Indium Software has been around for 20 years, and its growth has accelerated in the last five years, especially after it acquired Noah Data in 2018, which expedited the growth of its digital business. Indium’s digital canvas includes – advanced analytics, big data engineering, low code development, RPA and full-stack development.

Today, Indium has over 1000 employees across several locations in India, the US, Europe and Asia. To understand better how the company operates, we connected with Ram Sukumar, co-founder and CEO of Indium Software. Here are excerpts from the interaction –

AIM: What was the idea behind Indium’s latest product division, teX.ai?

Ram Sukumar: It has long been Indium’s vision to expand into a SaaS or PaaS or a product-based revenue model, in addition to the core services business. teX.ai was launched in 2019, combining Indium’s AI, cloud and product development expertise. Offered both as a cloud and on-premise option, teX.AI addresses a growing need in several industries to leverage text analytics to drive operational efficiencies and enhance customer experiences. There are customers in the US, India and APAC market currently benefiting from our teX.AI solution.

AIM: What is the role of AI-based text analytics software? How is it disrupting the industry?

Ram Sukumar: Depending on the industry, there are several use cases for text analytics. Let me give some examples. For an investment banking industry, going through several pages of large documents is humanly impossible, and there is a need to extract relevant text from documents into a format that is more easily consumed by analysts. This could also be applied to processing invoices, and processing bank statements for loan processing. 

For a consumer brand that gets customer reviews, there are several channels in which brands get reviews – at stores, online, or even social media. It is humanly inconceivable to go through each review for a global brand. Having a text analytics engine that goes through these reviews and summarises them can help improve customer experiences, and provide a huge business impact for the brand. 

A telco can use text classification to classify text messages as spam or ham, thereby improving customer experiences by reducing it. For all these three use cases, AI is essential and integral to be able to do text analytics with high accuracy and at scale. 

AIM: Which industries can benefit the most from this solution? What is the market size for it?

Ram Sukumar: The market potential is expected to be $14.84 billion by 2025 at a CAGR of 17.35%. Retail, consumer brands, financial services and supply chains will be the industry segments to benefit the most due to the growing demand to tackle big data and deliver valuable insights from it.

AIM: What kind of talent or skills are required to build and manage suggestions for a solution? 

Ram Sukumar: Our team of experts have strong skills in NLP, NLTK, ML/AI, Python, SQL, Tensorflow, OpenCV, Cloud & Text Library skills to be able to deliver these solutions for our customers.  

AIM: Can you also talk about the role of data scientists to build a digital framework?

Ram Sukumar: We believe data science has a pivotal role in the future of the digital framework. Technology has shifted from a back-office function to a front office function and is now a key differentiator for businesses in the future. Be it engaging with customers, employees or defining new business models, AI and Machine Learning are finding increasing adoption, and we believe the data science role is integral to implement these new digital technologies. 

AIM: Briefly explain Indium’s business vision and plans for the India market.

Ram Sukumar: Indium aims to focus its efforts to grow its core services business continually. Apart from QA and digital services, teX.ai will be a product play and will continue to be our key strategic focus for 2020-21. We will also continue to grow our advanced analytics practices and strengthen our team of data analysts, data scientists and data engineers and service customers globally and in India. As a company, our vision is to grow to over 2000 employees in the next three years.