Dubai: Tech Mahindra, India’s fifth-largest IT and software services provider and part of $16.5 billion Mahindra Group, sees machine-to-machine (M2M) as an exciting area that has the ability to transform vehicles into intelligent devices that can exchange real-time data.
“Everybody is talking about digital transformation and how to connect people, machines and entities. We see digitalisation as one serious growth area and started the digitalisation initiative three years ago by NMACS strategy — network, mobility, analytics, cloud and security,” Girish Bhat, senior vice-president for telecom for India, Middle East and Africa at Tech Mahindra, told Gulf News.
M2M is a technology that enables wireless devices to exchange information and perform actions without the manual assistance of humans.
As part of the initiative, Mahindra Reva, part of the Mahindra Group, launched the first electric car — Reva e2o.
The car is connected to the internet and can be controlled via a smartphone app.
Bhat said the telematics platform can access various features and functions of their vehicle remotely like vital statistics of the car, lock or unlock doors and find the nearest charging station. It can even send text messages on wear and tear of the car to the owner.
“There is a need for speed and connectivity and while the internet of Things proliferates rapidly, almost everything will be digitally managed in a few years to come. Moreover, we are also working with other automotive companies from an IT perspective,” he said.
“When we saw Star Wars twenty years ago, we thought it was a fiction. But if you really look at it, that is how the world is evolving and coming to life,” he said.
He said that M2M solutions are the fastest-growing offering in the telecom space, delivering innovations at an incredible pace and catalysing the growth of the industrial internet.
The company is betting big on driverless vehicle programme in bid to give a thrust on the automotive vertical.
He said that Tech Mahindra’s Integrated Engineering Solutions has been working on building various offerings which will eventually lead to semi-autonomous and later to autonomous cars.
“We have conducted a few proof of concepts with Google Glass on wearable technology to enhance customer experience via predictive analytics,” he said.
By Expo 2020, he said that most of the newer technologies like robotics will culminate in the UAE.
When asked whether Satyam Computer Services still disturbs Tech Mahindra, Bhat said that there were testing times for the company when it acquired it for Rs28.89 billion in April 2009.
Satyam Computer scandal was a corporate scandal in 2009 when its founder and CEO B. Ramalinga Raju, announced that his company had been falsifying its accounts for years, overstating revenues and inflating profits by $1 billion.
“We have gained all the customers who had parted ways with us during that period. Today the Satyam story is beyond us. Our tremendous growth in the last five and our rising strategic partnerships across the globe bears testimony to that”, he said.
“We had close to $900 million in revenues in 2009 and today we are a $3.1 billion turnover company,” he said. The company grew around 10 per cent in the last fiscal year.
“We have around 100 customers in MEA and have added about 10 new customers from the enterprise and telecom sectors this year,” he said.
America is the biggest contributor to its revenues, followed by Europe, Asia Pacific and Middle East and Africa regions.
Bhat said that Middle East and Africa contributes around 9 per cent to the group’s total revenue and the UAE, Qatar and Saudi Arabia are the key markets in the region.
