Intense Technologies

Conf call recording can be accessed at following link

https://www.researchbytes.com/webcast.aspx?WID=121845

For US deal they told it may not be huge in terms of revenue but from presence point of view its very important. In my understanding this may give them a chance to acquire more customers.

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Thanks for the link. Very helpful.

They are quite positive in the con-call, however I had one thought -
All their major clients are in telecom clients and the telecom sector itself is not doing great. Though they are moving into Insurance and Banking, yet 65% is Telecom. Do you guys see this as an issue?

Mayank

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Well if they can help a struggling industry better manage their processes at efficient cost which can further result in some cost reduction overall for customers then I guess Telecom Sector struggle can benefit this company.
On similar lines an example ( IT Solution for struggling Industry) I have seen is Accelya Kale which is supporting Airline Industry and is generating sufficient cash.

Just my 2 cents , don’t have indepth understanding of the impact.

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Telecom companies in spite of their problems have to keep acquiring customers and if any vendor can help them and reduce their cost of customer onboard and improve the experience, then they will choose that vendor. So I think, telecom company’s issues shouldn’t overly affect Intense in getting business. Of course, there can be issues related receivables and we have to keep an eye.

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Yeah, plus the con call said that 35% of business is coming from banking and insurance so i guess there is a scope for diversification… and the mix might get better n varied as time goes on …
Thx guys

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Its startup… need to have some time to stabilize cash flow…revenue growth… all depends on their intentional clients which will take this company into new heights…goodluck Bro.

Incase anyone is interested in transcript of Q4 concall

http://corporates.bseindia.com/xml-data/corpfiling/AttachLive/f0466e8e-f69d-4cae-8012-d174f7c24c8f.pdf

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Good concall! Most of the stuff they have said if known in public domain. I liked how individual investors were giving suggestions like publishing consolidated results in presentations, registering on G Cloud, and thing like that. With what i have read and understood (past two concalls), these guys are honest and really want to take the company up. They are struggling at the moment due to marketing expenses in Europe and US. Breakthroughs are coming gradually.

Product is not a problem for them (they already have a class product). Problem is to market it! They are looking for strategic collaborators and large integrators (again?). I think they moved away from this model so as to go to the market directly. But probably are finding it tough to get going in foreign lands individually. In India, they probably already have an established name with reputed customers, so don’t need integrators.

Minting opportunity is there if they can have a major breakthrough in setting some sort of JV with a strategic partner. Let’s see.

Disclaimer: Invested.

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CRMs have been around for the longest time. It is inherent part of business to communicate to their customers. The increased focused these days is due to advent of new technologies like big data, machine learning and AI. This has enabled the business’s to understand a customers behavior real time and target them with messages accordingly.

You might have already observed, when you do a search for a product in Flipkart or Amazon, the same product is displayed as ad on other sites you might have been browsing. At a broader level, this is also a feature of CRM, which uses a specific component with input data from google.

In simple terms, the issue with existing CRMs is ability to communicate like messaging existing customer on their devices, recommendations (offers) have been missing. This is where companies like Intense Technologies have put their bet. Now, at first glance, it looks like there are in sweet spot. They have built the entire system from custom onboarding to communication management.

But what has happened is even the existing CRM providers have enhanced their application to integrate the big data and AI technologies via external interfaces. This has allowed customer to pick and choose the components they would want to build their custom CRMs with same features Intense Technologies does. The trade-offs here is whether they want to migrate completely to new product or continue to use existing product and build custom features around it.

Don’t get swayed by facts like they onboarded x million for Jio.

  1. It is not going to be a cakewalk to get customers
  2. It would be easier to get customer who have not been using CRMs or using legacy ones. It would be difficult to get existing ones to migrate unless it offers serious value (lower cost).
  3. It is not difficult to build the product. It requires time. Indian IT companies do offer such customization to deliver same value.
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Brother for one you have got this wrong. Intense is not a crm system like salesforce or microsoft dynamix. It is a ccm or customer communication management framework with competitors like xerox pitney bowes gmc etc. I suggest you read about ccm products in gartner or forrestor research on what exactly they do.

