Saravanan Murugan: Leveraging Innovation, Analytics & Technology To Drive Business Transformation Across Organizations
Saravanan Murugan
Group Head
In an exclusive interview with CEO Insights, Saravanan sheds light on his overall professional experience, his leadership approach, and much more.
Could you give a brief account of your professional background and experiences? What is the motivation that fuels your daily routines?
I have extensive experience of over 28 years, especially in the IT Service sector. My major focus throughout my career has always been on bringing innovation to the organizations through my work. I truly believe that analytics projects can transform or disrupt the business process. I always start by defining the value while setting weekly milestones and visualizing success on a daily basis. Our
Chairman and Managing Director motivate me on failures during intermediate milestones and have given me challenging goals, which keep me going while pushing me to innovate new solutions without worrying about failure
Define CAVINKARE as an organization and the factor that makes the company unique from its competitors in the sector.
Currently, I am heading an organization, called Cavin Infotech, a subsidiary of CAVINKARE. The primary idea behind the inception of this firm was to be the Digital arm of CAVINKARE and digitalize the business processes and operations in CAVINKARE through AIML, data science, data generating solutions like Cloud-Native SaaS products, and so on. From my experience, I realized that analytics projects need customized solutions. That is when we decided to offer service to other organizations that are facing business challenges. We have gone through the hard struggle of failure and innovating solutions based on the ground truth. While on one side, we are a captive unit, we are also a service organization on the other side, providing service to our clients, and that's what makes us unique.
Can you elaborate on the technology frame work you have built within the organization?
Coming to the data side, we are completely into the usage of cloud technologies, using both Azure and AWS cloud as well as their recommended tech stacks. We also use various open-source frameworks. While our data science is completely in Python, we also use spark engine and other NoSQL database technologies. Apart from that, keeping all the sensitive organizational information in mind, instead of using tools, public APIs, and sending our sensitive data to external systems, we have opted for using open-source Foundational GenAI models that are trained locally and are currently at an advance stage of using them. All our AI and Analytics solutions are deployed on web or mobile devices using native technologies.
Tell us about your leadership approach. What are the guidelines or methodologies you follow as a
Owing to the rapid innovation currently taking place, Analytics, unlike technology, today can efficiently blend into any business domain
Define CAVINKARE as an organization and the factor that makes the company unique from its competitors in the sector.
Currently, I am heading an organization, called Cavin Infotech, a subsidiary of CAVINKARE. The primary idea behind the inception of this firm was to be the Digital arm of CAVINKARE and digitalize the business processes and operations in CAVINKARE through AIML, data science, data generating solutions like Cloud-Native SaaS products, and so on. From my experience, I realized that analytics projects need customized solutions. That is when we decided to offer service to other organizations that are facing business challenges. We have gone through the hard struggle of failure and innovating solutions based on the ground truth. While on one side, we are a captive unit, we are also a service organization on the other side, providing service to our clients, and that's what makes us unique.
Can you elaborate on the technology frame work you have built within the organization?
Coming to the data side, we are completely into the usage of cloud technologies, using both Azure and AWS cloud as well as their recommended tech stacks. We also use various open-source frameworks. While our data science is completely in Python, we also use spark engine and other NoSQL database technologies. Apart from that, keeping all the sensitive organizational information in mind, instead of using tools, public APIs, and sending our sensitive data to external systems, we have opted for using open-source Foundational GenAI models that are trained locally and are currently at an advance stage of using them. All our AI and Analytics solutions are deployed on web or mobile devices using native technologies.
Tell us about your leadership approach. What are the guidelines or methodologies you follow as a
a leader?
A firm believer in trust and teamwork, I always believe in an autonomous way of working in a team, which is essential to the growth of an organization. While recruiting next-level leaders, apart from their core competencies, I also look for skillsets that I myself lag in and can learn from that person. One of my biggest strengths has been critical questioning. I always give my team a lot of scope and the space required to innovate and take ownership. However, I do meticulous reviews, where I guide them in their tasks while trying to boost their confidence. In case of a challenge or scenario where we find ourselves deviating from the objectives, I help them resolve the issues by asking the right questions, which helps them find the answers by themselves.
What is the future destination you are heading towards?
As part of our current endeavors, we have been able to consolidate a majority of our organizational data and decisions in one place. Today, through analytics, while the majority of the micro decision-making processes are happening in a centralized way, as part of our future objectives, we want to move towards macro decision-making processes using analytics. For that to happen, we need to make sure to have Ethical AI as well as other attributes of AI incorporated into our system. So we are working to ensure that a majority of the decision-making processes in the organization will be taken care of by AI and related technologies in the future.
Saravanan Murugan, Group Head - Digital Technologies,Data, Analytics CavinKare
An accomplished transformation leader with around three decades of extensive experience in a wide range of domains, such as Data Strategy, Data Analytics, Cloud Data Engineering, SaaS Product Engineering, and many more, especially across various IT service organizations, Saravanan Murugan has leveraged his extensive experience to lead business transformation across those organizations. He is currently working as the Group Head - Digital Technologies, Data, Analytics at CAVINKARE.
•Hobbies: Learning new technologies, watching science fiction documentaries
•Favorite Cuisine:South Indian Vegetarian
•Favorite Book:Neuromancer by William Gibson
•Favorite Travel Destination:Sydney
A firm believer in trust and teamwork, I always believe in an autonomous way of working in a team, which is essential to the growth of an organization. While recruiting next-level leaders, apart from their core competencies, I also look for skillsets that I myself lag in and can learn from that person. One of my biggest strengths has been critical questioning. I always give my team a lot of scope and the space required to innovate and take ownership. However, I do meticulous reviews, where I guide them in their tasks while trying to boost their confidence. In case of a challenge or scenario where we find ourselves deviating from the objectives, I help them resolve the issues by asking the right questions, which helps them find the answers by themselves.
What is the future destination you are heading towards?
As part of our current endeavors, we have been able to consolidate a majority of our organizational data and decisions in one place. Today, through analytics, while the majority of the micro decision-making processes are happening in a centralized way, as part of our future objectives, we want to move towards macro decision-making processes using analytics. For that to happen, we need to make sure to have Ethical AI as well as other attributes of AI incorporated into our system. So we are working to ensure that a majority of the decision-making processes in the organization will be taken care of by AI and related technologies in the future.
Saravanan Murugan, Group Head - Digital Technologies,Data, Analytics CavinKare
An accomplished transformation leader with around three decades of extensive experience in a wide range of domains, such as Data Strategy, Data Analytics, Cloud Data Engineering, SaaS Product Engineering, and many more, especially across various IT service organizations, Saravanan Murugan has leveraged his extensive experience to lead business transformation across those organizations. He is currently working as the Group Head - Digital Technologies, Data, Analytics at CAVINKARE.
•Hobbies: Learning new technologies, watching science fiction documentaries
•Favorite Cuisine:South Indian Vegetarian
•Favorite Book:Neuromancer by William Gibson
•Favorite Travel Destination:Sydney