Sameer Mahapatra, Country Manager and VP Sales, Aeris Communications explains his IoT based offerings from connected cars to healthcare and agritech solutions.
What are your roles and responsibilities in Aeris?
My role has been to expand and run the business operations of Aries which is an integrated IoT player focusing across industries but specializing in the automotive segment. I look after interest in the India and SAARC region. The team based out of India is responsible for business in the south-east Asia, Middle-East and in Africa as well.
What are the solutions and services in the Aeris portfolio in India?
From an Indian subcontinent perspective Aries has specialised in automotive, IoT over the last 5 and half years. There is considerable interest generated and build in other areas like agriculture, Aries health care and in insurance. We have two joint ventures one with Mitsubishi and Volkswagen both these have enabled them to roll out connected car programmes in the American sub-continent and now spreading also. So this is what the Areis mobility platform does.
The heart of the connected car programme is running on Aries IoT tech. When we launched in the Indian sub-continent the focus was very clear that for both commercial and passenger vehicles most of them have their origins outside India apart from Suzuki in India brings most of its tech knowledge from outside India. The connected vehicle opportunity in India is in 1. Aftermarket 2. In the three wheeler, four wheeler and two wheeler segment, that is when Aries created the very robust Knowledge and tech platform which is the Aries smart mobility suite for two wheels three wheels four wheels insurance, for BFSI. What our platform does it enable the insurer multiple stakeholders with real time accurate and timely information to take timely decision.
How is the connected car opportunity in the Indian market?
The joint venture that we have is currently for the American markets. The primary reason for that is the effort of launching connected vehicle is only in that part of the world. So our relation with them is whenever they expand this variants globally it will come to India as well. In India the connected vehicle programme right now for auto OEM’s its an after-market practice as nobody is developing anything in India which is at a factory fit level. From volumes perspective there is a large market of two and three wheel where we are working with hundreds of OEM’s in production.
What are the different use cases in the auto insurance and other sectors?
We have seen health care industry undergoing a transformation of 5years in the last 1year. All of us are being affected in various ways. IoT has a very critical part to play. Some use cases that we found and brought to the market over the last 12 months. A remote temperature monitoring system became a large differentiator in the market place.
What are the use cases of the solutions you introduced for the healthcare and agritech sector?
Agritech has been a very prominent consumer of IoT for the last three years. One of partners by the name of Hello Tractor from Africa is ther for the last 3-4 years and very recently introduced them in India as our partners. Now what the solutions does is, the farmers today are not able to calculate acreage of the land they use higher rented tractors now the owner of the tractors and the farmers are two different entities here. By using lot of basic IoT implementation we have made a in road the agriculture sector where the farmer and owner ecosystem to do better productivity, in farm and the payment mechanism. So that’s something we have been doing successfully now.
How do you ensure security on the OT front due to which most IoT deployments fail?
As IoT becomes Omni present the rick of security continues to increase in proportion. As the number of devices increases the number of loose ends or points of security risk also keeps going up. As far as Aries is concerned our implementations everywhere we have tried to be ahead of the curve by putting in the most secure network that keeps getting upgraded every 6 months basis. So state of the art security systems which we built for very high OEM’s like Volkswagen and Mitsubishi which we will bring in our Indian ecosystem also. So from that perspective we have built a secure robust network.
What are the partnership models you follow and how do these work in India?
The way we are structured in India is we have a very robust go to market model which is based on two pillars one is direct selling as teams are present pan India. Second model is a partner model so BSNL is one partner so all the business that BSNL does the IoT partner for that is Aries. We also have host of channel partner who do business with us. From business acquiring perspective direct sales or the alliances and partnership model is very clearly defined and that’s what is bringing business for us. The third partnership that is important for us is the entire vendor ecosystem where we have a 24×7 platform multi lingual nok support from post-delivery to service and deployment. We have very strong partnership with Finish, American and Chinese companies where we bring in lot of these capabilities which are time tested with us for multiple use cases.
What has been the impact of the pandemic on your GTM model?
2020 has been a major dent in the programmes of all companies especially in the automotive sector. The two and three wheeler investment was at a 200 to 400 % growth stage in India. That took a huge beating in starting 2020 March. 15% companies withdrawed from the market. The rest 85% were in a stage where 2020 would have been an investment year for them. By the time 2021 started and lot the pandemic was subsiding a bit lot of these companies were heavily investing during the pandemic by creating tech support and process so they can sustain themselves. In the 1st quarter of this year we have seen a big rise in business and that has impacted our business as well in a positive way. The realisation of IoT and remote working and connected world has come very strongly in all companies.