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And about it being easy to build one please read my note on the m and a in this space. I wonder if it were so easy to build why are all biggies in an acquisition mode rather than building one themselves. About jio ask any IT enterprise architect on how robust a system has to be in terms of handling such unprecedented volumes. He will answer how as u say easy it is to hsve that horizontal and vertical scalability. Cheers.

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You’re right. I’m old school. I still refer to it as CRM. It’s also about customer experience. These CRM have evolved from single channel communication to multi channel to omni channel now. The basic tech would be - CRMs (Omni Channel) + Big Data + Google Analytics + Tag management + Tool to send messages to multiple touch points = CCM.

My previous posts talks about what the product does- CRM to Communication Management. Intense has developed a product for customer experience. IT companies provide them as service, with consultants for implementation. These are large scale implementation. It doesn’t make any difference who the competitors are. If the product has a unique value proposition, it will find its space.

I don’t find this to be a unique solution. Intense may have the best in class product. It can accelerate businesses, but there are other factors based on which customer would buys. Secondly, India IT companies are more inclined towards services. Even if the customer asks them to build the product and license them, they won’t.

I only wanted to caution investors, about risks and opportunities. I hope you are not going to ask me to provide integration architecture :slight_smile:

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Precisely that Indian IT companies are oriented towards services which is huge benefit for themselves, but not consumers of those services. Instead packaged products which can be customised is the way forward when Global IT matures. Long time to nature is a challenge of IT products and that prevents ‘quick result seeking’ indian IT biggies to invests seriously and heavily. Infosys is trying a switch to products. Large companies like SAP, Oracle, IBM (both products and services) thrive in that space. Companies like intense try to get a place in that space.If it will succeed only time can tell. I worked long years in an Indian IT Service biggy and watched hardware and software product companies on sidelines as my customer.

Disc: Highly opinionated about IT products and thus invested in Intense. So take with a pinch of salt.

Dear deepak,
Your flagging of concerns is appreciated. My thoughts on your comments:

  1. You are missing a big point in here. Time to market due to seamless integration. I had a chance to see their demo of Uniserve Nxt and their integration services (using micro services) is awesome and they are claiming to cut down time to market to 3 months from 6 months. If you see a enterprise implementation in a big bank or telco in Europe or USA they have tens of systems mostly legacy in multiple countries. A CEM system integrates easily with all of them seamlessly with minimal integration effort (using data virtualization, off the shelf adapters etc.). A typical IT services project as you are hinting above would typically stretch for more than a year or two very optimistically and is usually custom made.
  2. A product with its versioning system provides off the shelf updates to new channels, new data sources, analytics etc seamlessly through newer versions.
  3. The composition data inflow is going to change dramatically (especially say in insurance) with IOT , Pay as you drive etc, Big data through social media etc. all of which is supported easily with upgrades in a CEM product
  4. About them finding new clients. IT IS NEVER EASY to get new clients especially in enterprise products. So your flag is absolutely correct. This is not a commodity business like what our IT service vendors do. So the level of due diligence here is exceptionally higher.
  5. Now they are no longer in their comfort zone in India with their near domination in Telcos and Insurance. Now they have to take on the big guys in their own turf the likes of oracle, GMC, OpenText etc. That is where the concept of a Strategic investor buying a stake comes in as they can piggy back on their customer base and marketing muscle is all the more relevant. With just own marketing guy each in europe and USA it is a wonder how they could get such a pipeline till now honestly just on references.
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Time to market is 3 months? It would be a killer. I still can’t get how will they do it. I like these kind of companies due to commoditization. Cost would be a factor. The usual custom project like this run into millions of dollars. I hope they crack this space, opportunities can be mind boggling. Once you get a customer, it does work on references. Silicon valley very much runs on references.

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Automation is the key!

If you are familiar with SWDLC (software development lifecycle)…in which once the requirements are gathered, IT companies create a high level design document, then the low level design document, then it goes to the development team and through testing, then you have end-to-end environment, then the production front. This is a cycle for an enterprise product which need to be followed because anywhere it goes wrong, the whole business is impacted.

