billion-dollar company, requires data to measure and continuously improve their offerings and customer experience to scale up and sustain in their industry. 

The current solutions take a lot of time to deploy, are expensive, and usually require extensive training to get started. This is where StackNexus comes in with its No Code Data Solutions – takes hardly a few weeks to deploy and with the advent of no code, the existing team can start using it through drag and drop, making sense of the overloaded data that their company receives. We provide prescriptive and predictive data solutions – prescriptive help in making sense of the existing data from different sources and predictive help for taking the next steps through Artificial Intelligence and machine learning. 

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

When we started StackNexus, the biggest challenge we faced was to sell our vision, create the right team, and get really talented people into our startup. I believe the first 20 people are really important to any company, they shape the business and its culture, and getting that right is extremely critical and challenging. The other challenge was making sure that the cash flow was positive from the start, as we started with a niche market in the public sector, it was challenging for us to sell our vision to officials who are used to legacy systems. 

 We solved this by understanding the problem thoroughly and by communicating with the key stakeholders and aligning them with the value that our solutions will provide. We at that stage knew the problems we are solving are quite huge and will have a huge impact. Having this huge vision and impact helped us overcome these challenges earlier when we started. 

4. Please brief us about the products/services/solutions you provide to your customers and how they get value out of it.

StackNexus helps organizations attain operational excellence through Digital Transformation, by helping them to do things declaratively, i.e., build enterprise-grade software at scale easily through drag and drop, helping the businesses be efficient, scale, and sustain.

We have our services divided into three vertical CoEs (Center of Excellence): Each CoEs have subject matter experts that dive deeply into the problems: 

• Salesforce Products – We have built no code products on Salesforce for 311 Solutions, Grant Management, Licensing & Permitting, Emergency Management and Legal Case Management. 

• Salesforce Services – consists of Consulting, Automation & Optimization, Integration Services, Support, and Maintenance. 

• Staffing Services CoEs – 3rd Party Staffing, Staffing via IDIQs (Indefinite Delivery, Indefinite Quantity), and Direct Staffing.

• Data Services CoEs – Data Consolidation, Prescriptive Data Analytics, Predictive Data Analytics  

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

Worldwide IT spending is projected to total $4.4 trillion in 2022, an increase of 4% from 2021, according to the latest forecast by Gartner, Inc. The reason for the increase in IT spending was also advocated by COVID when companies realized the importance of IT., We have seen the adverse impact on businesses that had kept IT on the backburner. Without having IT, there is no way a business can survive in the given environment. IT is the bedrock of everything. We know that IT not only helps businesses scale and be efficient but also innovate and sustain, it is no longer a luxury but a necessity. In the current environment of speed and disruptions – the future is no code technology that helps organizations to deploy IT services at a much faster pace, experiment faster, and realize returns faster. 

6. Can you throw light on the latest employment trends in the big data and analytics industry?

More and more industries are getting data hungry, be it small mom and pop shops or large industries, all generate data to craft better experiences for their customers and retain them. Data Science is predicted to grow over the next decade. It is a staggering fact that over 90% of the data in the world was generated in just 2 years. It is unimaginable to realize the amount of data that will be generated in the next decade either. According to Glassdoor, Data Scientist is the number one job profile on its website. This position will remain unchanged in the future also. There will be about a 28% increase in data jobs by 2026 according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. At StackNexus, in order to reduce the talent deficit, we have formed something called as StackNexus University helping employees upskill and reskill and keep up to date with the latest technology. This in turn helps our clients to be future-proof. 

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

We want to be a premier no-code technology services company throughout the technology spectrum, from automation to data to intelligence. We want to make it easy for businesses to adapt to ever-changing technology.  From a business standpoint, we are currently in the US, and India and have just acquired Vidruma Technologies Ltd, a company in the UK to set our footprint in the European region. We are also betting heavily on no-code data solutions, our strategic partnership with a Palo Alto Data Company will help us democratize data for companies, helping them make sense of the overloaded data that they receive, through easy drag and drop functionalities. In the short term, we are planning to grow to 500 employees from an existing 100 employees. Our expansion plan is to start offices in Canada and Australia as well.