Do It For Me Analytics: Anil Kaul, CEO of Absolutdata (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: If you’re doing pure product, the customer is supposed to run the product and build an organization around the product. In this case, you are building that organization and you’re doing the business process on behalf of the customer.

Anil Kaul: That is correct. The only thing I would add to that is that the product piece here is something that we are building ourselves as well.

Sramana Mitra: Yes, which is true for a lot of the Do It For Me (DIFM) SaaS-enabled BPO companies. If you look at Athenahealth, for example, they are one of the most successful healthcare IT public companies. They focus on addressing the collections issue that physicians face – interfacing with insurance companies, filing the right codes, and so forth. For a small physician’s office, it’s a nightmare to do collections. They build proprietary software and a lot of artificial intelligence and they outsource the whole collection process on behalf of the physician’s offices.

It’s a very good example of the kind of DIFM model that we are talking about. In analytics and Big Data, it is starting to happen more. You probably know Latent View analytics, also out of India.

Anil Kaul: Yes, I’m quite aware of those guys.

Sramana Mitra: Does that mean that you are identifying more opportunities for developing software that will be used internally for addressing different aspects of your business as you go along? Have you identified opportunities to build more software that’s going to help you scale this further and offer further differentiation?

Anil Kaul: Yes, we have. We have two products right now. One of them just launched and the other one will come out in a few weeks. We have a third product that we just started developing in partnership with a client of ours. That is our big focus. By the way, we call it decision engineering. Our focus is to help our clients make better decisions.

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about what your vision is in terms of the long-term development of the company. You are, so far, completely self-financed?

Anil Kaul: No, we’re not. We actually raised some outside funding two years back. We raised $20 million from a private equity arm of Fidelity.

Sramana Mitra: Anything else that is interesting in your story?

Anil Kaul: What’s been interesting is that we’ve been a step ahead of the market in terms of developments. I’m excited about the product pieces that we are developing right now. There is a lot of demand for something like that. It helps us build IP without going away from the core DNA of services that we have built in the company. The second piece is that we’ve actually done a lot of thought leadership in the analytics space. We’ve been invited as presenters at a number of conferences here in the US and Europe. I’m very proud of that.

Sramana Mitra: Terrific. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Do It For Me Analytics: Anil Kaul, CEO of Absolutdata
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