Digital holds the key for every industry facing existential crisis: LC Singh, Director, Nihilent

LC Singh, Director & Executive Vice Chairman, Nihilent

Recently, Nihilent launched Covid-19 Mortality Incident Tracker (COMIT), a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering to help doctors and forensic pathologists to track and investigate the deaths that have been caused due to the pandemic. “Healthcare and medical institutions today are at the forefront in the fight against Covid-19 and it is very crucial to provide them with all the necessary tools, equipment and the right technology,” says LC Singh, director and executive vice chairman, Nihilent. An industry veteran, he founded Nihilent Technologies in 2000. In a recent interaction, he spoke to Sudhir Chowdhary about the latest IT trends and business plans for his venture. Excerpts:

What are some of the technology trends you foresee in the post-Covid scenario?
With Covid-19, we see a growing preference for low-touch interactions in customers. I expect numerous technologies to play a vital role, but the ones around interaction design, gamification, advanced analytics, data visualisation, robotic automation, virtual and augmented reality, distributed ledgers, geospatial analysis, Internet of Things, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and natural language processing will hold the key.

As for the Indian IT industry, we have come a long way since our humble beginnings, to tackling the Y2K bug, to now becoming the world’s de-facto IT office. Over the last three months, we showed our mettle yet again by tiding over unprecedented disruptions overnight using practical home-shoring delivery model, and keeping the lights on for global clients. Digital holds the key for every industry facing an existential crisis and I have no doubt that we are well-poised to exploit these emerging opportunities.

What is the USP of Nihilent’s ‘Design Thinking’ framework and how can it transform customer experience?
Nihilent is a pioneer in applying a human-centered approach to business problem-solving, especially within the context of digital innovation. Over the last few years, we made big investments and built state of the art interaction-experience design labs, which have today become the melting pot for innovation bringing together the creatives and the engineers. We have facilities in Pune and Johannesburg operating at full steam, and are now ready to open another one in Dallas. We have a large pool of passionate practitioners and continue to embed this philosophy into our daily solution design and delivery processes. This renewed vision and commitment to human-centered design, is what I would like to believe, will differentiate us in the coming days.

What are the key focus verticals for Nihilent in India and what are the key solutions on offer?
BFSI, media, healthcare, retail and manufacturing are the top focus for Nihilent and we continue to build tailored accelerators focused on specific industries and use cases. For the lending organisations, we launched ARM (Affinity Risk Model) to help build affinity-based red flags in credit scoring. We are ready to launch ReSense, an AI/ML based sales forecasting platform for the retail industry to make SKU level daily forecasts and recommend assortments. To manage private space and ensure social distancing norms according to government guidelines, we devised ARGUS, a powerful video analytics solution. A few more interesting solutions are in the works, which we plan to announce in the coming weeks.

Nihilent recently launched a Covid-19 Mortality Incident Tracker (COMIT). What has been the market’s response to this solution?
Covid-19 Mortality Incident Tracker (COMIT), launched last year, helps forensic pathologists and doctors track, investigate and record deaths from Covid-19 or comorbidity. We have designed COMIT as cloud based Software as a Service (SaaS) solution. We received encouraging responses from the US and India. Based on the feedback from our current deployments, we are working on enhancements on a war footing, for time is precious in our fight against the raging virus.

Nihilent acquired Hypercollective earlier this year, what value did it add to your portfolio?
With the acquisition of Hypercollective, a cross-disciplinary branding company, we seek to augment our expertise in digital technology with a deeper understanding of a purposeful brand and its attributes. We believe that the customer will continue to be the pull-propeller for businesses when it comes to transformation, and with our portfolio of consulting and delivery services spanning the brand, the customer experience, digital workplace, technology and infrastructure will enable us to become a true digital transformation partner for our clients.