Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Movius CEO Ananth Siva (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I’ve talked to some CEOs who are in that business as well. Key employers are keen to monitor what employees are doing on their time. They want to see what are the activities on the device. You get into this thing about the employees’ devices being monitored by software that the employer is putting in. That’s how employees are getting around that – getting another computer.

Ananth Siva: That’s a fair comment. Fortunately for us, all our customers have seen that we have that ethical wall created, for example in Microsoft InTune, Blackberry Dynamics, and WhatsApp Business from Movius. Enterprise financial services customers have all been able to give their employees the opportunity to have a business interaction that doesn’t cross the wall. This has been validated.

That’s why tens of thousands of our enterprise customer employees are comfortable with the fact that this does not cross over. Contacts, messages, and recent are kept separate. We have been able to protect the firm and give the employees confidence. This has been validated by the security departments of many of our customers.

Sramana Mitra: Where do these monitoring software firms sit in your worldview?

Ananth Siva: They sit in the container. If you rewind the clock 20 years in our industry when there were only desk phones in offices, we all went to the office and made calls on the desk phones. What happened there? It was all recorded. When you go log in and VPN into your company’s enterprise link, what’s happening to the traffic? Equally now, the technology exists where you can separate that using containers. It has given the opportunity for work-personal separation on any device.

Sramana Mitra: I don’t buy that all employees working remotely would accept this as their way of interfacing with the company.

Ananth Siva: If I was to present an alternate point of view, sometimes it’s worth asking what has the firm done to earn the trust of the employee.

Sramana Mitra: That’s exactly my point.

Ananth Siva: Different firms have different policies. One thing you learn is, employees often have a direct opinion of the firm based on who they work for. It’s the people who make up the firm and how they train managers and empower people down the line. I can tell you that many of our clients have that strong push towards building that employee manager trust.

Sramana Mitra: We have a company in 1M1M called Sapience Analytics. That has since merged and become a bigger entity. They do that kind of monitoring of what’s happening on the employee’s computer. During the pandemic, there were enterprises that wanted to monitor what was happening. How are they spending their time? What are they doing?

There is also a school of thought that doesn’t want this kind of monitoring to happen. Sapience has competitors. I’ve talked to another company I can’t remember off the top of my head. These guys are struggling with their positioning for the same reason that there is plenty of pushback from the employees who don’t want to be monitored.

Ananth Siva: I’ll give an example. My first startup since leaving my corporate life was GPS wireless technology. When you talk about GPS, everyone thinks of big brother. Deep down, one of our lead customers at that time changed the whole compensation of the employee being fitted with the GPS. That changed behavior.

They wanted to get location intelligence. We were selected. They put our GPS tracking on employees’ vehicles. What has happened is you have location intelligence. That also changed the compensation at the same time to make sure that the employee gets rewarded for turning up on time, and not having to repeat the job in the next 14 days.

Employees’ productivity went up by almost 50%. They were able to optimize their workforce. More importantly, employees’ pay packets went up to 2.5 times. They were now getting compensated. If the employer and employee take that approach, it’s a very different approach to watching employees’ every move.

Most people do the right thing almost all the time. If given the right tools, we would expect better outcomes from people. If you’re suspecting that someone’s going to be doing the wrong thing, then that’s the wrong business to be in. You’re already starting with the position of distrust. What we do is help employers or managers build that trust. We started from the very low end to the high end.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Movius CEO Ananth Siva
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