Exclusive Interview with Piyush Goel, Founder and CEO of Beyond Key Systems

Piyush Goel is empowering companies with software consulting services in 2022

Software consulting services are helping to adopt digital transformation efficiently and effectively in this global tech market. It is known for providing expert opinion related to any business strategy or idea without any potential error to face severe consequences. The global software consulting market size is expected to hit US$539.18 billion in 2028 at a CAGR of 12%. Thus, there is a huge demand for software consulting service companies to help with a wide range of services to other companies in need.

Here is an exclusive interview with Piyush Goel, Founder, and CEO of Beyond Key Systems Pvt. Ltd., who has explained how Beyond Key acts as one of the leading providers of software consulting services that offer product engineering services to adopt digital transformation efficiently.

1. Kindly brief us about the company, its specialization, and the services that your company offers.

Beyond Key has been providing software consulting services to clients globally since 2005, including those in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, and Australia. The company specializes in digital transformation and product engineering services by delivering enterprise-grade, consumer-focused applications, and technological solutions with a focus on cloud, data, Omni-channeling, and client engagement.

Beyond Key has a team of over 250 domain experts in various cutting-edge technologies, including Microsoft 365 (SharePoint and Power Platform), modern data warehousing, Business Intelligence (BI), artificial intelligence, and Dynamics 365.

2. With what mission and objectives, the company was set up? Small brief about the founder/CEO. In short, tell us about your journey since the inception of the company?

The company was established in the year 2005 with a mission to develop innovative and value-added solutions that would transform enterprise operations forever. Beyond Key empowered many enterprises by solving their mission-critical needs. The team has closely collaborated with each client to help them sail through the processes seamlessly while bringing continuous improvement to their products.

Piyush Goel, CEO, and Founder of Beyond Key, is a Chartered Accountant and has a Diploma in Information Systems from the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India. Piyush also holds Honors Degree in Systems Management from the National Institute of Information Technology. He has also completed an executive program in "Artificial Intelligence Implications for Business Strategy" from MIT Sloan School of Management (USA).

Piyush brings over 24 years of experience from different industries and has served many companies including Xerox, Ebot Technosoft Ltd, Prakash eSolutions, and Unified Technologies LLC. As a successful entrepreneur and experienced technology executive, Piyush understands that the key to helping clients is a mix of digital transformation, strategic innovation, and constant learning.

Apart from being a part of the Entrepreneurs Organization in Indore and Chicago, Piyush is also an angel investor and a mentor for several start-ups. He is the core team member of Earth 2.0 which was formed with a group of high intellect professionals with a mission to foster and innovate to help every citizen share their story and contribute to Earth 2.0. Piyush is also a part of the Economic Club of Chicago.

3. How is IoT/big data/AI/robotics evolving today in the industry as a whole? What are the most important trends that you see emerging across the globe?

IoT, big data, AI, and robotics are the most popular technology concepts these days. IIoT, specifically, has been driving much of the enterprises' interest. As the need to harvest consumer data generated from the IoT grows, the connection between IoT and Industrial IoT will get narrower. However, IoT and IIoT both promise to bring efficiencies, productivity, convenience, and quality, if converged and used as one ecosystem.

While both seem interdependent, IIoT has emerged as something quite distinct to the IoT and will transform a wide range of industry verticals. The concept of IIoT is not new— IIoT was developed in convergence with the more consumer-focused IoT capable to revolutionize industrial prowess by enhancing the efficiency at pharmaceutical plants, hospitals, power plants, refineries, off-shore oil platforms, and a lot more.

IIoT, when paired up with robotics and Robotics Process Automation (RPA), has helped many enterprises in industrial-automation setups with upgraded state-of-the-art hardware and software i.e., aligning their manufacturing and operations processes to ever-changing client demands.

While the logistics industry is the early adopter where the use case of vehicle fleet management is being witnessed in daily life such as the industrial asset management, inventory management with order fulfillment, truck utilization, real-time route optimization, mapping of the routes for speed, and GPS tracking, etc. has been possible due to IoT.

These advances in IoT-connected vehicles will take the supply chain to the next level by providing forecasts and predictions on the order flow, traffic, deliveries, etc. With increasing connectivity between people, data, and things, the public sector will begin embracing smart cities where sensors and automation enhance the reliability of services, especially in the areas of safety and the environment. IoT sensor data enables use cases including improved air quality, optimized traffic patterns, reduced safety incidents, traffic fire incident prediction, and improved citizen identity

There are numerous examples of IoT solutions serving enterprises with around-the-clock quality control and management, predictive maintenance, asset or plant performance optimization.

