Catalincs, a tech advisory firm enabling companies reimagine their business, operating and financial models to drive superior customer value, today announced that its Partner, Ramkumar Ramamoorthy, keynoted at Phygital, the annual technology conference of the Madras Chamber of Commerce and Industry (MCCI).

Ramkumar Ramamoorthy, former CMD, Cognizant India and Partner, Catalincs highlighted that Chennai is gaining significant ground as the Analytics hub of India.

In his keynote he underscored the following points:

1. Chennai has an enviable ecosystem of multiple players—muti-service IT companies providing analytics and AI solutions at scale, pure-play analytics companies, Global Capability Centers (GCCs) with significant focus on analytics, a large number of higher educational institutions offering data science and business analytics programs, and government setting the tone as a power user of analytics through the Tamil Nadu e-Governance Agency (TNeGA). These firms work across all four areas of analytics: descriptive, diagnostic, prescriptive and predictive analytics.

2. For decades, while multi-service IT services companies in the city such as TCS, Cognizant, Accenture, Infosys, Cap Gemini, Wipro, DXC, LTI Mindtree, Indium and Agilisium have provided broad and deep analytics solutions to clients, pure-play analytics and AI companies such as LatentView Analytics, Tiger Analytics, Ganit, Crayon Data and Fractal Analytics are today supporting global and regional clients in analytics and AI from Chennai.

3. Likewise, Chennai is strongly positioned as a focussed analytics and AI hub for specialized industry needs. Examples include Sports Mechanics which is augmenting sports performance and entertainment experience by offering analytics-as-a-service; Planys Technologies which is changing how underwater asset inspections are conducted across maritime, infrastructure and energy sectors through marine robotics and intelligent data analytics; and Waycool, a food and agri-tech company, adopting a phygital supply chain approach using AI and machine learning technologies.

4. In addition to horizontal areas such as customer experience analytics, sales and marketing analytics and people analytics, many pure-play analytics firms headquartered outside Chennai are making a beeline for the city because of its rich domain capability across industries such as financial services, manufacturing and  healthcare for fraud and risk analytics, health analytics, geospatcial analytics, supply chain analytics, device analytics, among others.

5. Prominent GCCs such as Ford, Wal-Mart, AstraZeneca, Neilsen IQ and Kapitus have either set up exclusive Data Analytics hubs or built deep capabilities in one or more analytics areas. One example is Ford which has set up its “Ford Data Insight and Analytics Centre” and employs about 500 data scientists in this centre.

6. The robust foundation that educational institutions in the state have built in decision sciences is attracting the best companies from India and globally. For example (a) Great Lakes Institute of Management was a pioneer in launching a program in business analytics (b) IFMR Graduate School of Business was a pioneer in offering a Quantitative Finance/Financial Analytics program (c) IIT Madras recently launched a BSc degree in Data Science in online mode that’s being pursued by thousands of students (d) Chennai Mathematical Institute’s MS in Data Science has become a benchmark for many institutions in India. In addition, hundreds of higher education institutions in the state—enginnering, humanities and science—today produce over 50,000 graduates every year with credentials or specialization in data science.

It is estimated that there are more than 100,000 data engineers, modelers, architects and ML engineers working in companies based in Chennai.