Drivers of Digital Transformation – Anand Raman, Newgen Software

This is Textron tv. Hey everyone, welcome back here to techron tv. I'm very happy to invite back, uh, my friend here, Anan Vermont.

Anand is the E V P for Americas as well as the c o o over at Nugent Software. Anand, welcome back to Techstrong tv. It's great to have you on.

Thank you, Alan. Thank you for having me. It's wonderful to be back here.

Yeah, absolutely. So, Anand, you know, we should get this outta the way first, I think. I think, you know, some people in our audience are gonna be familiar with Nugent, others not so much, much.

So, before we jump in on our, our, our topic today, which is around kind of what are some of the key drivers around digital transformation, um, let's first maybe get a little new Nugent, uh, background. Sure, absolutely. So, Alan Nugent software, uh, we have one of the world's leading products for digital transformation.

It's built using low-code platform and content management. What we do is we help our customers transform some of their most important businesses. So, as you know today, you know, every business is trying to be a digital business.

So what that means is companies are trying to transform how they can, how, how they can, you know, digitally serve their customers, be better than before. And so what we do is we help our customers to, to make their journeys of their customers frictionless. So for example, you know, how do you deliver?

Everybody talks about the Amazon like experience, right? And how do you achieve that? Is, is really the big issue at the end of the day.

And, and in our view, what we, what we find is that the best companies in the world, they automate end to end. You know, they automate across products, they automate across channels. They automate across, um, journeys of the customer.

Basically make it easy for their end customer to do business with them. And, you know, that's where we help, uh, our customers. So we have this platform, we have this low-code platform.

We help automate some of the most complex, uh, applications that are out there. For example, in a bank, we might help them with their account opening digital as well as in branch account opening, commercial lending, consumer lending, trade finance operations. So we are, we help some of the largest institutions in the world.

Banks, insurance, healthcare payers, manufacturers, automate some of their most sophisticated, uh, uh, you know, workflows and processes across the organization. Absolutely. Now, you know, and on, I, I have a good seat right here.

com, security Boulevard Digital, C X O is our digital transformation sort of portal site and, uh, and cloud native Now, and I can't help but feel we're on the cusp of a new age, right? I've been in tech for 30 plus years. com bubble started.

I was here when it burst. I was, I wrote that up and wrote it down. 0 and DevOps, obviously, right?

The, the rise of DevOps and Agile and all of these things. I can't help but feel though that C O V I D, but I can't help but feel that we're, we're really on the cusp of a new age here, where some of these mega trends, the move to cloud, digitizing everything, right, digital transformation Yeah. Are going to have just a real boost, a real rocket with, with the use of AI and, and from ai, right?

You get a lot more automation, maybe less people involved. I don't know that's open for discussion, but it, it's the, the impact is profound. And not only do I, I believe that or not, but every we do, the, the level of interest, the level of engagement, the level of, of activity around this says it's inevitable, right?

This is real. This is happening. I, I wonder what, what, what's your take on it?

What's the NuGen take on this, right? How, how, first of all, is AI gonna be a key driver? And if so, how of, you know, continuing our digital transformation journeys?

I think Alan, you, uh, you absolutely nailed it. You know, in terms of, I think it's a very exciting time. We are seeing so much of, uh, you know, um, thought leadership excitement on the, on the side.

You know, business leaders are trying to do so much. And I think you talked about it, right? It's first the mobile came, right?

I think that was kind of the, of course, the internet and then the mobile kind of making it, you know, just democratizing a lot of the applications, right? Where users became more empowered, then the cloud came in, so you could, you could move out of the clutches of it to that extent, right? You were able to roll out applications faster, you were able to manage things.

But I think with AI that has now come in, it's, it's kind of connected all of these things together. It's really now unleashing, or it's expected to unleash a whole different level of productivity and, you know, experience for customers. So we are finding that, you know, all business leaders across the board are trying different things.

So, you know, let, let's take, you know, two or three kind of areas or buckets, right? So we talked about, I think you talked about jobs and, you know, I think the, one of the important things we are finding is that productivity boost is, is so significant for employees because look, how do you get access to the right information at the right time, right? That's gonna help employees take the best decisions.

You know? So it's about access to all of that information, access to all of those insights. And you know, that's the more traditional ai, right?

The analytics and all. So I think that's kind of become more democratized. It's become easier for employees to access that.

