Interview - Prithvijit Roy, CEO and Co-founder at BRIDGEi2i

Prithvijit Roy speaks with Analytics India Magazine on the Bridgei2i, the emerging trends and everything else analytics. Experienced in incubating and building up two of the largest business analytics services organizations (for GE and HP) in the industry and in leading large teams of analytics services professionals across geographies. Deployed various effective business analytics solutions across multiple business functions (e.g. Marketing, Sales, Supply chain, Pricing, Risk management, finance, Human resources, Customer relationship management etc.) and across multiple industries (Financial services & Insurance, Manufacturing, Retail and Technology). The only goal in the coming years is to build up BRIDGEi2i Analytics Solutions as the global leader in advanced analytics solutions based on big data and thereby enabling more and more individuals and companies to drive incremental impact on a sustainable basis from analytical decision making. Prithvijit has done his MS in Quants from Indian Statistical Institute. Analytics India Magazine: What according to you differentiates Bridgei2i with similar sized players in the analytics space in India? Prithvijit Roy: Our USP is in our approach to partner with different types and sizes of businesses to make analytics real. Our technology apps allow us to be a catalyst for many more businesses to adopt analytics and in building a rigour around continuous data-driven decision making. Our team’s experience in building the analytics practice for two of the largest global enterprises equips us to provide innovative solutions for complex issues and to scale up the people's capability needed for a pan-enterprise deployment. AIM: What according to you are currently the most important and specific analytics needs for the industry? PR: In spite of a lot of eye-ball grabbing in the world of business in the recent past, the actual adoption of analytics in business decision making is still low and not very easily understood by many. Hence simplifying the power of big data, machine learning, predictive analytics and optimization into simple business applications and demonstrating how the business can benefit from analytics are the biggest needs today. The gap is in terms of big organizations not being able to institutionalize analytics and small organizations not able to adopt it at a reasonable scale. Availability of cloud-based apps, can make adoption of analytics affordable and help small organizations test waters before they make big investment commitments in analytics. For the biggies the opportunity lies in going beyond discrete applications into creating a system for data-driven decision making, spanning across all facets of the enterprise. AIM: Where do you see the bulk of your business coming from? Do Indian organizations have the same affinity towards BI/ Analytics as that of organizations from other regions? PR: Most of our business today comes from USA. We are also working with India, Australia and Middle East. Adoption in local Indian companies is in the early days. I think our “apps” will pick up demand for India rather than pure services as of now. Indian services operation units of some large multinational companies are seeing the value of analytics beyond their traditional core focus on Six-Sigma methodologies. We are seeing significant traction in the area of talent analytics and resource optimization. AIM: How do you see analytics evolving today in the industry as a whole? What are the most important contemporary trends that you see emerging in the analytics space across the globe? PR: Big data analytics is probably the biggest space enabling real-time data-driven decision-making, using huge volume, velocity and variety of data including data in unstructured form. The delivery model of analytics is also evolving as technology gets more embedded in analytics solutions – cloud-based, real-time, available on mobile, etc. I see an emergence of three distinct paths in near future –

1. New, complex and emerging business issues will require the focus of data scientists to solve specific business problems based on new techniques and big data.
2. Then there will be real time analytical decision engines custom deployed in the IT infrastructure of the enterprise.
3. And the third is the emergence of simple niche apps embedded with advanced analytics algorithms to increase speed and ease of decision making for business users.

The third area is the area of plug and play tools. We have been making in-roads in this space. Our Surveyi2i app uses very advanced data mining and machine learning techniques tucked inside a highly user-friendly interface making it easily accessible by business managers. AIM:  Would you like to share an example of an Insight that generated a huge positive impact on your client? PR:  In spite of being only a year into existence, we have been fortunate enough to be exposed to a few interesting business problems. To state a few, we helped an Indian consumer packaged goods company to better allocate their promotions budget to increase effectiveness from the promotional spend. We helped a global personal computer company to increase sales by identifying the sweet-spot cross-sell opportunities from their small and medium business customer and sales data. We supported a European bank to redesign their talent retention strategy for their operations unit based on insights from their employee data on attrition drivers.  We provide actionable insights helping clients realize significant top-line and bottom-line impact. We are now well embarked on our journey to build organizational transformation stories based on analytics. AIM: What are the most significant challenges you face being in the forefront of analytics space? PR:  The demand for analytics in many organizations is still a latent demand. It is buried in a business problem they face without knowing this could be solved based on data and analytics. Hence the most significant challenge today is to make businesses aware of how they can monetize their information assets to multiply value manifold. Also, given the way this space is emerging, there will be a significant shortage of skill availability to deliver the upcoming demand. I hope that educational institutes and students become more aware of the space and consciously build skills that could increase the availability of more analysts and data scientists.