Do It For Me Analytics: Anil Kaul, CEO of Absolutdata (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: This is happening in 2007, yes?

Anil Kaul: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: When you decided to make the switch, did you have analytics customers? Did you have an analytics product in mind? Had you built anything?

Anil Kaul: It was small. I would say about 10% of our business was analytics at that time. We saw that as the big opportunity going forward. We then started building the analytics product at that point in time.

Sramana Mitra: What was the revenue of the company at this point?

Anil Kaul: I think we were close to $3.5 million.

Sramana Mitra: Was that a very profitable situation?

Anil Kaul: Yes, the company has been profitable all throughout. Typically, we tended to have good margins and profits to sustain the company as well as continue to grow. We had cash that we could take the risk of letting some parts of the business go and build up another one.

Sramana Mitra: You had enough cash in the balance sheet to take this kind of risk.

Anil Kaul: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: Tell me more about how you zeroed on the analytics product.

Anil Kaul: Analytics was the focus at that time. We started going in that direction. I was able to leverage my network to get some of the core analytics clients, which tend to be big clients. We started working with Kraft Foods and Hilton Hotels among others.

Sramana Mitra: Were these service projects?

Anil Kaul: Yes, we have traditionally done services only. These are all services projects.

Sramana Mitra: Are you still a pure services company?

Anil Kaul: Mostly services. We do have some analytics products that we launched recently.

Sramana Mitra: You started doing services in the analytics domain and switched off the market research work in 2007. What other strategic decisions are interesting in that journey?

Anil Kaul: The most strategic decision was the switch. The second was about focusing on services and not on products. We realized that our core capabilities tended to be on services, so we prefer to focus on services. That was an important decision that we had taken. The third was continuing with the India business model.

Sramana Mitra: Give me some color on the services analytics business. Are you working on other people’s products? You have core competencies in working on other people’s products and what would then be those products?

Anil Kaul: The core piece there is that we decided that instead of outsourcing, we are actually going to focus on developing skills that are as comparable or as good as anybody else in the world including the US. That was a very important decision that we had taken. We typically use other software that are available to run analytics, but the core competence that we bring is the ability to understand a business issue, translate that into an analytical problem, and then use data and analytics to come up with an answer to that question.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Do It For Me Analytics: Anil Kaul, CEO of Absolutdata
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