Our Platformation strategy has helped us build systems that are open, intelligent and scalable: Roshan Shetty, CRO, Sonata Software

Roshan Shetty had in May 2022 joined Sonata Software as Chief Revenue Officer, responsible for sales of its services business, globally. In executing its aggressive growth strategy, Sonata Software has been investing in senior talent, especially located in its major markets to serve its clients better.  Roshan Shetty, shares with Express Computer, how his firm is scaling its operations globally including a focus on emerging technologies.

Some edited excerpts from the interview:

How has Sonata Software transformed itself in the last 10 years into a highly profitable company?

In the last ten years, we have done extremely well as a company. Our track record, both in terms of building Microsoft capability and providing services along with our very strong 360 Degrees partnership with Microsoft, has served us well. We invested in building the Platformation Framework which was leveraged by our clients in their transformation initiatives. And I believe that our global expansion over the last five or six years has been fully accretive to the company and has strengthened our presence in the United States and Australia, so I believe we have reaped immense benefits from that.

As we move forward, we will focus on being the modernization partner for our clients and deliver value to them through our services and continue to drive growth.

What are some of the key milestones or achievements during these years and reasons for this growth?

There were several things that happened – we hit $ 1 billion market cap last year. We launched our Platformation framework in 2016 because we saw the importance of platform-driven development early, and we have been refining it based on technology advances and shifts in the business environment. We’ve been named Microsoft’s Partner of the Year multiple times, consistently been members of Microsoft’s exclusive Inner Circle – a group of their top partners.

And the reasons for the growth: It may be cliched, but we focus on delivering value to our clients. We work closely with them to understand their priorities and challenges and apply ourselves in ways that ensure that we deliver the desired outcomes.

Employees are our assets. We strongly believe in our employees, we invest heavily in them and building cohesive and collaborative teams. We always try to ensure that the growth goals of our employees – be they professional or personal are supported by the company.

How has Sonata’s ‘ Platformation’ strategy for Digital Transformation helped in the growth? What are some of the key differentiators?
Openness, Scalability, Intelligence and Connectivity are core to resilient systems. And organizations need resilient systems that adapt to changes in market and industry landscapes as well as tech advancements. Platformation helps us build systems that are open, connected, intelligent and scalable. Platformation compliant systems are essentially, to a large extent, future proof. They are built to adapt and evolve, especially when a lot of companies are thinking long and hard on the kind of IT investments they make in a world that’s changing so rapidly.

Please also comment on Sonata’s successful partnerships- Microsoft, AWS, Google Cloud and their role in the growth?

We are pretty strong with Microsoft whether it is on Cloud, whether it is on Data, whether it is on Microsoft Dynamics. We do work with them both on the ‘sell to’ and ‘sell with’ side of the business model. We have partnered with AWS & GCP to capitalize on the our Modernization theme and have services being delivered to our clients. So, really expanding the whole solution footprint and leveraging the ecosystem partnership that we can really capture the market in a meaningful way to deliver value to our clients. We are currently working with many marquee clients in modernizing their ecosystem across Azure, AWS and GCP based on their technology choices.

 Roshan, since you have joined, what have been your observations on the opportunities for Sonata to scale its operations Globally?

Sonata has a strong foundation that was built over more than three decades with focus on Product engineering and Microsoft services. We have established business model across US, UK & Europe, APAC and ANZ markets. We have the unique advantage of leveraging our experience over the years to be the Modernization partner for our clients and deliver value to them. This along with the strategy we have defined to Harvest and Invest across Markets and Industry verticals, coupled with the Brand and Talent strategy will present enormous opportunities for us to take great proactive deal constructs to drive business growth for our clients.

Our localization strategy to build hubs closer to clients, like the recent operations setup in Ireland and Canada help us to attract local talent and be culturally more aligned to our clients. I am confident that with the above-mentioned strategy we will scale our global operations significantly.

What are your plans to strengthen the company’s presence in Europe and the UK?
We are investing in scaling up our operations across Europe by opening operation hubs closer to our clients like the recent one we setup in Ireland. Additionally, we are investing in hiring both Sales and Delivery talent locally to bolster our presence in the market and our relevance to clients and prospects. We have partnered with ecosystem partners in the market to bring forward better value propositions & solutions to our clients.

Our holistic approach towards markets, verticals, talent and ecosystem partners along with of consultative modernization solution will help us deliver digital transformation to our clients.

Can you throw some light on some of the emerging technologies that Sonata will be focusing on with an eye on future growth in the global markets?

We significantly work with industry verticals that are consumer facing where the focus is to drive business growth and better experience for consumers. As part of modernization services, we are investing is building better solutions around Data & insights that can help evolve better business models to benefit the consumers. We have developed a 3D data solution with focus across data consumption, solution agnostics of change in data structure to support data consumption and well-defined data fabric to ensure that data governance and stewardship is managed effectively. These solutions leverage emerging technologies like AI & ML to develop effective algorithms & models to render great experience through solution like metaverse. Emerging technologies will keep evolving and we will continue to look at applicability of these technologies for our clients in their business context to drive growth & better experience for their end consumers.

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