RESEARCH

Top Data Science Service Providers In India 2018: By AIM & IMS Proschool

This Data Science Service Providers benchmarking study by Analytics India Magazine and IMS Proschool aims to separate top performing data science providers from other vendors. Our experience shows that customers — enterprises and mid-sized companies alike are exploring and leveraging new technologies — data science and analytics by moving all the major levers — analytics solutions, building a foundation for data infrastructure to track performance and improve services and experience for their customers.

The growing availability of data coupled by high computing power has created an unprecedented opportunity for enterprises to use analytics to improve decision making and align it with the overall business strategy to drive value. As a result, organisations in India are spending billions of dollars to build their analytics capabilities and are increasingly turning to some type of reporting, analytics and data science technology to address key business challenges.

As enterprises strive to take advantage of analytics and data science to increase profitability, drive customer engagement and grow revenue while identifying and minimizing risk, they are tapping into the power of data by collaborating with service providers. Clients are implementing these initiatives in a strategic way, however it still remains to be seen if these efforts to raise analytics quotient will eventually translate into value-add for the end customers.

In turn, CXOs are demanding Data Science Service Providers that can respond quickly and effectively to changing business demands and gradually move into a value creation role. Clients expect stronger industry knowledge from vendors to provide better business context and effectively respond to market opportunities and challenges with agile and collaborative decision-making processes.

AIM’s Penetration & Maturity Quadrant (PeMa matrix) aims to benchmark Data Science Service Providers in India and highlight vendors with more mature capabilities that have the advantage leading the charge around data science services and standardization. The vendor’s thought  leadership and competency is measured over two key parameters— Pe (x) and Ma (y). A balance between both these parameters is essential to respond to client’s business challenges effectively and seize revenue opportunities with analytics. These vendors are also ahead of the curve in terms of industries and geographies served. Analytics and data science solutions from these vendors deliver a comprehensive, unified business analytics system that meet the growing demands of clients and at the same time, provides secure enterprise governance and control.

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Market Definition

The Data Science Service Providers study acts a Vendor Benchmark report and analyzes leading players in India. The Vendor Benchmark report assesses the Penetration & Maturity Index of Service Providers and gives strategic insights into their investments, go-to-market approaches and partnering techniques for forward looking organisations and mid-sized firms.

Data Science is the fastest growing technology services in India and globally with the big data analytics market expected to reach $16 billion by 2025. Today, Data Science encompasses services such as big data analytics, business intelligence, data warehousing, machine learning technology, enterprise modernization, and artificial intelligence capabilities to Government and commercial clients. AIM observed that industry investment in analytics and data science is noticeably increasing.

Missing from the PeMa Quadrant are many vendors that we have been watching closely but at this stage, they do not meet all the minimum criteria to participate in the study. AIM sees the emergence of a new area of data-driven vendors that are offering integrated business analytics system with flexible deployment options.

Vendors that do not have a full data science capability, with only limited case management are not included in this study. In the future, we will explore this rapidly evolving market space. Factors affecting the evaluation include the extent of a vendor’s presence in the market, the number of geographies served and the observed momentum in their growth.

PeMa Quadrant

We have deployed an approach —  Penetration Maturity Quadrant (PeMa) to appraise the efforts of data science providers. PeMa maps the effectiveness of service providers on two broad parameters, namely Penetration of (x) and Maturity (y).

To qualify as a service provider that is truly ahead of its competitors in terms of penetration, the companies should demonstrate several enablers that include:  

  • Number Of Analytics Employees
  • Number Of Clients For Analytics Services
  • Number Of Large Clients (Client Listed In Major Bourses)
  • Sectors Services For Analytics Services
  • Geographies Served For Analytics Services

The Maturity index will measure factors such as:

  • Employee Seniority
  • Advanced analytics work done
  • Dependence on key clients
  • Data science product offerings
  • Tenure of employees
  • Years in Market

This report seeks to lay a foundation to define the PeMa Quadrant as well as emphasise the major enablers that businesses should take into consideration before onboarding a vendor and understand partnering techniques. Through this unique approach, we aim to help business leaders understand and evaluate the essential focus areas of Data Science Service Providers in India across two main categories — Penetration and Maturity. The PeMa Quadrant can also be viewed as an opportunity to plot a strategic path forward. Forward-thinking companies can use the framework to identify the gaps and potential opportunities and gain a comprehensive view of a Service Provider’s analytic/technology capabilities and how it has evolved.

Methodology

The analysis includes operational metrics, maturity in terms of data science product offerings, depth across geographies, acquisition strategies, and the vendors’ initiatives in keeping with emerging analytics and AI trends.

For the Penetration & Maturity Quadrant, AIM built a survey to gather data to analyse vendors. We also received entries from the vendor customer community. Our research team carefully scrutinized and verified all respondent entries to ensure qualified participants are included in the report.

Study Demographics

Our Top Data Science Providers in India 2018 study Big Data Analytics Market Study is based on data and spans organisations size, verticals and functions. Unlike other industry research, this study is an indicator of analytics market dynamics.

Companies mentioned in this report/study are as follows:

The PeMa quadrants have been created using an evaluation matrix and contain four segments where the Service Providers are positioned accordingly.