At a macro level, big data with the combination of AI has improved connectivity between people, data, and various other things. AI is being used in a variety of industries including the public sector enabling people to embrace smart cities where sensors and automation enhance the reliability of services, especially in the areas of safety and environment. While in the financial markets, the traders or hedge funds leverage AI for trade analytics i.e. in high-frequency trading, decision-support analytics, sentiment measurement, predictive analytics, risk analytics, risk management, fraud mitigation, and many more. The entertainment industry analyzes client data along with behavioral data to create a personalized client profile for content moderation and recommendation, along with content performance measurement.

The trends which are emerging across the globe are digital transformation or adoption of technology at a fast pace, using the technologies like AI, RPA, IoT/edge computing, everything on the cloud including the emerging technologies with initial exploration around blockchain, metaverse. A lot has changed in the last couple of years due to the outbreak of COVID-19 where digital transformation is now not just a necessity, but a norm.

Meanwhile, the cloud will become a digital backbone for everyone. The industries are quickly realizing that it is inefficient, unproductive, expensive to have the IT infrastructure on-premise and would invest and start utilizing providers of Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service.

Personalization of experience will be a norm and would be a key differentiator between any two businesses in a vertical industry. This is becoming possible due to big data being collected and stored from all possible platforms. It is analyzed by algorithms to pick the trends and expectations, accordingly drilled down to micro-level individual personalization.

Heavy programming capabilities and capacities would shift to an easier model of low-code no-code where everyone will be a citizen developer with the easy capability of configuring a system or workflow using drag and drop functions.

Last, but not least, cybersecurity will be of utmost importance and heavy investment will happen in this area since the backbone of industrial automation would be the internet.

4. How do you plan to revolutionize the US market and what are your plans to tap the market?

The US market is huge and the following are a few steps amongst the many to revolutionize the US market:

• Focus on digital transformation: Digital transformation is helping all businesses to be digitally ready i.e., on the web and mobile, helping in cloud adoption, robotic process automation with the cognitive AI of voice and vision to make the business functions more intelligent, efficient, and cutting-edge by building a modern data warehouse to run their visualization dashboards to make pro-active and smart decisions.
• Legacy to modernization: Organizations are still running on legacy platforms that have limitations. It would be a deterrent to the growth of the business if they don't modernize.
• Big startups ecosystem: This helps them in their early stages, supports them, and grows as they scale up and have incremental funding.
• Scale-up onshore, near-shore, and off-shore teams by adding offices at new locations globally.
• Providing substantial incremental value for the clients and their businesses by adding domain specialists to interact with the clients, being proactive by providing smart solution recommendations.

The US market is big and a laser focus is required to tap this market. Beyond Key is already in the path of scaling up its core functions such as predominantly marketing and sales, adding solution experts, practice leaders, and domain experts.

Beyond Key is targeting initially to tap clients in the HealthTech, InsureTech, EdTech, and non-profit tech space. New marketing strategies are being designed towards innovative ways to outreach to the target segment. It can be successful by scaling up the team on-shore, near-shore, and offshore in order to fit perfectly as per the need of the clients.

5. Mention some of the awards, achievements, recognitions, and clients' feedback that you feel are notable and valuable for the company.

Beyond Key is a Microsoft Gold Partner and has been endorsed as a "Great Place to Work" for the third time in a row. Beyond Key is also a Gold winner as the "Software Company of the Year" by Stevie International Business Awards.

The company was also titled as a Gold Winner "IT Service Provider of the Year" by Titan Awards and Bronze winner in the "Most Client Friendly Company of the Year" for the best in Biz Awards.

The clients continuously appreciate Beyond Key's team in terms of the high standard of performance, consulting approach, flexibility, turnaround time, and technical expertise. Awards and accolades are so much more than trophies— a testament to what the team has experienced together and how it can push performances to do better.

6. How do you see the company and the industry in the near future? What are your growth plans for the next 12 months?

The concept of 'digital transformation' is closer to reaching fruition in the near future where all possible digital technologies would be used to transform existing traditional and non-digital business processes and services into new modern ones. The aim is to meet the global market, supporting employee, and client expectations. In turn, tech stacks, as one knows, will completely alter the current way of running, managing, operating a business, besides bringing high value and personalization to clients, vendors, and employees. Following are some strategies of the team of Beyond Key to pursue in the future.

• Beyond Key has strategically planned to grow 40% YOY in revenue with growth in the team by 35%
• Focusing on emerging technologies like AI, data, cloud, and RPA tools for building solutions
• Focusing on the HealthTech, InsureTech, EdTech, and Non-Profit space
• Building the strategic front-line team of consultants who are domain specialists having the support of specific practice leaders
• Scaling up the marketing team for building the Beyond Key brand, spreading the expertise, and knowledge via global webinars, podcasts, case studies, articles, etc.
• Adding the new practice of QA-as-a-Service and using new tech tools for automation, performance, and security testing
• Building the in-house cybersecurity team to consult all the clients in implementing security checks in the infrastructure and applications by enabling better security governance and fulfilling compliances checks