This Global Tech Consulting Firm is Bringing a Big Change in Digital Transformation

How a global technology consulting company equips entrepreneurs – just out of college as well as industry veterans - for digital transformation.

Entrepreneur India

There are two type of entrepreneurs that do start-ups, one, those hardcore geeks absorbed in technology and beer – well that's how you would typically define young kids doing cool technology stuff but the challenge is they don't very clearly understand the lifecycle of an idea from the concept stage to an evolved product. Second, are accomplished professionals who try dabbling with latest technology pieces like artificial intelligence, and virtual reality but aren't completely soaked into it. They might have a business vision but they need support in marrying it with the technology vision, says Puneet Gupta, Global Chief Technology Officer, Brillio – based in California. Brillio sets out to help both of them (apart from serving Fortune 500 and 100 companies).

The Fix

Young entrepreneurs though can develop an idea but they know less in terms of taking it into the real world. "We help them through their entire value chain of defining what should be their product strategy, minimum viable product, and how it should be engineered," says Gupta."

On the other hand, industry veterans that have a thorough understanding of their market and its customers often fall short of knowing how they can inject technologies for a complete makeover. "They need some partner who can help them by building the technology from scratch, doing a first demo, a first proof of concept, etc," adds Gupta. Two primary offerings by Brillio for start-ups include Brillio Imagine and Brillio Realize. Imagine helps early stage startups with quick prototyping and testing their minimum viable product to get to a stage where they can pitch to investors as well. With Realize, Brillio offers a comprehensive package where enterprise architects and specialists in the areas of cloud, security, scalability, and data provides with architecture required for enterprise scale and consumer scale.

Tapping New Ideas

Conversational interfaces, artificial agent, digital currencies, like Bitcoin, are the technologies of the future for Brillio. Conversational interfaces are natural language and voice recognition interfaces, like Amazon Echo or Google Home. "Conversational interfaces are making digital experiences more real. For e.g., for a fintech start-up, artificial intelligence and conversational interfaces are a huge phenomena to engage with customers," says Gupta explaining its application, "You think of any technology system for e.g. online shopping, ticket booking, self service, etc., we are trying to bring consciousness to this system by making users feel as if they are talking to an intelligent system, who understand them and changes its behavior based on how you act."

Brillio has been investing and supporting businesses and even incubating unique ideas from its employees. It has acquired a data analytics company and invested in two businesses in artificial intelligence so far.

"We incubate interesting ideas of our employees in these areas. Once they start demonstrating it, we build small teams for them," maintains Gupta.

Design Matters

The solutions span across creating a digital strategy to diagnose and implement solutions, end-to-end data, and analytics capabilities etc. It is important for start-ups, building great technologies, to blend with their capabilities in design. It is one thing to figure out how do you use big data analytics, AI etc., and understanding the little experiences or moments of truth in your customer's life that makes the difference, is another deal altogether.

"Once you have figured it out, the technology has to serve millions of users in a highly secure, scalable and high performing manner which we call as digital engineering," says Gupta. Brillio, a Microsoft managed partner and cloud solution provider, recently became Amazon Web Services (AWS) delivery partner for Amazon's API Gateway and AWS Lambda (that runs your code without managing servers). Its 70 per cent business comes from 50 Fortune 500 and 1000 companies in the US, and 15 per cent from Europe and India, each.

(This article was first published in the January issue of Entrepreneur Magazine. To subscribe, click here)