Dr. Sreerama KV Murthy: Delivering Customized Solutions to Enterprises through Disruptive Innovation

Quadratyx is a globally respected AI-powered data science company that helps businesses find new value from their data to make smarter, faster decisions and solve complex business problems. The company has a hands-on team of experienced data scientists, engineers and project managers who have worked with some of the leading brands across the world to put their data to work.

For the last 6 years, Quadratyx has been helping large public sector and private sector organizations in industrial verticals such as Banking, Insurance, Non-Banking Financial Services, Manufacturing, Pharmaceutical, Education, IT and Government. The company helps its esteemed clients to set up their big data infrastructures, train their workforce in the areas of analytics and big data analytics, build novel applications with well-defined return on investment and set up Centres of Excellence that continue the work of analytics up-gradation at its client locations. Quadratyx has contributed to the training of more than 100 different large enterprises where it has helped transitioning to the next generation of analytics and big data analytics.

Experiences that Define Unique Perspective

Dr. Sreerama KV Murthy serves as the CEO and Chief Data Scientist at Quadratyx. His journey as an analytics leader started at IBM Research, almost 22 years ago, where he had set up the AI Research in e-commerce for IBM in India with a team of over 25 data scientists. In his career, he has helped build solutions for diverse problems such as classifying Hubble Space telescope images, medical diagnosis of mammography images and data, setting up automated intelligent auctions, injecting AI into coupons and promotions, learning user preferences from the images they browse, using AI to improve information visibility and also to cut down form-filling time in import & exports, building information dissemination and education systems that benefit hundreds of thousands of students with limited faculty using intelligent education platforms, skilling blue-collared workforce like drivers, plumbers, carpenters, assembly line workers, welders leveraging Artificial Intelligence.

These past experiences shaped Dr. Murthy’s journey in understanding that analytics is a cross-disciplinary field and it can be brought to bear in novel ways in industries. This breadth of experience defined a unique perspective at Quadratyx in terms of designing analytics and big data analytics solutions for organizations.

A Pursuit of Addressing Perpetual Challenges

Dr. Murthy’s Ph.D. in Machine Learning was completed in 1995 and he has been connected to AI, machine learning and advanced analytics work in India, in one or the other form, since 1999. His biggest challenge initially was that nobody knew, what machine learning was? He felt the need to educate investors, customers, managerial staff to bring everybody on to the same page about the promises of AI and machine learning. Dr. Murthy feels happy to see now that this is no longer required, people know when he refers to AI, Machine Learning, Big data, Analytics, etc.

The second biggest challenge that appeared was finding a workforce that can bring a wealth of experience in solving customer problems in these areas. Because the workforce was so limited, Dr. Murthy has been with the International School of Engineering (INSOFE) from its inception as a Principle Mentor and trained thousands of students in Data Science, Data Mining, Data Engineering, Machine Learning and AI, making them industry ready. The challenges that he continues to face is helping customers appreciate the difference between software development and AI solutions development. They seem to put both into the same bracket but there is a substantial difference that needs to be understood by all the stakeholders.

The Verticals of Innovative Leadership

Dr. Murthy believes that innovation comes from the team. Every innovative leader must respect the team and create an environment where the team can learn and flourish. Such teams can learn and grow at the same time. They can be held accountable and cultivate the ability to think beyond their current frameworks or current limitations.

The second most vital attribute for an innovative leader is to understand that innovation succeeds only when it is adopted widely. An innovation, however insightful or intelligent it might be, if it does not get adopted in the market then it is of little use. So, an innovative leader’s responsibility is not only in ideation or in building the product or service but in ensuring that the end-user gets the desired advantage which can be measured, tracked and confirmed. According to him, then only a leader’s responsibility ends.

The third responsibility of an innovative leader is not to be afraid to think outside the commonly agreed parlance. For example, if the entire industry says that building solutions on the cloud has certain advantages and a specific innovative leader feels that building applications on the cloud may have certain disadvantages then he should not be afraid to openly speak about his stand and work hard to either justify the stand or change it to align better with the rest of the society. Courage is an important and vital trait of an innovative leader.

Business-Centric Approach Towards Innovation

Dr. Murthy thinks that one of the distinguishing factors of Quadratyx innovation is that it is business-centric. The company trains its technologists not to be technology-centric; they need to understand the business challenge. They are required to look at the business problems from the eyes of a practitioner of business and with fresh eyes of a technologist to bring together the best of these two visions.

Quadratyx also trains its technologists to “never think that something cannot be done.” If the right question can be asked, then ‘technology to answer’ can be invented or innovated. The most difficult thing is to ask the right business questions and the company hones its technology leaders in this arena so that they are not restricted by previously available solutions. Through this they can think freshly about the customer problem and in the context of the available technology, understanding the best way to solve it. The company doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel, rather it keeps itself abreast of the ongoing innovations, new solutions, new products, etc.

The Prominence of Analytics in the Future

Dr. Murthy believes that 2020 will be a year when most of the large enterprises in India and outside, irrespective of the business vertical they belong to, will have widespread adoption of analytics and big data analytics. There will be the automation of some routine operations to become independent of human involvement. For example, extraction of information from documents, document comparison, some routine call-center functionalities such as simple outgoing calls. The industry will witness that in 2020 and 2021, such functionalities will be fully automated in large enterprises. He also observes that applications in local languages and addressing local problems will gain more prominence in this duration. For example, the use of chatbots for disseminating government information and its services to end-users (citizens).

Moreover, Dr. Murthy sees increasing adoption of cloud and edge computing where more and more solutions going onto the cloud. He also sees that big data analytics will seize to be a separate field than data analytics; everything will be data analytics because everything will be anyway big. There will not be a separate thing called big data analytics. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning will find their way into the core of many business applications.

A Perceptive Idea of Modern Leadership

Dr. Murthy advises budding entrepreneurs to know that technology innovation always happens when someone arrives at clarity on what problem to solve. There are a lot of exciting things in science and technology, but business executives or entrepreneurs need to define their problems correctly; to identify what distinguishes their business from other businesses exactly. Once they can identify in terms of the business offering, they will be able to leverage technology better and control the direction in which technology development is done.

Further, he adds, “no matter how good you think you are as a business leader or technologist; it is the quality of your team that dictates the ability of your business to expand. So, invest time in selecting the right people for your organization. Spend time with them to mentor, mentor, and mentor. With your genuineness of involvement, they will get attached to the organization. Loyalty is two-way; you care for your team the team will care for the company.”