With the real world now at the intersection of physical and digital, it necessitates every enterprise, including digital-born enterprises, to have a top-class content processing system to manage their show effectively. The Digital India mission has further accelerated the adoption of cloud and digital transformation journeys for multiple organisations. Even government bodies are not far behind in embracing technology when it comes to digitising case data, land records, or other public services. The cloud industry is definitely seeing a major upheaval in global demand which will soon assume a new realm as it penetrates deeper.
Here’s what Satyamohan Yanambaka, CEO, Writer Information Management Services has to say about the work the organisation is doing to aid the government’s Digital India mission and bringing their customers’ “paperless” vision to fruition.
- Could you provide an overview of Writer Information Management Services’ journey thus far?
Writer Information, a strategic business unit of Writer Business Services, commenced its operations in 1987 and since then has grown leaps & bounds in providing information management services to Indian corporates. As we speak, Writer Information has 3000+ active corporates as its clients and is a market leader in the information management business. To understand the scale of Writer Information’s operations, we deal with close to 1.5 billion customer files and handle close to 12 million monthly transactions on average. We operate out of 18 cities and 3 countries and hold close to 6 million sq.ft of storage space.
Writer Information has carved a sweet spot amongst its competitors. Over the last few years, Writer Information has transformed into a multi-services ITeS setup, offering niche KPO, Cloud, Hyper Automation, and process transformation services. Writer information now has close to 5000 KPO seats operating out of 6 cities in India, including Mumbai, servicing major BFSI, PSUs, and Manufacturing companies.
Writer Information is also listed as “aspirant” in the Everest Peak matrix and equipped to provide. (PEAK Matrix assessments provide the analysis and insights enterprises need to make critical selection decisions about global top services providers, top locations, best-in-class products, and best-in-class solutions)-class solutions)
- With the growing impetus of the Digital India movement, how do you see Writer Information playing a role in pushing this further?
The Digital India mission has opened up huge opportunities for us, and we have been fortunate to play a pivotal role in the Digital India movement initiative of the Government of India. We have been the chosen partner for Digital India initiatives. We have designed a bouquet of services that suits digital India’s needs in a sustainable way that aligns with our core philosophy. We deliver critical services starting from the digitalisation of High Courts’ case data, land records, and other public services. Apart from these offerings, we are an essential back office (BPO) services provider to the Government of India and its statutory affiliates like UIDAI. We are also partnering with the National Health Authority and are involved in Ayushman Bharat, the flagship insurance scheme of the Government of India. We plan to contribute a lot more by setting up multiple data centres and making cloud hosting more affordable and local, fulfilling our vision of providing rural employment & digital empowerment.
- How do WI’s Information Management centres support a customer’s digital transformation journey?
Most of our customers’ agenda is turning “paperless” in its true sense, and Writer Information enables this ask for our customers. While paper still exists, especially in fast-transforming countries like ours, Writer Information’s offerings are precisely at this interface of Physical and Digital, a PHYGITAL offering. Writer Information has devised an “Integrated Business Process Services” (IBPS) offering that facilitates a seamless move of our customers’ physical data to digital bytes. However, establishing a wholly dematerialised world is still a long road ahead.
The second most crucial suite of offerings comes from our Hyper Automation and RPA-enabled competencies. All our facilities have IBPS tools which help our customer records data to be automatically read, converted to bytes, and hosted for creating insights. We partner with best-in-class RPA providers and use our domain expertise to provide customised and hyper-fast process solutions, thereby adding immense value to our customers’ end goals.
As Writer Information has its cloud, hosting and owning data integrity & security gives more confidence to our clients. However, the icing on the cake is the data insights we offer to our clients as part of the value-added offerings.
- How does an Enterprise Content Management System aid in the data lifecycle?
In its traditional formal form, Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is architected to hold massive amounts of content and help retrieve it whenever required using multiple search criteria. Then over a period, the workflow was added, followed by annotations, audit trails etc., and thus ECM evolved as a total digital repository & content management tool for the enterprise.
With OCR/ICR technology advancements, a certain amount of automation has become an intrinsic part of ECM for auto-tagging, keyword wild search, readable PDFs, etc. Further, additional functionalities like social collaboration, voice-based search, and dynamic workflow made ECM a much richer content management platform.
The latest avatar of ECM is more oriented towards content attributes and the ability to interface with other applications through microservices and generate deep, real-time insights. ECM thus is now upgraded to Content Services Platforms (CSP).