Uh, if you look at the front end in terms of the customer experience, right? How do you help customers take, you know, move, move through those journeys better, more self-service. Now that's again, productivity, right?

Again, think of the mobile, right? Uber, for example, changed how you hail a cab forever, right? And so this is again about, you know, you can guide your customers better, you provide them information.

So chat bots and all we've seen, it's about making it more real time, uh, you know, kind of a guided self-service. But I think the real, real power of AI is going to come in business innovation, especially when we talk about generative ai, right? Is in terms of how quickly can you make changes to your business?

How can you try different business models out who can do that? You know, again, it's, it's, it's shifting the power to the business in terms of being able to roll out new applications, being able to roll out new, you know, the time to market for, for a new campaign, or if a competitor makes a move, how soon can you kind of, you know, roll out your offering. So that's where I see that in innovation.

I think AI is going to help kind of bring a whole different level of, uh, acceleration there. I i, I don't doubt it for a second. Now, you know, though, AI is maybe sucking a lot of the oxygen out of the room.

There's also some other sort of, uh, key drivers that, that we need to, to explore here. And, and, you know, and these drivers, they're not NuGen specific. They're world, I mean, they're, they're general.

They're drive things like the low code, no code movement. Absolutely. You know, they continue moving towards automation and, and automating anything that we can automate though, just because you can automate it.

I'm, I'm a believer in just 'cause you can automate it doesn't necessarily mean you should automate it. Right? Right.

We, we need to be a little smarter about that. But let's get Nugent specific on these things now. And how, how is Nugent sort of saddling, you know, riding these trends?

How are they directing these trends to help your customers in their digital transformations? See, we've built this. Absolutely, Alan, you're right.

And I think, uh, the first step is really automation because, you know, how do you, how do you kind of move from this manual world to an automated world? How do you become more digital for your customers? How do you service them better?

That's where we've built this low-code platform, which is able to handle some of the most sophisticated kind of, uh, business requirements that are there. See, you've got, companies have to automate at scale at this point. You know, you can't just automate in bits and pieces.

And again, you know, that Amazon story, they've, they've automated at scale and they may or may not use that term, but, you know, that's really what they've done. And so for us as con consumers, it's very easy. Whether you're ordering something, you're returning something, you know, the whole experience across different journeys is so frictionless.

That's the kind of experience that, you know, most companies are trying to do with digital transformation low. What is a way that, that makes it happen faster? And it also transfers power to the business.

So business users can basically look at how quickly they can make those changes so that these applications can be rolled out. So newgen is at the forefront there. You know, we've, we've been very fortunate.

Uh, we think it's the right time. Digital transformation is, again, it's been a term that's been there for I think the better part of the decade, I think. 0, uh, you know, I'll leave it to you to kind of find out what coined that term.

But, you know, in the sense that what we find customers definitely looking at, like you said at the beginning of the, of the discussion, right? Things are at the cusp of, of, uh, you know, a whole different level of productivity. So, yeah, go ahead.

No, I was just agreeing with you. Go ahead. Yeah, I was just saying that low-code, you know, is, is again, another great enabler.

It also democratizes it, right? When you're talking about ai, on the one hand, you're talking about low-code, how the power is that, look, you know, how soon can you roll out some of these things? How soon can you make changes?

You know, in the old world, you are able to implement a process or an application. It used to take six months, nine months, and then you have to again, wait for a long time, you know, another six, nine months before you can make changes and roll out a new application. The monolithic world with low-code data transform.

Because look, you could do that for one or two or three areas of your business, but that's not enough, right? We talked about you to make it easy for customers across journeys. Likewise for your employees, you've gotta make sure that, you know, you deliver superior employee experience because they're the ones taking care of your customers.

So more of their work has to be digitalized as well. So low-code just helps you tackle all of those things at scale, you know, across the size and scale of the organization. I, I, I, I agree.

What, what, what's interesting is specifically with low-code, no-code, there's, there's almost two, and, and in some ways competing bodies of thought. One is this citizen developer, low-code, no-code, right? That we could take this low-code, no-code tool and allow non-developers to develop.

In essence, you don't have to be a developer anymore to make an application. You get it done quick. You could bypass the whole IT process and time and get something done quickly.

And that, you know, that that's attractive. It sound, it sounds almost too good to be true. And at my age, I found out when things seem too good to be true, they often are.

