Gaurav Shinh: Leveraging Big Data Analytics to Transform Businesses

DAAS Labs is adept at delivering solutions using smart data analytics.

To understand the peculiarities of the tech world, especially big data analytics, it is imperative to gain knowledgeable insights from industry leaders regarding new trends and innovations that are impacting the world. In a recent interview with Analytics Insight, Gaurav Shinh, the CEO of DAAS Labs, briefly discussed the impact of big data analytics in the industry and how DAAS Labs is driving innovation in the world.

Question 1: What is DAAS Labs? What is the specialization of the company, and what are the services that the company offers?

DAAS Labs (Data Science and Analytics Services Private Limited) provides Data-as-a-Service to its clients, enabling them to make better and smarter decisions. For the last six years, the company holds expertise in four areas: natural language processing, computer vision, data and analytics, and robotic process automation. With regards to natural language processing solutions, DAAS Labs provides chatbot solutions, social listening tools, and data to text features. DAAS Labs excels in providing static image and video AI solutions.  The company deploys data and analytics capabilities to generate reports and insights for clients from structured and unstructured data collected across multiple sources. DAAS Labs' RPA capability enables the client to implement multiple RPA and software bots across the globe. The company works with financial services, e-commerce, retail, logistic, and manufacturing clients.

Question 2: What inspired you to start DAAS Labs, and how has the journey been since its inception?

Before starting the company, Gaurav worked in the corporate sector, where he saw an opportunity to set up something agile and flexible, empowering organizations to draw insights from abundant data. By leveraging the company's solutions, DAAS Labs adds value to the industry and enables organizations to solve data abundance challenges. He says that the challenge that the company faced was to make this data talk in a language, which is native to the business user.  Hence, the NLP solution was leveraged by DAAS Labs, helping organizations to understand the context of data. Gaurav remarks that a traditional model usually takes months to deliver the solution and demands millions of dollars investment. But the solutions provided by DAAS Labs are cost-effective and delivers results within a few minutes.

Question 3: What role did you play while making this organization and how you managed it?

As the Founder of the company, Gaurav had to multi-task. Gaurav feels that it is about striking the right balance between the services and product. He was addressing the challenges of the clients, articulating solutions, and delivering products. Gaurav was involved in diverse roles from product manager to the finance manager and making sure that the company is on the right track.

Question 4: What makes your product unique in the market?

He states that the company differentiates from other service providers in delivering a solution built on four pillars, i.e., NLP, computer vision, data and analytics, and RPA to solve a customer problem. These solutions provide an end-to-end use case and benefit the business user. Gaurav cites that the company used a cost-effective approach to build an internal-facing chatbot, integrated with the RPA bot, to achieve end-to-end automation. DAAS Labs used a service request ticketing system monitored by an RPA bot to lock the request for creating a chatbot. Gaurav is proud of the fact that the entire process was completed within two minutes from a technical standpoint without any human intervention.

Question 5: What are the key involvements and partnerships of DaaSlabs on national or international level?

Gaurav shares that DAAS Labs is working with some of the key marquee clients. DAAS Labs have worked with banks like Barclays, American Express, and Saxo bank. The company is working with tier one logistic companies, like cargo logistics in India, DB Schenker, and Hong Kong Airport Authority. DAAS Labs is also associated with tier one retail customers. The company is partnered with Denodo- the largest data virtualization company in the world. DAAS Labs has an R and Python department and is currently working with Accenture ventures as well.

Question 6: How DAAS Labs is contributing to the big data analytics industry, both nationally and internationally? And how are your clients getting benefited from the services that you provide? 

According to Gaurav, the company on a global level is solving the challenges of data fragmentation, integration of data sources, building models, and creating reports, which can draw insights to the business users, to make better, faster, and smarter decisions. He states that DAAS Labs accumulates, acquires and integrates the data in data engineering space under a data lake format. This format is curated and prepared to generate insights out of the data. DAAS Labs is also building models using its Python and deep learning models, thus enabling businesses to make decisions better and faster. This way, the company is bringing and adding value to the data analytics space. Gaurav apprises that the company has been recently picked up by the Open Data conclave, an initiative run by Indian School of Business Hyderabad and Niti Aayog and the government of India. The company's product SCIKIQ, which is scientific IQ, also solves data challenges.

Question 7: How do you compare the leadership when data was not in abundance to the leadership now? What has changed over the years?

Gaurav observes that the world is now moving from a data-constrained economy to a data in abundance economy. Time-effectiveness to make decisions is driving this big shift in the tech world. He believes that data to action or data to strategy has reduced drastically with the new edge technologies. Due to this transition, leaders are now making more data-driven decisions, which are logical, rational, and mathematical. There are tools that help build a decision support system. He emphasizes that as the data process is becoming democratized, the style of the leadership has become more factual and data-oriented.

"Regulators, people, employees, colleagues, and the world is watching the leadership. So decisions cannot be taken in silos. Another big shift is in managing talent," says Gaurav.

Question 8: As an industry leader, how do you think that all these disruptive technologies impact today's business and innovation?

Gaurav asserts that technology should not be viewed without a business lens. There are multiple reasons companies get benefitted from technology and that every company or industry is on a different maturity curve.

"So there are certain industries that are higher at the maturity curve with a different way of growing in those areas. Few companies will be able to see through the value what the emerging tech can bring for them, which in this case in company maturity", he adds.

Gaurav states that a company's maturity indicates the maturity in adopting the changes. Many companies struggle to find out the right use cases of the technology. Gaurav opines that this indicates whether the companies are mature enough to identify the right use cases or business cases, to use emerging tech to solve business challenges. This way, the company can stay relevant and stay ahead of the competition. He thinks that this is where differentiation in innovation can be seen.

"Some companies are good at driving innovation, whereas some companies still need a learning curve to drive innovation," Gaurav says.

Question 9: As an industry leader, how do you visualize the future of the big data analytics industry? What are your views on how it is going to change in the future? 

Gaurav points out that the future of the big data industry has just started. A lot of data still needs to be combined, integrated, and linked, so that it can derive insights, enabling businesses to make better decisions. Gaurav views that with time, better and smarter tools will aid in cranking up the data mammoth in no time. The big data industry is on a growth path.

Question 10: What is your vision ahead for the company? How are you planning to improve or improvise services? 

Gaurav shares that the company's vision is to help clients make better, faster, and more confident decisions using data. Gaurav mentions that for the next two years, the company is targeting to make the company's product SCIKIQ available across the globe. The goal is to build the company more innovative, creative, agile, and nimble when it comes to data.

Question 11: As an industry leader, what is your advice for young entrepreneurs?

Gaurav firmly believes that big data analytics is the future. He advises young entrepreneurs not to be afraid, as the industry is growing. The industry has much room to accommodate young entrepreneurs and lots of innovation. Gaurav suggests

"Think more about business. Think about how you can leverage more data to solve business challenges. There are lots of resources available now."