Technology has always been at the forefront of every business operation. Businesses rely on the smooth functioning of technological resources that they have integrated with their operational capacities to meet their organizational goals. Enterprises know the importance of technology, not only the extent of its application but also of its utility and further maintenance.
Harnessing the power of technology is critical and it may seem straight forward to many organizations, but its integration into their already existing operational pipelines is quite difficult. That is why there is a need for deducing the right requirement of technological inputs concerning the nature of an organization’s business along with the deliverance of successful technology integration. A few IT (Information Technology) and ITES solution providers are solving this challenge with an out-of-the-box yet professional approach.
One such company that delivers expert value services customized to clients’ business objectives and requirements is Innova Solutions. The company forms a deep partnership with enterprises to drive transformation. The focus is to align with enterprise goals and deliver business value by reducing the complexity of adopting next-generation cloud and data analytics services. Many large-scale enterprises utilize Innova Solutions’ exclusive suite of end-to-end solutions because its team of experienced and skilled professionals provide the required subject matter expertise, flexibility, scalability, extensibility, and quick turnaround of projects.
The company’s vision is to help large enterprises adapt to the evolution occurring across technology domains and drive business value with cloud and related ecosystem. Innova Solutions not only transforms traditional workloads to cloud but leverages its expertise in working and delivering projects on SaaS, PaaS & IaaS platforms along with data science concepts integrated with Machine Learning. It is the go-to solution provider for enterprises looking to transform their business operations dynamically.
Innovation Redefined with Innova
The team of Innova Solutions believes in living everyday with the company’s delivery values, namely transformation, automation, and optimization. “These are the three aspects that enterprises are trying to leverage as an outcome of these recent technologies that came into the marketplace,” says Rajkumar Velagapudi (Raj), President of the company.
Even in his earlier successes, Raj created an innovation group early in the company’s cycle. That is exactly how Innova Solutions differentiates itself in the marketplace. Solutions (all clearly visible on the company website) are built by this innovation team: “Innovation is critical to the application and rapid deployment of these recent technologies, as well as bridging gaps to the customer’s business objectives” says Raj, President of Innova Solutions. This belief is borne out by the statistic that Innova has invested more than ten million dollars in building these innovative solutions to enhance its service offerings.
Innova Solutions has grown to $100 million in about five and a half years. The innovation mindset, customer focus, and proper alignment of the experience of the entire team has given Innova Solutions the positioning it has in the marketplace today.
Raj envisioned and acquired a data competency company, built infrastructure competencies, and scaled up to be able to deliver a complete end-to-end application competency. When the Innova team reaches out to a potential customer, it positions itself as a strategic consulting partner who can relate to all these elements and create the vision for the business, envisioning and presenting the right enterprise transformation architecture.
This positioning with the right leadership is supported by strong innovation. The team learns recent technologies, develops the appropriate industry partnerships, invests in building frameworks & transformation blueprints, and this is what makes Innova Solutions to be considered as not only a competent, but best of breed enterprise transformation enabler.
The Innova-tor
Rajkumar Velagapudi is a Computer Science Engineer of Madras University. He started his career immediately in the international arena. Right after college, he joined a group that automated Kuala Lumpur stock exchange and in just a year and a half with this group, he learnt the entire business of trading and proposed and developed a paperless trading automation system – one of the first in the world.
With this knowledge, Raj then moved to the USA and for the next eight years, he worked with a consulting company called as CBSI expanding his business skills – operating in multiple businesses.
With the confidence and skills, he developed in these years, Raj established his first system integration company. The company established captive centres for Franklin Templeton and Invesco in Hyderabad. The company also built a reference data management framework for capital markets which is adopted by several market leaders.
This company was acquired by Ness Technologies – a publicly listed, global company with about 1 billion-dollars in gross revenues. Raj then spent about four years working at Ness Technologies heading their Global Financial Services unit and consolidating their global operations.
Raj then left Ness Technologies and started another company which focused on infrastructure services. Within one year of operations, this company was acquired by Mphasis, which enhanced their service offerings by adding this unit.
In the year 2014, he established Innova Solutions which was then acquired by ACS (American Cyber Systems) in 2019 as part of its strategic global growth plan.
The journey was remarkably interesting because the landscape of technology was continually changing. The adoption of cloud, Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a service (PaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and low-code maintenance was evolving during that time. Enterprises were looking to adapting those recent technologies to either optimize the current business or transform, enhance, and expand new lines of businesses.
Nobody was using technology the traditional way. Cost optimization is not the biggest thing that they have been looking at. It was tougher for Raj to go to his past customers and say, “I can help you transform and modernize by doing cloud enablement”
The question from the customer’s side was, “You might have hundreds of cloud certified engineers, but they all have an average experience of two to three years. They have no idea of my existing environment, that we have built up over the last 30 years, in the enterprise. How are you going to take us through the transformation journey?”
To answer this, Raj went to the marketplace with an established, proven leadership team that had both legacy experience and the expertise of how to transform the businesses. He hired five of his previous customer leaders. With that team, Raj was able to say, “We understand legacy systems, we know how to take you through this transformation. Give us the opportunity to prove what we are saying.”
Today, as a member of the leadership team of the ACS group, he runs a hundred-million-dollar business. Innova continues to run operations as an independent business unit as part of the ACS group. This has been the journey of Rajkumar, a serial entrepreneur.
Under the Guiding Light
When Raj started his first company, lack of experience was the major challenge. He was overly excited to become an entrepreneur. He learnt that there was a lot of competition and this influenced the development of his core principles – be extremely focused, know who your potential customers are going to be, who is going to be leveraging your capabilities, and who should be the target for delivering your services. He also learnt that even though there are many opportunities available, it is critical to narrow down and to be focused on core services / product business. The vision and visibility must be clearly defined.
With this leadership, ACS group’s Innova Solutions is aggressively transforming to be a visible brand among solution providers. As part of the ACS group, Innova Solutions has access to large enterprise customers that ACS has developed in the business over 35 years. Many relationships with financial services, healthcare, and the entertainment businesses are now accessible to Innova: over 650 large enterprises as its customers. Innova is utilizing this and cross selling the capabilities of transformation, automation, and optimization to them. Becoming a leader in offering those futuristic technologies is the goal.
Another advantage that Innova Solutions is looking at, being part of the ACS Group, is to expand rapidly in various geographical areas. Primary target markets are India and the APAC regions. Currently, it has a presence in Australia, Singapore, and Taiwan. It is also looking to expand to the Middle East.
Innova Solutions will continue to look at potential acquisitions in the future. The company wants to be the market leader in adopting recent technologies to transform the business for enterprises. Raj believes that the company will reach these goals in the next 18 to 24 months.
