‘India is an interesting market for us with its GCCs, system integrators and dynamic customer base’: Ernie Hu, COO/ Directeur General, CAST

Riding the wave of digitization, Indian IT firms are increasingly leveraging software intelligence to understand their software’s inner workings. Ernie Hu, COO/Directeur General, CAST, talks about how CAST is at the forefront of steering tech-driven innovation in India, why the Indian market offers huge growth opportunities, and how its three major drivers are ushering in the next stage of evolution in India.

Q: Software intelligence is relatively new to the Indian and ASEAN markets. Given that India is home to more than 1,800 global capability centres, what is the scope of growth amongst Indian enterprises and these centres based in India?

Software has a ubiquitous and all-pervasive impact on our daily lives and everything we do. A couple of decades ago, the foundation of CAST was laid by our founder, Vincent Delaroche, when he realized how little visibility there is into its inner structures, slowing down the businesses relaying on it.

CAST technology ‘understands’ how custom-built applications work and automatically provides insights into their inner workings, in real-time, which is especially valuable for legacy or multi-technology applications.

India is an interesting geography largely due to its three major drivers: global competency centres (GCCs), system integrators, and a growing domestic market. GCCs have become centres of operational excellence, product development, and innovation hubs.

Moreover, India’s large domestic market and system integrators are a huge customer base for us. System integration companies use CAST Imaging during their application modernization and cloud refactoring efforts. Since we have been instrumental in transforming their solutions, we contribute to their bottom as well as top line growth.

Q: Why is retaining or preserving software knowledge crucial for software delivery-led growth and fast-growing enterprises in India?

I think it’s the notion of speed to market. Ultimately, the insight given by us reduces the time taken to ramp up learning about the applications. It reduces the time spent on taking the application, offering, or software to market.

There are companies that are growing so fast that they need to promote people or rotate people off the job, so preserving the knowledge helps support the notion of speed and go-to-market. It is basically automation vs. manual. The operative word here is ‘automate’.

Q: How crucial is it to help software teams respond faster to enterprise business and operate more efficiently?

I think it’s all about the numbers. It’s about helping the bottom line. I’ve seen situations where, at the end of the day, a large enterprise customer may well have multiple contracts with different parties. You will see situations where both customers and suppliers are using CAST. They’re on the same page, so to speak. Visibility gives you insight into making better decisions ultimately.

Q: Cloud adoption is a catalyst for IT modernization in India. How can CAST intelligence enable enterprises to undertake their digital transformation journey with pivotal hyperscalers like AWS, GCP, and Microsoft Azure in the region?

Today, organisations are constantly trying to leverage the agility and innovation that hyperscalers like AWS and Google Cloud have to offer for their custom-built applications. CAST technology equips enterprises to assess and modernise their applications easily and safely. Essentially, we are the common denominator among all the hyperscalers.

Taking the lift and shift approach to cloud migration, these hyperscale customers do not know what to do with some artefacts or a bunch of applications developed 50 years ago. The people who developed them are no longer around. From a customer point of view, what we provide is clarity on the five Rs: refactor, rebuild, rehost, rearchitect, and replace. What the hyperscalers do is give you a set of outputs and say, ‘We can do this in five days versus 30 days.’

Q: India is the open-source capital. How can tech leaders minimise software risks while dealing with open source?

Software intelligence plays a big role in quality and security. As a pioneer and category leader in software intelligence, CAST plays an important role in migrating application portfolios to the cloud and reducing the cybersecurity risks that come with open-source software (OSS) components. There are multiple players like Black Duck and White Source who have done a very good job at open source from day one.

From a publisher and an event management firm to an alcohol distribution company, I’ve had discussions with many organisations that are relying on open source. With large numbers of developers contributing to a project, there are several benefits to open collaboration.

Also, it’s more than just the technical issues. It’s about copyright, which is something that we provide. Through our open source capabilities, we are able to shine a light on any legal or copyright infringements.

Q: Recently, CAST introduced a first-of its- kind automated green software insight capability. What kind of impact do you foresee with this initiative?

A few weeks ago, I was in Italy and realised that they are very particular about being ESG-compliant and green. In fact, I learned this from a conversation with one of the customers who spoke about moving their data centres from lithium battery-operated systems to hydrogen-operated systems as rapidly as possible. CAST is now part of the Green Software Foundation. In terms of reducing the carbon footprint, CAST Highlight can give you a broad, quick view of how green you are with your applications through a green index that gives better insights.

Q: As compared to other geographies, what kind of impact or scope do you see in India and ASEAN markets? What do the growth numbers look like?

India is the second-largest geography in revenue contribution to CAST after North America. Going back to the three domains in terms of how we see this geography, there’s a huge growth opportunity in that respect. Since the founding establishment of CAST India, we have primarily done business with the likes of Accenture, CGI, Cognizant, Infosys, LTI, TCS, and Wipro to accelerate their digital transformation.

I think there is a lot of cross-selling of new capabilities in the domestic market right now. I’m visiting India once every quarter, and that’s because, in addition to prominent BFSI players, I’m now meeting organisations I’ve never heard of before. I think that having global partnerships with our Hyperscalers has given us another lever to be able to bring the two geographies together.

Q: From a business point of view, have you been able to achieve the revenue targets set for the Indian market so far?

Software intelligence has been changing the way businesses work for decades. While collaborating with some of the major players in India & ASEAN, we have been able to deliver several positive business outcomes for a large number of clients like Neptunus Power, Generali Thailand, LTI Mindtree, Kyndryl to name a few. We have also helped drive value for a number of clients in the BFSI, Manufacturing and even in the Healthcare sectors in the region. India is among the fastest-growing markets for us today. When we first stepped into the Indian market in 2010, we began with a few hundred dollars. In the last 10 years, we have been able to see consistent growth in numbers. CAST is projected to double its revenue in the next five years in India.