As chief technology officer of Teradata, Stephen Brobst’s role is to ensure the data and analytics company develops cutting-edge technologies.
This includes helping the Dayton, Ohio-based company find new customers and deploy products and services across the world faster and at a large scale. Chasing such goals, Mr. Brobst said he sees ‘huge’ potential to sell Teradata’s technology products and services to Indian enterprises as well as the government here.
He said this opportunity had been bolstered by India’s digitisation drive across banking, finance and government. This consisted initiatives like ‘demonetisation’, which was introduced last year, because the transactions are getting “recorded digitally,” he said.
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With the increase in the country’s data volume, Mr. Brobst said Teradata could help customers make better decisions by using analytics to mine hidden insights, patterns and unknown correlations from large chunks of data.
“India is at the beginning of this [digital] revolution. I was actually in India when demonetisation happened and to be honest it was a disaster..., you couldn’t buy stuff, you couldn’t get the money out of the ATM,” said Mr. Brobst, in an interview at the ‘Teradata Partners Conference’ in Anaheim, California.
“But demonetisation was actually the first step in the right direction to [achieve] digitisation.
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“Now. I really want to know the details below the financial transaction. That is another level that has to happen,” said Mr. Brobst who has done his Masters and Ph.D research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Mr. Brobst, who also founded multiple start-ups focused on database products and services, said the digital divide in India was ‘very big’ and comprised a large number of unbanked people. He said digitisation was going to help bring those citizens into the mainstream society and provide them access to facilities such as loan services. “You may know that State Bank of India is a big Teradata (prospective) customer. We would love every Indian citizen to be a banked client,” he said. “I care about improving quality of life with technology.”
Big data opportunity
Indeed, the government and the Central Bank are on a mission to rapidly formalise and financialise the Indian economy, according to a report by global financial services firm Morgan Stanley.
It said India had ‘introduced a universal biometric identification system [Aadhaar], initiated measures to boost financial inclusion [Jan Dhan], moved to a new fully online value-added goods and services tax system and implemented real-time payment systems [Unified Payments Interface and Bharat QR].
Coupled with rising smartphone penetration, likely doubling from 300 million to almost 700 million by 2020, these changes were driving India’s digitisation, said the report. It said the combination of digital payments and GST would create significant big-data opportunity.
“I don’t want to sound arrogant but [looking] at the scale of India, there is no other technology [provider than Teradata] that would scale to that level,” said Mr. Brobst who had also served in former U.S President Barack Obama’s first term as a member of the President’s Innovation and Technology Advisory Committee.
Oliver Ratzesberger, executive vice president and chief product officer at Teradata said besides eyeing the market opportunity, the firm was also leveraging heavily on India’s engineering talent. He said the company has about 500 people in Hyderabad who are building cutting-edge technologies. “There is so much disruption happening right now,” he said.
‘Dairy analytics’
In response to a question about the company’s plan to tap the India market, Victor L. Lund, president and chief executive of Teradata said the explosion of data was throwing up unique opportunities.
He gave the example of a young couple who started dairy farming and how the two of them managed the entire farm by collecting and analysing data from the cattle.
“The cows wore Internet of Things devices,” said Mr. Lund. He said the technology enabled the couple to monitor the cows for insights such as feed requirements, eating behaviour, health and location. “This all was controlled by analytics and IT,” according to Mr. Lund.
(The writer was in Anaheim, California. at the invitation of Teradata)