Now, what Intense is trying to do is to build a platform where once you have the requirement, it is all just a matter of few clicks to build your enterprise solution. Basically, there are five core big components – UI, UX, once you compile, create/import UI, and it can run on any device (mobile, tablet, desktop, car dashboards, or going forward IoTs). That is one. The second aspect of it is Data. You might have a great UI but handling data is crucial. So the good old days for digital transformation of data is to be collecting all data at one place, which is a three - four years process. So that is now moving to data one. Virtualization of data connection (they have filed a patent for this). They call the process Data Manager, which taps various data sources in different file formats/structures and normalizes this for the front end. On top of it they have a rules engine. Further, there is workflow… because every process has got a workflow. For instance if you are buying something online - you place an order, make the payment, then it goes to shipment, it goes to logistics, the whole lot of things. So, in short, Intense, through their product Uniserve NXT is trying to merge all this exercise of UI, data, workflow by building wizards and wrappers.

Today, the world is transforming and is getting more collaborative i.e. towards the "World of API.” APIs are integration between applications to interface what they are trying to replicate. So this particular thing becomes very critical because if tomorrow Uber is giving car for rental, they would like to sell food on his app, would like to sell hotels on their app, and stuff like that. This is where APIs come to rescue. APIs become an integral part of any enterprise application in order to make the legacy system robust i.e. without tweaking the legacy system’s code much one can add functionality. So, instead of coding and scripting, they have a very unique application of connecting to systems because they support all the best renowned API interfaces in the industry they operate. So in a nutshell, they are talking about BOTS, that is Artificial Intelligence space, Automated Testing, etc.

They further explained by pointing to the manufacturing industry, which became more efficient once the conveyor belt systems started. In the software industry, it has never happened or even as we speak today where there is a kind of you pick up individual LEGACY box and create whatever shape that you want because with software industry, the convention has always been to identify what the requirement are, then sit down and look at which is the best language to code in which will probably work in multiple environments and then start coding for that requirement. What they have managed to build is this architecture for the first time in the industry where they are treating software like parts; you can pick up components and on the fly, stitch new parts and new solutions as you go. So, where a normal software development life cycle (even when we are talking of automation, to move out say 500 resources from Cognizant and put in an automated system) will take about 6-7-months to a year for that transition to happen, we are seeking to completely break that and say that can be done in a month.

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BRAVO, Thanks. Gives me a much better understanding and the model of conveyor belt to
retain it in mind with. :slight_smile:

And no other company has this so far?? That is what seems a bit strange…

Also how quickly can others get it, now that they know that Intense has it?

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Well, this is one unknown to be honest. I am betting on them getting awards for best architecture for this NXT software they have built. Gartner recognition matters a lot as well. So that is sort of “faith”, as i have not seen the system myself. Another thing that gives confidence is there already reputed clientele and breakthroughs they have managed to get with a single man marketing team in Europe and US. So, if the product on offer isn’t good, these breakthroughs and strong clientele wouldn’t have come. Food for thought!

As i have said earlier, i don’t doubt if they have an excellent product. It is how they market that product is important. One of the major stumbling blocks in switching between such systems for the clients is transition time along with quality of transition and effort to be put in. Intense is trying to quicken the process and is said to have built right set of APIs to manage this transition.

Now they are upping their efforts to find a partner in target geographies which can propel them to the next level. Doing it all alone would be very difficult.

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True, their product must be good and thatz why they got that Gartner
coverage. Their sales team is weak and that is why they are looking for a
strategic investor.

Now in their domain, it could be a bank, a telco (65% of their business) or
an insurance company and that can then help them to push their products in
that industry.

Or could it be a technology company that already has a lot of influence in
this sector? So what kind of a strategic investor would Intense need?

I had a talk with a few Intense Tech employees through a friend. They say
that there is nothing revolutionary that has happened in the last 1-2 years
but yes, the business has been steady.

Honestly their sales team is too depleted. 1 sales person in Europe and 1
in US is a joke if a company wants to push in these geographies. However
they acknowledge it themselves so thatz good. We’ll just have to keep a
close eye.

One another question is that this company has been around from 15-20 years.
So how did it suddenly came into prominence - is it because of their
Gartner coverage? Earlier it was into data migration I believe.I might be
wrong here.

Regards,
Mayank