November 04, 2016 : Neurealm is recognized among the 100 most promising Microsoft Solution Providers – 2016, by CIO Review

September 08, 2016 : MY fondest memory of Durga Puja in Ko­lkata was the annual trip we would make to the local darji or tailor, to stitch our puja clothes, a pair of silk shirts and pleated shorts.

WE CANNOT BE LEFT BEHIND LIKE THE PROVERBIAL HORSEWHIP MANUFACTURERS

July 29, 2016 : Neurealm a global IT services & solutions provider, has been recognized by Gartner as a “Cool Vendor” in IT service management 2.0, 2016. With the theme of 2016’s Cool Vendors in ITSM 2.0 being innovative analytics and aggregation for high efficiency and effectiveness, Neurealm was noted for its predictive analytics tool GAVel.

GAVel provides insights into the activities from the time the end user raises a ticket until the closure. It correlates events and data based on human intelligence and machine learning to provide predictive insights into the operations, thereby driving increased revenue and enhanced customer satisfaction.

This open source platform deployed on Microsoft Azure helps reduce meantime-to-repair number of incidents, predict potential outages and enhances user experience in contact center/data center environments.

“Neurealm harnesses next-generation technologies to deliver value-added services to clients. GAVel, our predictive analytics platform powered by Microsoft Azure, increases operational performance, reduces costs, and decreases infrastructure downtime,” said Sumit Ganguli, CEO of Neurealm.

To learn more about the GAVel platform on Azure, download the mini-case study and datasheet and read the press release.

July 18, 2016 : On being asked what books he has been reading, Sumit Ganguli, CEO of Neurealm, and a General Partner at Basil Partnersmentioned that he has been reading Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl and A Little History of the World by E.H Gombrich. We spoke with Sumit Ganguli at his Chennai office on a Friday evening, “Reading these books give one a broader perspective towards life, gives you dollops of humility and it spurs you to work towards leaving a legacy behind”. “Living a life is more important than supporting a livelihood”, he had heard this phrase from a commencement speech.A lot of these values and life goals are directly implemented at Neurealm, which obsesses on its RITE Values – Respect, Integrity, Trust and Empathy for all its employees, clients and stake holders.

Sumit has been in the US for the last 25 years and has been involved in the IT & IT Services business all of his career. He attended IIM Kolkata and NYU Sterns School of Management, after his degree in Engineering.Before joining Neurealm, Mr. Ganguli worked with companies where he was involved in Global Sales, M&A,& Strategic Consulting. He was intimately involved in GE Equity, investing in one of the companies and was the CEO of a BSE listed entity that was created through the merger of three companies with the focus on Embedded Systems. He is also an Adjunct Professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey, teaching International Business. Recently he has taken upwriting opinion pieces for various periodicals in the US and India.

Neurealm is focused on Enabling Digital Transformation for its clients through Infrastructure Solutions and newer technologies. Neurealm and its leaders have committed to use this as a platform to truly create a disruption in IT, and has developed a Predictive Analytics tool, GAVeLin the IT Service Management Space. GAVeL has recently been awarded the Gartner’s ‘Cool Vendor’status in the ITSM 2.0 for 2016. GAVeL can predict potential outages and enhances user experience in contact center as well as data center environments

Neurealm is also promoting a truly disruptive frame work, Zero Incident Framework (ZIF) that employs Instrumentation, Real User Monitoring, Automation, Predictive Analytics and Virtualized Desktops.

Through these innovative and disruptive technologies Neurealm is committed to be a trusted partner of its clients in the Bi-Modal IT trend, managing current operations, lift & shift while using Automation, Instrumentation and other tools to redefine the IT Infrastructure Landscape.

Neurealm is planning for some in-organic growth to either acquire new clients and new IP and would like to look at some liquidity event in the next 24 – 36 months.