CSP is the crux of any data lifecycle management. Data monetisation peaks when data generates high-grade insights at the right time, contextually and instantly. Modern-day CSPs enable the same, and Writer Information proprietary suite InfoDOCS® is designed accordingly as a state-of-the-art CSP. InfoDOCS® holds data, processes, and manages data, and helps generate insights for our clients. This, being a cloud-hosted pay-per-use subscription model, provides significant flexibility to our customers to use the best-in-class product offering at a minimum spend in the OPEX route.
- What potential do you see for the growth and adoption of enterprise content management systems across different sectors?
As discussed earlier, the real world is PHYGITAL – at the interface of physical and digital. This necessitates every enterprise, including digital-born enterprises, to have a top-class content processing system to manage their show effectively. We are seeing traction for a cloud-hosted CSP in manufacturing, new-age start-ups, the SME world, and a huge demand for upgrades in early adopters, especially the BPFSI industry. Most of these enterprises would prefer subscription-based SaaS models and micro-service-enabled software to make CSP an integrated component of the overall enterprise application landscape.
We have recently rolled out our CSP in a large Power Transmission Tower company, a large global Project Engineering entity, and a large American beverage manufacturing set-up. As seen from this diversity, demand is very secular across industries.
- How has cloud computing achieved synergy with the different technological layers such as artificial intelligence, big data, machine learning, and advanced computing?
The answer to this question is the other way around. The emerging tech stack, like AI/ Big data etc., has achieved pace and universal adoption because of the penetration of cloud computing. Cloud computing models made advanced technologies cheaper, easy to access, and much easier to experiment with. These triggers have fast-tracked innovation and helped these technologies to emerge as refined ones in no time.
The other important attribute of cloud computing that helped emerging tech is the availability of metered and superlative computing power required for optimal results. Today, for instance, if Instagram can understand the user profile and analyse it deeply, it is because cloud computing power provides the information gateway for AI/Big data to analyse contextually and generate real-time guidance to the customer.
- Are traditional companies resistant to embracing digital transformation? How can they be convinced to go the cloud way if there were challenges?
Traditionally, digital transformation has yet to be a priority for most enterprises, while the intent was always to go digital and migrate to the cloud. However, the scenario is fast changing since the pandemic and due to the cyber threat’s enterprises face, including MSMEs.
The threat of cyber-attacks and the need for cyber security are giving the necessary impetus for cloud migrations, and we are seeing greater acceptability of the cloud. While most enterprises might opt for a hybrid cloud to start with, multi-cloud environments will be a reality over a period.
As a cloud-managed services player, we encourage enterprises to go cloud by offering advisory and migration services. More importantly, we handhold them to have the right tech stack on the cloud. Finance Operations (FinOPS), Security Operations (SecOPS), and Development Operations (DevOPS) are a bouquet of services that we extend to our clients to ensure their key risks are transferred to us.
Choosing the right and trustworthy partner is an important catalyst for embracing cloud-enabled digital transformation. Writer Information fits the bill very well, enabling large enterprises in their cloud journey.
- What are some trends you foresee globally, and what role will India play in advancing this industry?
- The cloud industry is seeing a major upheaval in demand globally, and this will soon assume a new realm as it penetrates deeper. The top 5 trends that will influence cloud adoption and increase its velocity of usage are:
- Data Privacy and Localization Laws: Every country is maturing to the next level of evolution in ensuring their citizens’ data privacy. This needs a complete data shield when at rest and even in motion. This regulation makes the cloud necessary for enterprises to acquire computing and storage capacities.
- Hybrid to Multi-Cloud: 2023 onwards will be the age of multi-cloud implementations if 2020-2022 was for hybrid cloud. Even migrating across clouds will be something we need to be aware of with the increasing number of new service providers.
- Cloud Security and Resilience: Increased cloud adoption implies more investments to secure data and make cloud resilient across all threats. Security as a service will get prominent in times to come.
- Proliferation of AI/ML using Cloud as Medium: AI/ML will graduate to “evolved” tech from “emerging” technologies. Cloud will be the catalyst as it ensures usage on subscription models and facilitates exponential innovation.
- Gaming Industry: OTT and streaming service providers have gained multi-factor growth over the last few years, owing to enlarging cloud computing and edge data centres. Gaming has a positive momentum bias; with growing cloud capacities and the advent of 5G, gaming will pick up much more acceleration in years to come.
India has been very indulgent and a front-runner in pioneering tech through its start-up ecosystem. With a favourable climate for start-ups to flourish, India is poised to be the capital of innovation and a global hub for rendering many services. Further, India is fast emerging as Data Centre Capital for APAC, so there is limitless potential to be fulfilled.
