The Indian consulting industry has grown substantially over the period of time. It has grown not only in sync with the size but also in terms of service offerings. Currently, the demand for specialist consultants and their services has shot up and the Indian customers are actively in requirement of the same. This has evidently opened new horizons for a huge number of consultants. Helping the businesses with the right knowledge, expertise, and resources have become quite essential in today’s business paradigm. As the consulting industry is continuously expanding as per the demand, it is estimated to grow significantly more at a compound annual growth rate of 30% by 2020. It is on track of becoming a Rs. 27000 crores industry along with the rapid digitization happening in the space.
The young generation or the millennials precisely, are born in this digital age, unlike some of us who have come up from the non-core technology days. The younger workforce must align themselves with the disruptions coming their way. They need to keep themselves updated, use technology wisely, learn coding, math, and some data sciences to transform into able individuals. All the while fitting into the future data-centric world of decision-making, that we all are entering in the coming days.
Mr. Vijay Vaidyanathan advices the young generation by saying, “If you have entrepreneurial dreams, explore it with passion, and start early. There is no eligibility criterion – the technology business at this point is democratized.” These words of Mr. Vijay, addressed to the budding entrepreneurs, align with what he has done in the line of technology-oriented businesses. Mr. Vijay is a serial entrepreneur with more than 27 years of worldwide experience of facilitating products and services.
His previous association with companies like Oracle, Yahoo, eBay, PwC, and Cognizant has helped him in incubating as well as exiting two product start-ups with diverse technology and business expertise. Now, he is the Founder and CEO of Npedia Technologies Pvt. Ltd., and this company operates with the approach of driving seamless technological solutions to its clients.
With more than 25 years of the team’s cumulative experience, Npedia Technologies has acquired the key talent to foresee changes in the current IT consulting landscape from the traditional consultative offerings of the past, to more digital transformative models. It is a company offering CTO & CIO as-a-service, along with Business Digital Transformation consulting services, to work along with the clients’ stakeholders. It helps with business process execution, strategic planning, technology roadmap, and capital expenditure models to deliver the client organizations’ strategic vision and in achieving their goals.
Driving Value
The team of Npedia Technologies has helped established enterprises with their CIO-as-a-Service model, where they engaged in planning and assisted in the rollout of new IT projects. This helped them in aligning, modern digital transformational applications and enabled the company to reduce downtimes and plan for business risks. Earlier, consultants used to be billed for a set period of time whether they were productive or not. Now, with as-a-service models coming in, the client companies can utilize those said services only for the time required and on an ongoing basis.
Npedia has helped more than a dozen organizations stuck amidst the dearth of a senior IT talent; take better and wider decision-making authority and technology deployment responsibilities. As a result, companies can now take a broader view of the strategy and infrastructure, focusing on business and IT alignment to create a lot of value. “We collaborate, advice and perform the same functions as a conventional CIO,” states Mr. Vijay.
“We are facilitating work with customers to plan technology roadmap, identify opportunities to use new technology tools,” states the team of Npedia Technologies. Customers were first reluctant to try and engage in the new as-a-service model. But, when the company engaged with senior management of various organizations for an initial period of 12 weeks, they all realized its success rate and the value it could bring to the table. They all loved this model and from then, the company grew from having just a few customers to a larger client-base. It went on to being engaged for more than 52 weeks which helped the firm to move forward on the journey and dive into strategic planning.
Npedia’s Dynamics
“Our C-level engagement services provide strategy and consulting services for startups and technology-driven companies along with their stages of expansion,” describes Mr. Vijay. The team of Npedia assists and guides technologically-oriented companies, all the while considering their growth through their business development cycle. Right from product development, go-to-market strategies, financial plans, IP, fund-raising and guidance till intellectual capital, the firm takes care of everything. The challenge for companies is to stay updated with these emerging technologies, investing wisely with confidence in strategic options that create most value and Npedia Technologies helps them in achieving exactly the same.
This tech-enabler has helped a mid-tier investment bank for their new push to digital retail brokerage and increase digital adoption practices. Another client organization is a Fin-Tech Web Platform which has be transformed to operate with new data-as-a-service API domain services, shift to digital, for growth and customer adoption. A creative media services content studio company has been helped with strategy, process changes digital platform and functions for efficient tracking of projects, resources, cost and overall security assessment and cloud migration.
Npedia also engages with several incubators and accelerators to assist with their mentorships, technology assessments, and guidance for start-ups. It is also aligned with the various colleges’ ecosystem to empower knowledge, creativity, guidance, and overall success of their program along with their investments.
It has now grown significantly in the last year to over a dozen customers, over 3 colleges, and two co-working spaces that facilitate tie-ups for mentorship and partnerships. Currently, Npedia is providing Mentorship and tech advisory for the smart manufacturing tech accelerator, run by a leading National level College, in association with India’s leading manufacturing company, to promote Made in India tech initiatives. “Our future roadmap is in the new offerings of conversational A.I., machine learning data models, AR/VR, and guiding businesses to adopt more digital transformations,” concludes Mr. Vijay.