“Our endeavor is to bring predictability in the IT operations, reduce manual interventions and drive towards a higher availability of business services” Mr. Ganguli explained. GAVeL& Neurealm Aided Zero Incident Infrastructure have been conceived, developed and deployed by Neurealm’s key leaders – Chandra Mouleshwar, Balaji Uppili and Rao Haridasu. Neurealm’s Predictive Analytics platform GAVelcorrelates events and data based on human intelligence and machine learning, to provide predictive insights into the operations, thereby driving increased revenue and enhanced customer satisfaction.

Neurealm has also built strong expertise around Microsoft’s Azure and other Cloud and Machine Learning technologies and IBM’s Blue Mix and Softlayer.

Neurealm was formed over 15 years ago, and one of the key characteristics of the companypromoted by its two founders was deep rooted, concierge like client intimacy. Basil Partners and its investors have taken majority control of Neurealm during the last 1.5 years. Neurealm is continuing this legacy of trying to provide obsessive, Seven Star Service to all of its clients while adding Innovation, Technology bias and RITE to the original recipe.

Neurealm has been largely operating in the US, ME and is again growing its UK foot print. Health Care, Manufacturing, Media & Publishing are the focus areas of Neurealm and it has strong presence in Oman and UAE, with the leading banks in that region. Neurealm is convinced that it will bring in genuine disruption in the Infrastructure Management space and usher a newer phase using Automation, Predictive Analytics, Instrumentation and reduce this total dependency on people based support, presently employed by the established IT Services company.

Neurealm, in a major Infrastructure Managed Services engagement with a leading hospital in NYC and was able to bring in a saving of almost 31% in its IT Operations costs. This allowed the hospital to continue with its Clinical Support at the same level inspite of almost 7% reduction in budget which wasshy of a billion dollars. . Neurealm is now engaged with the hospital to look at other newer technologies like Software Defined Data Centers, Automation, Analytics to improve its patient and user experience and further cost reduction. “The CIO ofthis hospital terms the engagement as “IT Managed Services with a heart”.
“Most clients are looking for business agility and cost optimizations. One such customer, a large publisher in the US is currently engaged with Neurealm and its partner to support their Cloud orchestration, transition to cloud and have used DevOps to work towards significant productivity gains”.

What are the major challenges that you have faced currently? How did you get rid of this? askedThe CEO Magazine. “As a mid-sized organization, Neurealm has been doing multiple things primarily being driven by clients. The current challenge is to change the organization inside out – moving away from doing multiple things to focusing on our core competencies, developing solutions and framework of IP, and to bring about cultural changes in the organization to support the growth and changes, ” as per Rao Haridasu , Neurealm’s Head of Solutions and Strategy. .
“By focusing on the crest of technology, trying to stay ahead of the curve, identifying niche and developing solutions, challenging our delivery leaders to focus on solutions to address client needs, and constant upskilling and training of the people to build on the existing competencies to align with the changing needs,” he concluded.

To upskill employees, the company has built Neurealm Learning Academy (GLA), in association with George Washington University. Neurealm also has a tie-up with the British Council for employees to go through communication and presentation skills.In order to prepare Neurealm as an International Consulting company with CXO presences, Neurealm has instituted in-house courses on Business Etiquette and cross cultural training.

Being asked to discuss about Neurealm’s culture, Sumit Ganguli said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Our company follows RITE Values; Respect, Integrity, Teamwork, Empathy – and this is seamlessly incorporated into our day-to-day functioning, and has become an integral part of Neurealm’s DNA. At Neurealm we do not want HR and culture to be clichéd and filled with platitudes. Neurealm shares the same board-level quarterly updates with all of its employees. A favorite and most ubiquitous Neurealm’s sloganis – ‘At Neurealm We Care’ emphasizes our response and approach to clients and employees, striving towards a better engagement that is aimed to ‘delight’ customers and employees alike with Neurealm’s commitment to goals and values. Our employee centricity steers various in-house activities and programs that keeps motivation and employee engagement levels high. ”

