If you are in IT sales, then key for you is to know what could be the possible trigger for the business to think about :- Digital Transformation Existing IT systems upgrade Existing IT systems benchmarking with industry peers ERP systems modernization .... IT sales guys keep looping between business and IT side, with the two mostly head to head in terms of case for modernization versus as-is state of affairs. For the business, digital transformation only makes sense when it a

As per an interesting statistic, a mid and large sized enterprise on an average uses 100+ SaaS tools across its internal and external operations. Couple of years back, a lot of work was either manual or excel driven, cut to today, we have fund-raising rounds happening everyday thus leading to a flurry of applications and cloud based non-premise solutions where users either log their attendance or tick mark their vendor selections. While it started with the ease of digitizatio

1. Palantir Technologies in their filing notes " Across both the public and private sectors, there is a history of failures when investing in new technologies. One U.S. military department spent more than $1 billion building an enterprise resource planning system from scratch. The system was never delivered, and the project was terminated. Many of our customers have had similar experiences investing millions — even billions — of dollars in digital transformation projects, ent

NVIDIA, Oracle, Meta seem to be in the most turbulent zone for the next 1-4 year time horizon! I ran a 2x2 analysis on quantum of risk v/s Immediacy of risk on select US tech companies - Risky US Stocks Parameters used on both X and Y axis:- 1. Difficulty in monetization and sustainability of AI initiatives 2. Threat to existing key (>50% by revenue) revenue component 3. Failure to hire and retain key personnel 4. Effect of macro-economic factors Insights :- 1. Netflix Shopif

Not sure if bottom-lines will improve, but telco's should definitely grab eyeballs of every global investor | Analyst commentary on Telecom While this year, I could not, last year, same time, I had fascinating conversations with leaders across Ericsson, Nokia, Airtel, Jio at the India Mobile Congress. Two developments that caught my eye include :- 1. Monetization of network slicing 2. Growing relevance and adoption of private 5G across use cases in manufacturing and mining Wh

2 Years back I was supporting IDFC FIRST Bank Vaidyanathan V in their micro-entrepreneurs journey as part of their FAME Challenge where they wanted the bank to gain traction in the rural-lending segment (unsecured lending space). Today the whole industry is reeling under significant stress for obvious underwriting issues. In the same regard, I was having deep-conversation with industry veteran and SVADHAN CEO Krishna Chandran V Today's auspicious day of Diwali and Lakshmi Puj

The Week Unpacked with Analyst Ankur : What we speak and what we do? 👉 [Private players in defence] While defense minister explicitly calls out "INR 50 Crore to be a good amount, only 79 projects being funded in 6 years and only 18 moving to development stage speaks of the acute shortage of funds and efforts. Earlier this year I remember hearing Neel Mehta, Asteria Aerospace Limited when he mentioned that unlike Automotive where the whole ecosystem is available, in next-gen

While we regularly hear VCs and brokerage houses being bullish about food delivery and quick-commerce, I believe a growth (speed-breaker) / impediment is near (Analyst commentary on quick commerce) :- 👉 Business context : In the last couple of years (some may read as decade as well!) many new business models (app-first and based on convenience) have sprung-up largely to cater to Gen-Z populations (early adopters) based out of our urban centers 👉 Digital detox and rise of du

👉 For quite sometime, multiple conversations are running with narrative like "SaaS is dead" | "SaaS is losing its value" - these conversations are running as current AI support has enabled enterprises to build certain modules internally thus making some think "SaaS as redundant" 👉 While in my next post, I will cover the changing "landscape of SaaS" - I want to callout how Klarna's current move is distraction 👉 Klarna is a buy-now, pay-later provider (credit underwriting ma

Yes Bank MD and CEO, Prashant Kumar has listed couple of factors across both the asset and liability side. Lets dissect those and let me call out the red-flags which continue to make the bank and management unattractive to investors like me :- "Retail stress is attributed to aggressive unsecured lending." Two important fundas to focus here - first is aggressive and second is unsecured. The unsecured lending space has been very attractive for all the market participants sinc

