In the third and final part of our interview with CA Technologies, Sunil Mangalore, Managing Director, India explains how his company is helping banking companies with digital transformation using the Modern Software Factory. Stephen Miles, CTO, APJ was also present for this interview and his input appears in another story elsewhere on Digital Creed (see our Top Stories section).
Sunil Manglore, Managing Director, CA Technologies India
DC: Can you give us some good examples of Indian organisations that have leveraged the modern software factory?
Sunil Manglore: In the Indian context, we’ve seen the greatest amount of traction for the modern software factory (especially) within Banking and Financial Services. One of the main reasons is that banking today is more about software and IT than it’s about brick and mortar in branches. IT and software are today at the center of the business for most banks. They’re using the software on applications to directly connect with their customers without any intermediaries, connect with the customers to carry out their business.
Software and IT are playing an extremely important role in the banking space. We have quite a few of our customers who we’ve engaged with, for starting to put together the building blocks of what we believe will ultimately lead to the modern software factory. Stephen Miles (CTO, APJ, CA Technologies) said it’s not a destination which you’re getting to; it’s a kind of process which we expect to go on for a few years, before they get to a state where they said they have enough in place to say that they’re somewhere close to having a modern software factory. So, we have engagements with quite a few of the Indian banking customers where we’ve started the process of building the building blocks of the software factory. The State Bank of India in fact was one classic example where we’ve used some of the products that we’ve offered to help them. There, it was used for innovation, in promoting innovation and getting in new ideas, which they could then implement for their business.
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DC: And what are the services and solutions that these companies leverage?
Sunil Manglore: Firstly, around using our solutions for service virtualization, which is mimicking the test bed or stimulating the test bed and the testing environment, which obviates the need for actually investing in a real test bed, and speeds up the process of testing democratize, testing; so that’s one area that we’re seeing a lot of interest from a number of banks in the country. Stephen also talked about this need for developing an ecosystem, that’s very relevant in the banking sector. So, that’s where our API management solution comes, which helps banks connect with third-party entities and transact business, exchange data and information across organizations in a secure way. This helps the banks manage all the APIs in a secure way. So, in the Indian context we see the front runners being in the, on an option of technology, being in the banking space. We also have some of the (telecom) service providers who’ve adopted our technologies to speed up innovations, speed up the process of developing faster apps at a lower cost and of a better quality.
DC: What about other verticals like e-commerce?
Sunil Manglore: With the e-commerce business, at the end of the day it’s about IT and software. We are in in the early stages of discussion with some of them. We’ve so far we have (customers from) the more traditional sectors of banking and telecom.
DC: What about logistics, anything happening there?
Sunil Manglore: We have examples, just across, maybe one or two in manufacturing, one or two in say the pharma or automotive. Across industries, we generally have the leaders and the biggest names in their respective industries.
Stephen Miles: Yeah and from a more regional perspective or global perspective, as Sunil says, what tends to happen in reality is, we get the opportunity to have this discussion and talk through the dynamics and the issues that I just shared with you. But typically, they want to break that down to one area to start to focus on; (we want to) get that right and then start to think about the other components. So, Sunil says a lot of the initial investments are in getting the API platforms on, because that’s a simple way to start your architectural transformation, I mean most core banking apps as an example were not designed for mobile connectivity.
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DC: We hear a lot of companies talking about Automation these days. How are you helping these companies with automation?
Sunil Mangalore: Just about everyone’s talking about automation today and a big component of undergoing the digital transformation is automating the manual processes that you have today. We have banks and IT services companies we’re talking to for automating their internal processes, which brings in efficiencies, lowers costs, replaces people with tools and technology — this is across businesses.
The product we offer is CA Workload Automation. And we acquired Automic recently. The Automic suite of products is to help businesses with automation.
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