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KPIT
Too many companies, but only one Microsoft
Mandar Marulkar
The implementation of traditional ERP solutions could take one to three years, which makes changing any process a long cycle, ultimately slowing down the support system. With the cloud-based technology, creating a differentiated experience for the customers, partners, and employees becomes an underlying objective when considering the overall development of the organization. New cognitive technologies use conversational UI instead of traditional interfaces making room for innovation through automation and AI, and that is where Microsoft has played a significant role. It has launched services varying from advanced analytics and machine learning algorithms, the Azure function services through the Azure platform to many services rendering native cloud databases. It has helped evolve the face of APIs. From the technologies which help in building bots to the conversational UIs those are mainly into speech recognition and the natural language processing areas, Microsoft has emerged with a broad portfolio of services aimed at helping the organization to build a native cloud application sourced system which is more agile and creates a difference.
Impactful Initiatives and Evolution with Microsoft
KPIT is one of the first few companies which started the cloud journey along with Microsoft toward the end of 2012. Initially, it was with SaaS-based applications, like Office 365, so we moved all the 12,000 users using MS Office to Office 365 to allow people to work from anywhere, anytime, and securely across applications like mailboxes, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Skype for business.
From 2013, we started consuming Azure and initially, we started as an infrastructural service, so we moved some of the workloads from our private cloud to the public cloud giving the flexibility to the user to provision and scale their workloads dynamically.
We started our smart enterprise journey from 2015 onwards, which is the digital transformation initiative for KPIT.
Microsoft has emerged with a broad portfolio of services aimed at helping the organization to build a native cloud application sourced system which is more agile and creates a difference
As a part of the smart enterprise program, we wanted to transform the user perspective and achieving it required taking all the seven pillars of a smart enterprise, namely: smart campus, smart collaboration, smart business applications, smart insights, smart workforce, smart relationships, and smart infrastructure.
For data visualization, we use Microsoft Power BI allowing employees to see reports on the dashboard itself and they can customize it the way they want without concerning the IT desk. In smart campuses, we use the Microsoft computer Vision technology to recognize the people through a camera. We use the Face API to monitor tailgating users into the offshore developing centers, and we also implement various Microsoft Technologies like speech recognition, language recognition, and natural language processing when we are building the conversational UI to automate a task.
Advice to those Who Wish to Embark on a Similar Journey
An organization typically needs to take care of three factors for productivity increment using digital technologies—automation of a task, augmentation of the processes, and amplification of the jobs. Microsoft’s cognitive technologies have much better learning algorithms, and they understand the accents and the local pronunciations from different genres and get the things done quickly from the development perspective, so we use many Microsoft technologies in building the Bot framework and conversational UI. Also, integration of virtual private assistants like Cortana or Alexa within the same framework also allows the user to talk with the virtual private assistant to complete the business activities. Advanced analytics and machine learning algorithms of Microsoft help in predicting ongoing and possible traits in the system and help people in taking the right decisions at any point in time, giving Microsoft a competitive advantage.
KPIT is one of the very early customers for Microsoft globally who implemented the Enterprise Mobility in 2014 that helps to manage the devices from the mobile management capabilities. It helps to maintain the applications in the MDM and MAM solution. It has the information rights management giving granular control on distribution of information, the Azure rights management with multifactor authentication and data leak prevention technologies. Security plays a significant role when we are going for a digital transformation journey, and the Microsoft enterprise mobility features add a lot of value in the security area. Microsoft Enterprise mobility solution also helps in implementing policies for controlling, monitoring and reporting unauthorized access to data ensuring data privacy and compliance.
The new minds should aim at getting a cost advantage and agility in running the workload on the public cloud without making huge upfront investments. Companies should look at the dynamic and rule-based scaling of resources and optimize the billing and paying for what is being used, securely through Microsoft to gain a competitive edge.
Suggestions to Increase Profitability and Bridge Gap between Customers and Microsoft
The underlying issue is the awareness and the development of the skill-set among the partners about the new age technology. Microsoft should educate the partners and help them to develop the skill-set otherwise the partners will not be able to sell Microsoft technology efficiently and might not relate to the concept. Microsoft should inform the customers and the partners about the industry vertical specific use cases, the success stories, and the benefit of using the Microsoft technology stack. With the innovation and the ideology, Microsoft sure forms the basis for the whole concept of better user experience.
The articles from these contributors are based on their personal expertise and viewpoints, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of their employers or affiliated organizations.