Neurealm is immersed in the concept of Social Enterprise. “At Neurealm, we believe that a bias towards altruism and being connected with the society at large gives our employees and leaders a larger vision and purpose, and we attract a different profile of personnel and it promotes a higher level of dialogue. Neurealm is closely engaged with the Dream Runners Half Marathon in Chennai that directly impacts the disabled by raising funds for prosthetic limbs. Neurealm is extremely blessed, that we have been given an opportunity to nurture and support a small isolated village named Ramanwadi in Maharashtra. The volunteers involved in supporting this small village have brought success in several areas of rural development and have the small hamlet inching towards self-sufficiency.” Balaji Uppili, Neurealm’s Chief Delivery Officer explained.
The testament that some of these values have trickled down at Neurealm, came from the individual effort that some of the Neurealm  exhibited during the Chennai floods.

Sumit completed the interview with a small parable, which in his opinion surmised Neurealm’s efforts to make a difference both in the professional and altruistic world. “These are all very humble efforts compared to some of the massive projects undertaken by the largest of groups and individuals. But I am reminded of the story – when a passerby witnessed a man who was painstakingly picking up upturned baby turtles, which had washed ashore and werestuck in the sand, and was rescuing them by taking them back into the ocean. The passerby remarked that with so many of them on the beach, the man will not be able to make a difference in the world, to which the man smiled and said that to each baby turtle it would make the world of a difference”.

July 13, 2016 : Societe Generale’s 10-week accelerator programme Catalyst has eight Indian startups working on various themes and three of them -Uniphore Software Systems, FixNix and Neurealm are from Chennai, working on various risk and analytics tools that may be used by SocGen in future.FixNix, founded by Shanmugavel Sankaran, is trying to develop an early prediction based warning system for employee retention and proactive management of employee expectations. “We have a three-member team working on risk analytics in the accelerator. FixNix is getting aggressively into security and risk analytics for Indian and international banks, including Societe Generale, UBS,“ said Sankaran. The SaaS based governance, risk and compliance (GRC) startup has funding from ex-CIO of Tesla Jay Vijayan and other angel investors. “Through the accelerator, we get access to senior management, lead ership teams and create a product that will drive innovation in the HR function,“ he added.

SocGen said that it will explore and identify opportunities to forge new partnerships with fintech startups.“In line with digital transformation strategy of Societe Generale, the Catalyst programme aims to co-create solutions by collaborating with these disruptive technology startups,“ said CEO Veronique Sani.

Uniphore Software Systems, a speech recognition solutions company , is working on a voice to text solution for SocGen. In order to help eliminate language barriers for business as usual (BAU) activities across geographies, the startup is working on a virtual assistant and artificial intelligence (AI) enabled speech recognition solution to automate processes in the bank and to explore speech analytics with transcription and translation functionalities.

Neurealm, a global IT services and solutions provider, has a threefour member team in the SocGen accelerator. The company has a big data based IT operations analytics platform called GAVel, which facilitates insightful data aggre gation to enable service intelligence through proactive and predictive risk management. “One of the things GAVel does is to aggregates information about the enterprise, about servers and laptops, look at patterns in the past and gives useful insights to the company ,“said Rao Haridasu, headsolutions and strategy, Neurealm.

While the GAVel platform has multiple functionalities, they are also working on using sentiment analytics as an HR tool for Soc Gen. The tool will help drive intelligent decision making within the company .

April 10, 2019 : The US-based Neurealm is a global IT services and solutions provider. Neurealm’s offerings are aligned with strategic technology trends to enable enterprises take advantage of bi-modal IT trend, which is all about managing current operations, transforming them through IT operation analytics automation, cloud orchestration and DevOps. Private equity player Basil Partners is a key investor, attracted by Neurealm’s infrastructure offerings. This has opened Basil’s ecosystem for Neurealm to expand and enlarge its offerings and operations. While the company’s operations are spread in the US, the UK and West Asia, it has a large development centre in Chennai. Sumit Ganguli, CEO, Neurealm, spoke to FC on emerging trends in the industry and the company’s growth opportunities.