Um, right. And, but then there's another aspect of low code, no code, which is, look, we're not looking to bypass the developers. We're looking to empower developers.

Yeah. We're looking to allow developers to code, whether it's low code, no code, quick or faster, better, right? I'm not looking to cut them out of the equation.

I'm looking to let them go faster and better. Absolutely. What's the new gen kind of view on that?

Uh, absolutely. We, you know, that makes sense, Alan. What we, what we find is that, look, you can, you can look at, it depends on what kind of a problem you're saying trying to solve as a company.

There are some things which are very simple and you know, you can automate that. Think of Excel spreadsheets, Excel macros, you know, most people can write stuff like that. Now, that's low code, that's as low code as it gets, right?

It kind of predates the low code term. But when you're talking about doing it at an enterprise level, look, enterprises are dealing with fairly complex problems, right? It's not, these problems are not easy.

So you've got, there is a lot of heavy lifting to be done. There is integration with different systems. You've gotta make sure the data is, you know, accurately converted from one format to the other, for example.

And, you know, there's security, there's, you know, security. We are living in a, in a, in a time and, you know, security standards are only getting more and more stringent. So you can't just kind of leave the developers out of it.

You've gotta make sure that, you know, you build the guardrails. And that's where the advantage of a platform is there that look, if you, if you have a platform which can help you automate some of those edge use cases, and you know, you don't, you don't bypass it, you leverage it, you basically empower it, you know, to use your expression, I think you absolutely empower it. You partner with it, is what I would say, you know, where both, both the business and the it do their parts and you cut down the time to market for your, for your business application.

That's kind of where we find that for some of those sophisticated applications, you know, low-code becomes, uh, the kind of low-code enterprise, low-code that newgen provides. You know, it helps customers. We in fact, recently launched a digital lending platform and a trade finance platform built on low-code.

Now these are, you know, these are extremely complex problems. You're talking about, you know, trade finances, you know, expands multiple countries, regulations, currencies. These are not simple things that somebody can just concoct in a day or two.

But because it's built on low code, you can make changes to it quickly. It can adapt more easily to changing circumstances. Absolutely.

You know, I know we didn't mention this or not, uh, new, new NuGen, that's N E W G E n, just the way it's spelled in your background. com. Excuse me for, if someone wanted to go check out, let's say this, this platform that you're talking about, how do they get to that?

Where, how would they, you know, what's the path there? com, you'll find NuGen one. NuGen one is the, is is the NuGen, uh, pro, uh, product platform, which is low-code AI based for helping customers with their digital transformation, uh, requirements.

com. Very good. I wanna, we, we only have a minute left.

I want to return to the AI thing if we could. Yeah, Sure. As I mentioned earlier, the, the level of interest that we're seeing from our audience, it just dwarfs everything else that we're looking at.

Yeah. Is that a similar to your experience, or, I mean, like, everyone has to have an AI story now. Everyone has to tell you what they're doing with L LMSs or what have you.

I'm wondering if you're seeing that over at NuGen. Absolutely. Absolutely.

I think all, like I said, all customers, all business leaders are looking at, you know, getting their, you know, feet where, if you will, right, in terms of figuring out how, how can we use AI to, to, to, you know, unlock that next level of growth for the organization. So whether it is delivering cust superior customer experience, whether it is about delivering operational excellence and efficiency as an organization, you know, just becoming more, getting those productivity gains or about unleashing business innovation. You know, those are the three tracks that we see a lot of the investments and, and interest on ai, you know, kind of aligned with NuGen, uh, you know, customers and where, where we talk to customers across these three areas, we find tremendous interest in ai.

And, you know, it's something that's part of our product platform. Um, we are working on pilots with so many customers. Um, so, you know, it's, it's absolutely, I think it's, it's an important part of that next phase of digital transformation for companies.

Excellent, excellent. Anan, we're about outta time. I want to thank you for coming back on and, and telling us a little bit more of the NuGen story as well as discussing this.

You know, these are digital transformation and drivers behind it, and things like ai, certainly automation, low-code, no-code. These are, these are big topics to our audience. So I, I appreciate you coming on and talking about it.

Best of luck and we'll see you again soon. Thank you, Alan. Thank you.

Thank you for having me on the show. It was great talking. It's a Pleasure.

Our pleasure. Anan Ramen, E V P Americas and c o o for Nugent software. com.

N e W g e N. We're gonna take a break. We'll be back in a moment.