Accelerating entrepreneurship in the age of “techno-disruption”

Accelerating entrepreneurship in the age of "techno-disruption": Interviewing Badrinath Rao, Co-founder & CEO, Cattleya Technosys

'Boxes' in Spotlight: Cattleya Technosys

A crown jewel from a 42-year-old business legacy specializing in Loss Prevention, Risk Mitigation and Operations & Maintenance, Cattleya Technosys is an IoT Technology based, product Company in the business of Electronics & Video Surveillance, Central Monitoring, Command & Control Center services, Asset control and Analytics backed by Closed Loop Operations.

The core team at Cattleya caters over 100 combined years of experience and expertise in Telemetry, Telematics, M2M and IoT solutions for varied industry adaptations. The tenure and comprehensiveness of the contracts signed off by the clients indicate the robustness of its solutions and services.

Brains behind Cattleya Technosys

Anoop Narayanan,

Co-Founder & CTO

Anoop currently leads Technology and R&D initiatives at Cattleya. In his previous stint, he Co-founded INVENDIS Technologies India Pvt Ltd in 2007 and lead the technology team.

Earlier with MobiApps, he led the Design & Development activities of Terrestrial Telematics Vertical. He has 20+ years of specialization in design, development, productization and project management in the areas of Application Software & firmware for electronic equipment.

Karanraj, Founder Cattleya and Group MD, NISA Global

He is a founder at Cattleya and Group MD of NISA Global. He currently drives the services business of group and has been an integral part of all the strategic decisions across the group for the past 15 years.

Under his mentorship, Cattleya Technosys Pvt Ltd was founded to be a technology partner for NISA in its stint of large complex security products and co-supported the company to become an independent IoT oriented security solutions business. 

Badrinath Rao,

Co-Founder & CEO

Badrinath is the in-charge of leading Cattleya's business and strategies. In his previous stint, he co-founded, INVENDIS Technologies India Pvt Ltd in 2007. He led the Sales & Marketing activities for INVENDIS as Vice President – Sales and as a member of the board till 2012.

He has 20+ years' experience in Management functions, Business Development, Sales, Alliances and Product marketing across diverse vertical markets globally.

The driving force encouraging his people to look into new methodologies, options, innovations, and creations that can benefit customers, stakeholders and even the industry at large, he is a focused person fixated in forming an innovative working community for his people and customers to interact and collaborate to create new solutions.

The CEO Magazine interviews Mr.Rao over a host of current issues in line with Cattleya Technosys and its future ahead.

Every problem is the foundation of a new business; which hot water steamed the inception of Cattleya Technosys?

Infrastructure proliferation across geographically disbursed locations signifies increasing complexity of functions such as Operations, Asset Maintainability, Security, Energy, Continuity, Minimal physical presence, and Scalability. Infra is Prone to frauds, malpractices and continuously emerging threats.

This risk is magnified today leading to risky banking transactions and/ or physical security of both infra (such as ATMs, Bank Branches, Telecom Towers, Retail chains etc) and customers. There are Minimal technological processes to identify inefficiencies throughout the large network of locations with Zero physical presence.

Sometimes the absence of staff at infra requires a means to maintain assets efficiency or to enhance customer relationships.A completely manned operation covering multiple and remote sites is an expensive talk with a recurring cost.If you look at the Banking scenario, the figures are more horrifying.

According to the RBI, there are 3,00,000 ATMs and over 1.5 lakh bank branches that can use security applications.

We found that banks are bound to spend sacks of money on security and only technology can cut this vex. We delved more and this turned out'the opportunity' that we went after.

The IoT application will also let the bank know whether the power supply is constant; it will track how the customer is interacting with the machine and report any suspicious activity. If technology could bring the costs down by 70 percent then clearly, we were on to something big!

What is 'disruption' for Cattleya?

The technology enabled managed solutions backed by on-ground response teams and 24/7 command center form the backbone of our Managed Services that allows customers to focus on their Core competencies, while we manage critical parts of their business.

Our IOT based Managed Services enables remote surveillance, interconnect, control and management of assets and processes in geographically distributed sites to minimize risks, energy usage, increase asset/ process efficiency and productivity.

Our customer offering is holistic – combining technology and services for Central Observatory with Quick Response and On-ground Services Team.

We connect to everything – humans, machines, process and data to manage concerns, complexities, business needs while providing personalization, value-added services that are scalable, profitable and are aimed to open up new means of interactivity.

We not only provide Preventive & Pro-active data but have started initiatives to provide insights towards the Predictive using Artificial Intelligence, data mining and machine learning techniques based on past historic data.

Well, I guess our 10000+ Managed Service sites across the leading Public Sector and Private Sector Banks and 175000+ connected THINGS under the Internet of THINGS are enough to story tell our prowess in a humble way!!

You had an amazing journey till date; I am a personal admirer too. What would be the main highlights of your career that shaped you what you are today?

My plenary professional journey has been carved out from the three main books of the corporate world; being a part of product building companies based out of India, secondly, exposure to multiple angles of the industry- from marketing to training and the exposure to international clients.

What are the hardest and the best aspects of being a CEO?

Evolving the right culture that builds a cohesive team

A word that portrays you the best…

Tenacious

Your companionship with other founder partners…

They provide the power to make it through the challenging periods and the camaraderie to share failures and successes.

A piece of note for the budding entrepreneurs

Build a worthy team that helps the enterprise triumph in a journey that throws up plenty of professional and personal trails. It is critical to the success of all other aspects of the business.

From India to Ecuador, from Public and Private Sector Banks to Government – Railways and Municipalities, Telecom operators, Corporate Real Estate and International trade organization, the 'boxes' has carried Cattleya to almost every corner. What's the next big plan?

A strategic transformation of the existing human resources and services of the group traditional business from a bottom of the pyramid to higher rungs via a tech-enabled approach resulting in up-skilling and higher per capita income with better margins while the client benefits by moving from a traditional solution, services, cost-intensive model to a tech-enabled, predictive, lower cost managed services model that can be scaled quickly.

We intend to move from a pure B2B play into B2B2C and B2C in India and expand our offerings to customers in the international markets.

We have signed on geography-specific partners across certain near-shore geographies and have finalized plans to introduce our solution in the North American markets this summer. Also, we envision reaching every doorstep of the country to safeguard them with our IoT platform.

Mileposts

• Cattleya Technosys became an IEEE N3XT Star at Collision 2017

• The organization has been crowned among "10 Most Promising Managed Services Providers 2017" by a leading business magazine.