With his diverse experience in various companies for more than two decades, E Pradeep Kumar, Founder and Managing Director, Autointelli Systems, realised that there was a major need for automating routine IT infrastructure operations in companies. This was needed to not just cut costs, but also to improve efficiencies, he says. In all aspects, points out Pradeep, companies were talking of automation, use of artificial intelligence and machine learning. But somehow not many were talking about automating their IT processes.
“Rather than reducing employment opportunities, we thought we will build a software which will help companies work better. For companies to achieve the kind of growth they are talking about, the infrastructure has to be automated,” says Pradeep. Once the IT infrastructure operations are automated, the employees who were handling those jobs can be employed more productively elsewhere. Also, in most companies the IT infrastructure is handled by one person and if that person is not available for whatever reason, things tend to go haywire.
According to him, many times the websites of consumer facing businesses – say, a bank or an e-commerce portal – are too slow causing tremendous customer dissatisfaction and anger. This could be due to various reasons. With Autointelli’s AI-driven solution, a company can automatically detect the problem and rectify it quickly, explains Pradeep. “When you automate this, if any issue arises, we will tell you this is the time period when you have heavy traffic (on your site), we will say the RAM is slow and that you can probably add RAM. In case the server is down, automatically we will make sure that within 10 seconds the server is up again,” he adds.
Bat for automation
Pradeep says he and the four co-founders, each one of whom had different expertise, discussed the issue and came up with AI and ML-based solution to automate IT infrastructure operations. He says he invested quite a bit of his own funds in the venture. It took more than a year to come up with a solution for the problem they had identified. While they built the base product, they had to still incorporate a client’s requirement. It took almost a year to develop 60 per cent of the product – AIOpps (Artificial Intelligence for Infrastructure Operations) – as it required a lot of R&D. Also, the individual use cases of various companies had to be incorporated.
Autointelli, says Pradeep, will sit with the CTOs to understand their requirement, go back to the drawing board and come up with a solution. The CTO will then want more features incorporated or a few changes made, before the product can be installed. The company, he says, recently worked with a North American water utility which was getting a large number of data on Excel sheets. This data was being manually entered into the system. Autointelli, says Pradeep, has now automated this process, saving a lot of time and money for the utility. The product can either be installed on site or be deployed from the cloud.
How AI helps clients
Pradeep explains how the product helped a customer of theirs. This customer, a BPO, has nearly 26,000 employees across different locations. Their login password had to be changed every week. Previously, this was manually done and this would take almost a day. Now, with Autointelli’s product, this whole process is automated and the server sends out the passwords within 30 minutes. This is an Indian company with offices in many locations in Africa, he says. All aspects that need to be automated for a client can be done so and brought on to a single dashboard.
How does Autointelli get its income? Pradeep says there are three streams. One, it sells the product to customers. Two, it licences it out and the third, is through managed services. Autointelli participated in the Aditya Birla group’s BizLabs initiative to solve a problem the group had. According to him, Autointelli partners with some of the large vendors for companies, as it makes their entry into these companies easier. Through these partnerships, it has managed to sell its products to customers in West Asia and other regions.
The company hopes to have 100 clients by March 2020, for which it will need to increase the team size from 20 now to about 50, with most of them being involved in development and implementation. Autointelli, according to Pradeep, is also looking to raise funds – about ₹35-70 crore ($5-10 million) – to scale the business and establish overseas offices.