Integrated technology solutions provider Redington has announced plans to sell Robotic Process Automation (RPA) consulting and services to markets across Turkey, the Middle East, and Africa. The company has a separate team focusing on RPA services and consulting operating out of Turkey.
“The Turkey team is building out a business purely on RPA services. It is still fairly small, but we can see a significant requirement for corporates that want to consume this,” V S Hariharan, Group CEO at Redington Limited told businessline.
He explained that companies with complex processes have had success with RPAs. ‘’RPA and RPA AI will become a significant element of workflow automation. People deploy simple chatbots to replace customer offices on the phone. But now, these (RPAs) will become more important. Even without a digital transformation strategy, my RPA with AI can do things so I won’t have to reinvent and change how I do my data. Even with multiple applications, data lakes, and data streams, I can make it work. So, I believe it will come back strongly,” he commented. He added that more than 500 RPA bots are deployed to automate their in-house processes.
Adding that a lot of hardware will become AI-enabled hardware, the Group CEO said that a lot of their early PCs, launching later this year, will also be AI-enabled. The chips have software, and the AI-enabled microprocessor can do some AI computation within the PC; some will go to the cloud.
“In the next three to five years, from all the discussions with the brands, AI-enabled PCs will become a significant chunk of the PCs sold in the market. The same thing will happen to smartphones, in servers and storage and networking,” said Hariharan. He also mentioned a new slew of AI solution-specific software because new use cases will require more than the existing array of software in the market.
As part of its AI portfolio, the company is also building an AI-independent software vendors (ISV) solution strategy and an ecosystem for customers and resellers who are becoming very AI-focused. These players, who are working on new use cases, will require solutions beyond the current range of hardware and software. “We are already beginning to work with a few of these names. They are not big names yet, but a few are in theaters across Middle East-Africa and India. Within the company itself, we are beginning to adopt AI, which will also be an important change for us in the early days,” said the CEO.
Redington claims to be the number one distribution player in Turkey, UAE, some African countries, and India. “Our job as a distribution player is to look at the total distribution available addressable market. We try to get between 20 and 30 percent of the distribution space available in each of these markets because we want to be number one or number two here,” said the CEO, adding that India was projected to grow by 10 per cent in the IT consumption year on year (YoY) for the next five years. In the Middle East, Africa, Saudi and UAE, it is about 8 percent.
For the full year of FY24, the company reported a revenue of ₹89,610 crore which was a growth of 13% YoY. “We had two soft quarters in India on the technology solutions largely because some decisions were delayed because of elections, but we expect a comeback.” Hariharan also said that between India, Saudi, and UAE, Redington is quite bullish about the market and outlook for the next year. “This quarter, from whatever we see, things seem pretty good overseas. Africa and Turkey seem still stressed, but the Middle East otherwise is good. In India, hopefully, we’ll see the demand coming back strongly on the enterprise side,” he said.
Redington recently announced a distribution partnership with Indian tech firm Zoho, as well as Data and AI leader SAS across the Middle East, Africa, and Turkey (META) regions. The company also plans to collaborate with several other software as a service (SaaS) players shortly.