Aarav Solutions is a global product engineering and IT consulting services provider catering to a broad array of industries such as telecommunications, banking & finance, Government, power and utilities, and other B2B segments. The company facilitates digital transformation for its clients to enable sustainable growth. As part of the CTO series, we interviewed Sriram Ramakrishnan, CTO, about how the company keeps pace with technological developments and enables its customers to leverage the same. Excerpts:

Technological Evolution: How does your company stay ahead in technological advancements, and what’s your approach to adopting new tech?

The three approaches to Aarav being future-ready in today’s ever-changing technology environment are:

• Training and Enablement
• Establishing Co-create Labs where our people can play with the latest tech in a sandbox
• Enabling real-world PoCs and Accelerators through our Co-create Labs

Tech Stack Evolution: How has your technology stack evolved over the years, and what key decisions drove these changes?

One of our initial moves was to shift from on-premise foundational IT solutions to cloud-based scalable solutions. The key drivers for our move were the need for automation, getting off the ground quickly without massive investments, and the need to realize more efficiencies through AI & ML.

R&D Prioritization: How do you prioritize projects in R&D, and can you share an example of a project that significantly impacted your business?

We are driven by market needs, technological trends, and strategic business objectives. We focus on projects that promise significant impact in terms of innovation, client satisfaction, and market leadership. A notable example is our investment in developing advanced Generative AI-driven analytics tools. This project was prioritized based on the growing demand for data-driven decision-making in our client industries without them having to create, maintain and grow their data analytics teams.

Tech Team Dynamics: What’s your philosophy in building and managing high-performing tech teams – especially the senior leaders?

We provide our teams with the space to fail fast, learn and move on. Competence matters, and senior leaders need to lead by example on competence and certifications. We back them up on key decisions and empower them to act independently with accountability. The company encourages a culture of continuous learning and feedback.

Security and Privacy: How do you approach the ever-evolving challenges of cybersecurity and data privacy in your industry?

By investing in robust and adaptive security technologies, and maintaining a stringent focus on compliance with global data privacy standards. Security is there by design in everything we do – right from the beginning, and is not an afterthought. We apply the principle of least privilege in all the applications we build.

Tech and Business Alignment: How do you ensure that technological developments align with the overall business goals? 

Tech developments have to move the needle on business outcomes in revenue, operating efficiency, or customer experience terms. We enabled our customers – a global giant in the Consumer Credit industry – to optimize their billing time from a few weeks to a few hours, improving customer onboarding time by 45% and improving their time to market for new product launches by 60%.