How have you been looking at balancing between retaining existing customers and acquiring new customers?
The faith that the management had in India had definitely paid off, which means that all of us knew that the pandemic will be behind us one fine day. The management’s decision from march 2020 to march 2021 to keep investing in India was a very visionary thing. We all know that across the globe downsizing happening, sever cost measures being taken. We kept the team together we did not do any major reaction like slashing the cost for the year. We reached out to customers through webinars, video discussions product demos. As this was so interesting the availability and reach from the customers went up by 100%. If I look at the number of customers we acquired in the last 4 month was almost equal to 2019 when the pandemic was not there. We acquired 10 customers without even meeting them face to face once.
How did you ensure remote support and services to your customers?
We run critical operations for companies across industry from the state police machinery to ride sharing to disaster management in Uttarakhand so many use cases which are critical to business. Like a telco those teams are always out on the field. Our operations deployment team are from a essential services perspective are continuously present on field. That is one of the reasons I think Aries is a trusted partner sustained and got new business through these. We are always there for customer support.
How do you ensure conformance with multiple regulations across multiple geographies?
Regulations in India and across is an interesting and dynamic play. There are many variable in regulations, for IoT in automotive there is a regulation that drives the automotive industry itself. There are regulations that drives what a device can do. When you talk about the telematics or the insurance segment IRDA comes into play. So it’s a very interesting and complex mesh out there.
What are the challenges in IoT deployment in India and what role Aeris is playing to develop the IoT market here?
In India we are the pioneers and very represented in government forums. There are multiple contribution from Aries in multiple panels. We are co-creating a lot of policies as they are dynamic. We have seen that the sophistication of the industry for IoT adoption. If the technological adoption of the enterprise regardless of its size is very high in various stream. If the company is digitally savvy then their efficiency from IoT is very high. Aries has been able to educate companies the need to have IoT as what IoT can do so that’s where we see pioneer companies like ours educated people and companies that what IoT can do for you.
Who is driving the IoT agenda in organizations – CIOs or other CXOs?
Interestingly the answer for both is the business head. From my experience whether it’s a digitally developed company or not these kind of situations are driven by the business head.
How is IoT deployment emerging as an additional revenue generator and profit center for organizations?
One of the largest deals we have closed in India in the last 18 months has been done last month, it’s a two wheeler organization their entire focus was on how they can put variant in the market place which will earn them increment. They have successfully launched a variant which is a successful connective feature. So the organisation is looking at incremental value that they can give to the customer and make incremental revenue as well.
How are SMEs looking at IoT deployment?
We have seen large implementation happen in tire 2 tire 3 cities also. Ride sharing is a very classic use case which are driven by SME’s. A ride sharing company which has may be 100 vehicles in the city which ferry people across the city. Now these companies internally lease these vehicle to individual owners and these owners have to pay a sum based on the mileage struck on the vehicle. This is only possible if they have a business critical IoT platform.
What are the use cases of your Top 5 largest IoT deployments and what are their contributions to Aeris topine?
70% of our new business comes from two wheeler. Clearly the use cases are similar they don’t change from one two wheeler OEM to another. Lot of these two wheeler OEMs have B2B client we have been able to work very closely with these two wheeler OEMs and completely educate them. The OEMs have no knowledge about how to pitch about their USPs so that’s where our solutions comes into play. My team works with these OEMs and make it relevant for the OEMs for each of the use cases.
How has been your experience working with the government sector?
There is a sizeable investment that has happened by the government in the last 2-3 years. The digital infrastructure in the country has gone up by many folds and there has been serious investments and government is one of the largest spenders in this field. As far as Aries been concerned there has been direct interaction with the government in some of the use cases. But mainly we are in non-government deals. Many non-government B2B deals that we have done they have been provided us through government.
What will be some of Aeris’ key focus areas in 2021?
2021 will be a consolidation year for IoT feature sets for vehicle in India and globally as well. Some organization are prioritising and de prioritising the investments on IoT depending on the organization. Ride sharing, logistics, cargo monitoring will become huge assets for every company. One of our priorities will be to invest heavily on specifically created model and enhancing ride sharing assets monitoring. 2021 will be about enabling critical process which will be needed from a delivery perspective. We also want to work on battery solutions, battery efficiency.
What would be your message for customers looking at IoT deployments?
My message for clients and customers and especially for SMEs the message is IoT is not an option anymore it’s a must have now. We should be looking at implementing IoT in parts and start to reap the benefits.