[Young MSME founders in IT and Engineering services] Over the last couple of months, I got chance to interact with multiple stakeholders across SME, MSME and new India digital services vendors as my friends at Confederation of Indian Industry, Sharp Electronics Corporation USA Vodafone Idea Limited, ZEE Business and Profectus Capital Pvt. Ltd invited me to showcase partner events. Couple of quick observations below:- 👉 Digital Competition Bill (DCB), 2024 might have counter

Responsible Tech, genetic diversity and ownership hold key to unfolding of 19th July MSFT-CRWD saga!! [Implications of cloud outage] 👉 Couple of months back, probably in early 2024, we saw Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister (EAC-PM) coming up with CAS (complex adaptive system) approach to regulate AI. This was running parallel to the RAI (responsible AI) initiatives being run across technology providers (Microsoft, Google taking the lead here) and system integra

Happiest Minds Technologies CTO Sridhar Mantha mentions AI to be an iPhone moment (Implications of AI implementation) in the industry. He says “When the iPhone came, it was not meant for a specific industry like retail or banking or entertainment. AI is such a powerful horizontal technology” I second his thought process as we have already seen fairly successful AI implementations and WIP in fields which required: - 1. Hyper-personalized Customer Experience 2. Real-time

Seeing a host of things happening at Ola, some seem good to get them back to track, some showcasing recurring problems and some still grey...(Developments at OLA) 👉 Getting them back on track: - Firstly squarely focusing on domestic market and winding up international markets business (UK, Australia and New Zealand) seems a much needed step. Hemant Bakshi mentions they have re-assessed the priorities is a great step as every market is different and there is no point in makin

In recent dialogues at ETAuto, Mr. Kishor Patil, Co-Founder, MD & CEO KPIT shared some provocative thoughts on Automotive, Connected, Electric, Shared mobility market. Capturing the essence below :- 👉 L3+ Autonomous to become norm in next 3-4 years (across North America, Europe and most of Asia) 👉 Connected software services market to grow at a highest rate among space 👉 As Connected vehicles keep penetrating the market, vehicle interiors to undergo massive change (Might s

Intelligent Industry is in full motion!!! During my recent visit at Cyient Analyst event, I got privilege to interact and touchbase with key leaders on a plethora of happenings in the digital product engineering world Sharing snippets of some of these discussions for benefit of wider engineering community and my network [Focus on Cyient Engineering Services Player] : - 👉 [Communications space] After RDOF, BEAD is a significant program bound to get in business to the engineer

As I recently got a chance to attend fireside chat with Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal, I captured their key investment mantras [Kunal Bahl investing philosophy] :- 🎯 Lower TAM (Total Addressable Market): Instead of chasing big categories, they prefer smaller, niche categories at their stage of investment. Their capital infusion can't single-handedly turn around a startup. Mamaearth is a prime example, where they invested when the company was producing mosquito repellents for k

Morgan Stanley today shared a bullish outlook on the Indian IT and ER&D players. While the article by Bloomberg beautifully captures the essence [Indian ER&D players coverage], here are the key themes that govern the ER&D market for remaining of CY'2023 👉 The deal closure was slow in H1'23, but quicker deal closures are expected in the later half of this year (read "large multi-staged digital transformation deals") 👉 Synergistic benefits from acquisitions for players like C

Recent reporting by Forbes on Garuda Aerospace Private Limited, Agnishwar Jayaprakash founded unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) OE(D)M opens new opportunities for service providers in the platform and digital product engineering space across the aerospace and defense continuum. “About two weeks ago, the drone-tech startup and Naini Aerospace Engineering Ltd (NAeL), a wholly owned subsidiary of HAL (Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd), signed a joint development partnership to manufactur

- Initial Context Network slicing has been a hot topic in the 5G space for quite sometime now, Ericsson explains Network slicing as tech which allows mobile networks to be partitioned into virtual network elements (‘slices’) on top of a common shared physical infrastructure. Each network slice can be customized to meet the specific needs of applications, services, devices, customers, or operators. Think of a network slice as a type of private network, with the appropriate iso