Can you elaborate on the Neurealm journey so far?

It’s a 12-year journey so far. Neurealm was promoted by two entrepreneurs from Chennai. They reached out to various companies worldwide with their idea and one of those companies was Storage Tek, which was based out of Denver Colorado in the US. Storage Tek was the leader in storage and tape drives in those days. Storage Tek was acquired by Sun Microsystems, which in turn was acquired by Oracle. As a result, if one looks at the hardware from Oracle, it will have servers from Sun Microsystems and storage devices from Storage Tek. The CIO of Storage Tek, Dan Manuels, was impressed with a supply chain product – Progress Database – that the Neurealm promoters offered. Since they started working with Storage Tek, Neurealm got registered in Denver as an IT services and solutions company.

Maneuls later moved over to Hunter Douglas, a leading window treatment company and Neurealm also started working with that company. Subsequently, through this relationship Neurealm started working with several clients in the Denver region. Thanks to their strong relationship built CIOs, they started doing lots of work around infrastructure management space.

Around 5-6 years ago, Basil Partners, a private equity fund invested in Neurealm. Since then, the company started closely focusing on offering classical infrastructure management services. In 2009-10, a hospital situated in one of the poorest districts in New York, which was a $1 billion hospital and was surviving basically on aid from agencies to the tune of $700 million per annum faced a piquant situation, when 10 per cent of its aid was cut. It is to be noted that the AIDS epidemic actually started in Bronx. Suddenly, the hospital was put in a situation, where it had to carry on its activities but with 10 per cent lesser aid. It did not want to disrupt the clinical services and instead it tried to optimise its infrastructure management services. Neurealm moved in and helped to bring down costs by 40 per cent. Neurealm created a private cloud for the hospital and deployed 20 people in New York and 30 in Chennai. This major cost out helped the hospital retain its clinical services. Since then, we have been doing a fair amount of work in healthcare, especially with healthcare providers.

What unique value did Basil Partners saw in Neurealm when they invested? How Basil’s ecosystem helped Neurealm to expand its base?

Basil Partners is a private equity firm and largely focusing on IT services. It has been fairly successful with some very, very interesting portfolio companies, where they have invested and also did some re-engineering. So far, Basil Partners has invested in 17 active portfolio companies. What Basil Partners liked in Neurealm – it genuinely had some very deep-rooted CIO/CXO relationships and despite being a mid-sized company had a fair presence in the US and UK and also in West Asia. Its focus was on infrastructure management space and this was one more factor that attracted Basil to Neurealm. We have recently signed a multi-year contract with a leading publishing house in the US and it is a classical implementation of what Gartner calls as bi-modal IT or what Mckinsey calls as ‘two-speed’ IT. It’s a combination of what one can call as ‘Marathon and Sprint’ in running. While day-to-day activities are listed and brought under some optimisation, even while planning for transformation for the long-term. This order was signed along with a key Basil portfolio company. As a result, it is no longer a plateau approach for Neurealm, but more a Keiretsu type of growth. We will be handling infrastructure management, DevOps and cloud transformation for the client.

Further, Neurealm has signed one of the first SAP implementation on a Microsoft Azure cloud for a FMCG company in Asia and we will be one of the first few companies to implement SAP in the Microsoft Azure ecosystem.

Which are the verticals that Neurealm is focused on at present?

Right now, we are focused on healthcare and manufacturing, besides publishing and media. These are our three focus areas. In West Asia, we are working with a leading bank, which has operations in Oman, Abu Dhabi and Dubai. Hence, in this region alone, Neurealm is into banking and government sectors. Otherwise, we are not really looking at too many verticals. We want to strengthen our focus area in the chosen few.

