Most digital transformation projects planned at the start of 2020 have been dramatically overhauled or scrapped altogether. As companies remerge after being shut down from normal operations as a result of COVID-19, balancing the need to innovate and control cost is the new priority for most of the companies.

By combining deep digital expertise, industry-focused business imperatives, and IT platform modernization services and solutions, Virtusa helps clients to fast-deliver end-to-end digital business transformations. To provide insights about the company’s offerings in data analytics solutions, Arvind Purushothaman, SVP & Global Practice Head of Cloud & Data Engineering, engages in a brief conversation.

In conversation with Arvind Purushothaman, SVP & Global Practice Head of Cloud & Data Engineering, Virtusa Corporation

As time passes, data analytics will only gain momentum for the foreseeable future. In what aspect Virtusa is helping business to understand and transit to the new world of Data Analytics?
Organizations are now fast-tracking digital initiatives, and data is at the heart of it. One priority is to help clients modernize their data platforms to derive insights faster. Virtusa helps clients make the right platform choice based on their use cases and overall strategy. We are also helping organizations rationalize and consolidate their numerous data integration and BI tools

to gain a 360-degree customer view, allowing them to understand relationships between existing and potential customers using graph databases for superior customer experience.

We see business disruption as something that is expected to happen continually. Back in March, many customers were scrambling a bit, trying to carve out a path forward with employees working remotely. We quickly turned our attention to Virtusa capabilities that could help. The Virtusa Desktop-as-a-Service (vDaaS) offering provides employees access to the systems they need to work regardless of where the employees are located. There is no dependency on physical hardware, and vDaaS includes strong data security to avoid data loss or leakage. Now that everyone is up and running, we’re helping clients get back on track with projects that will help grow revenue. We recently helped a Myanmar-based travel company reduce IT expenses by 20 percent by migrating their systems to Google Cloud.

More than two decades in catering efficiency, please narrate one implementation story that that helped Virtusa earn value among its clients?
Today, employers and employees are rightfully concerned about returning to work.In response to this concern, Modjoul partnered with Virtusa to re-engineer its existing wearable Smartbelt, equipped with sensors and GPS that provide data to help companies understand behaviours and activities that lead to workplace injuries. The new Modjoul Health Platform, a cloud-based application for employee screening that uses a mobile application or wearable device for contact tracing and social distancing, keeps employees safe and assures employers that critical work that requires being in person can still get done.

In the days ahead, what further innovations can we expect from Virtusa?
We have invested in developing deep capabilities in areas like IoT, AI, AR and RPA, fostering a strong partner ecosystem and building rich platforms for nurturing innovation to solve specific business problems. Through our partnerships with leading educational institutions, we have set up CoE’s and plan to coinnovate through a crowdsourcing approach.