We have a very defined focus for evolving this company into what we call – ‘enabling digital infrastructure’ space. We believe that the present IT environment is undergoing seismic shift. Even though it has not been felt in the open, the tectonic plates are getting moved underneath. One will need a partner to do the enabling of the digital transformation and there also, we will largely play in the overall digital infrastructure tran-sformation. Going forward, we will be the ‘go to’ partner on the Azure platform. Predictive Analytics is another area of focus and we are working on a strong automated testing practice. We believe, very soon, we will have a good story to sa – around the industrial IOT. We believe there is a paradigm shift and we have strongly positioned ourselves around that with predictive analytics and we are well positioned to take advantage of this changing landscape. And since it is changing, everyone including the large players are new and this is where boutique companies like us are celebrated.

The focus of Neurealm seems to be more on emerging and mid-level companies?

No. Most of the orders that we are getting now are from fairly large entities. We are working with one of the large disc manufacturing company and in West Asia, we are working with one of the largest banks. Here we are competing with larger players. Recently, Everest Group has ranked Neurealm quite high on their list. Its founder has said that – “Neurealm packs more punch, than its weight class”. Most of our clients are $one billion – $two billion companies. Very soon, we will be working with a Fortune 5 company.

Which are the countries and regions that offer better long term growth prospects for the company? What opportunity does the Indian market offers to the company?

We continue to be bullish about the US. There is a little bit of concern around the world, largely triggered by China, and of course the low oil prices. We will continue to be in the US. We have operations in Denver, Chicago, the New York/ New Jersey area. We have a good presence in the UK too and in both these regions, we have recently recruited some senior marketing personnel to strengthen the operations and reach. We are force to reckon with in Oman, Abu Dhabi and Dubai. We definitely had plans to set up base in Saudi Arabia and Qatar. We are going a little slow on that front, given the present low oil price scenario. In India, we are actually getting involved with some government projects. This was not part of our initiative, but people reached out to us. These are fairly large projects and that is where, we are focused on, when it comes to the Indian market.

February 12, 2016 : The mood at the 22nd edition of Nasscom’s annual forum was sober. Unlike last year, drones were not flying inside the Grand Hyatt hotel. Neither were there too many announcements from companies participating in the event.

Conversations, mostly centred on how technological advancements such as automation can potentially change the economics of the $143-billion industry.

“These forces are hitting the industry hard and the majority did not anticipate this,” says Neeraj Aggarwal, Managing Director, BCG India.

Nasscom, however, understands this and has partly baked in this sentiment in its guidance of 10-12 per cent growth in fiscal year 2017, which is lower than the 12.3 per cent in fiscal year 2016. Macro-economic factors such as the fall in oil prices and the China slowdown are becoming party poopers. Recently, Cognizant issued an uninspiring annual revenue guidance, TCS has been struggling for the past 6 quarters and Infosys is yet to turn the corner.

Old paradigm

A large part of the problem has to do with the way the industry was built. Outsourcing started with companies trying to solve the Y2K problem in the 1990s. This needed more bodies to maintain and develop software that ran banks, airlines etc.

“Technological advancements have reached a stage where some basic repetitive tasks can be automated and it does not matter whether it is answering calls or writing code,” opines Akhilesh Tuteja, Partner and National Head, Technology and BPM sector, KPMG.

Companies are beginning to understand this shift but are caught in a sticky situation. According to Nitin Rakesh, CEO of Syntel, the back-end systems of companies are in the old world and their front-end systems are in the iPhone age. However, more than 60 per cent of their revenue comes from the old business and a very miniscule bit from the new business.

“More systems will gravitate towards the new age but business from old systems will get highly commoditised,” opines Sumit Ganguli, CEO of Neurealm.

To adjust to this change, some companies have started making adjustments to their business models. All the major outsourcing companies are looking to partner with start-ups, build capabilities in new technology areas, make acquisitions and get their workforce to start thinking about problems instead of just solving them. “Clients these days do not understand what their problems are so it is up to us help them navigate at a time of high volatility,” says Puneet Gupta, CTO of Brillio, a tech consulting company.

In the new normal of constant volatility, the software industry has to take the next step quicker than before, opine industry watchers.