Pioneers

The “Pioneers” among the vendors in the top right quadrant are those who have a strong market presence across industry verticals, are estimated to have double-digit growth and offer end-to-end analytics solutions, including strategy, solution design, implementation and execution. In terms of Maturity index, the vendors in this quadrant display deep domain expertise, industry-leading analytics solutions and expertise in different industry verticals which makes them the frontrunners in the market. The service providers can be regarded as opinion leaders, digital enablers who lend strategic impulses to the market. The Penetration dimension measures the geographical footprint and diverse set of clients served across the markets. The vendors’ strong geographical presence across Asia Pacific, US and Europe, backed by cross-industry reach gives them the ability to understand business needs across all layers of client organisations.

Genpact: The last few years have witnessed Data Science making quantum leaps into a multitude of domains spanning Banking & Finance, High-tech and Manufacturing, Customer Analytics, Insurance, Healthcare and so forth. Genpact’s vision is to operationalize Data Science for clients from every domain to make faster and efficient decisions. Data Science at Genpact is part of the large umbrella of capabilities and offerings within the Analytics space. They leverage state-of-the-art academic and industrial research to lead clients into a new frontier with solutions developed by tightly infusing domain and software engineering with Data Science solutions at core. Data Science is an interdisciplinary field that incorporates Computer Science, Mathematics and Business Domain Knowledge to derive value from the data. They are proud to say that their Data Scientists are not type casted to solve a particular type of challenge and they are equipped to leverage Deep Learning, Machine Learning, Natural Language Understanding/Generation, Statistics, Optimization, Forecasting and Graph Theory as required. The flexibility to handle structured and unstructured data (text, speech, images and video) while following agile methodology of development helps to glean meaningful impactful insights for clients. Genpact provides these services through their AI platform Genpact Cora – a modular, interconnected set of curated technologies that solve for the data ingestion and availability of scalable compute power (GPU and Big Data) with ease of deploying consumable API by clients in their existing processes/pipelines.

Bridgei2i: BRIDGEi2i is a trusted partner to enterprises for AI-driven Digital transformation. BRIDGEi2i leverages Data Engineering prowess, Advanced Analytics capabilities, proprietary AI accelerators and Consulting expertise to contextualize data, automate actionable insight generation and enable data-driven decisions across the enterprise to accelerate digital transformation. Backed by the global equity firm Edelweiss, BRIDGEi2i is a powerhouse of talented data scientists and AI experts who solve some of the most complex business problems. With a steady focus on AI-powered asset-based consulting, BRIDGEi2i offers tried and tested transformation frameworks and customer-centric engagement models to deliver sustainable business impact. BRIDGEi2i’s proprietary AI accelerators Watchtower, Recommender, Optimizer, and Converser enable the democratization of analytics insights to drive faster and more accurate business actions for digital transformation outcomes.

Consistently ranked by Analyst and Advisory firms among most prominent analytics and AI solutions companies, BRIDGEi2i has been consistently focused on building best in class Data Science and AI capabilities through SCaLA, a progressive capability development program and AI labs, an AI-focused innovation group.

BRIDGEi2i has steadily grown into a 400+ member organization today and is a transformation partner to more than 15 Fortune 500 companies globally. With some of the best minds in the industry and cutting-edge innovation, BRIDGEi2i is poised to cement its position as a leader in the analytics & AI solutions market.

Seasoned Vendors

In the top left quadrant are the “Seasoned” vendors who with their strong analytics and data science consulting expertise and significant portfolio share have consolidated their market presence. The vendors in this quadrant show more depth in the Maturity dimension, with deep analytics and data science practice and domain-based consulting, translating customer demands into solutions. These established vendors new technology investments and solution development capabilities provide a foundation on which to build a better analytics market presence. Moving in the other dimension, Penetration, the seasoned vendors need to grow their market strength, capture share in upcoming growth areas of the analytics market. In fact, they are yet to catch up with the Pioneers in their hold on the global market.

Cartesian Consulting: Mumbai-headquartered Cartesian Consulting specializes in analytics that helps businesses improve customer value, marketing spends, and business decisions. Set up in 2009 they are over 200 people strong, present in 5 offices across India, APAC and North America.

Their Services division provides bespoke analytics to over 50 domestic and global brands, spanning Customer Analytics, MMM and MTA, Promo Optimization, Business Analytics, Pricing and Promo Optimization, Store analytics, Retail analytics and Digital Analytics.

Their new Solutions division blends in AI and ML models into ready-to-use products the first two of which are Segment of One Engine and TheKyte.ai –  Subject Line wizard. Having set up AI lab in mid 2017 they are constantly pushing themselves to convert their IP into consumption-ready solutions.

Their main differentiator is their focus on creating business impact through analytics for clients. They measure contribution to toplines and participate in the outcomes.

AnalyticEdge: They use technology extensively to develop marketing analytics solutions. The core differentiator is end-to-end marketing effectiveness measurement platform called Demand Drivers. It is a DIY (Do-It-Yourself) platform and marketers with only a basic knowledge of data science can build statistical models for measuring the effectiveness of their marketing spend across all marketing channels. Traditionally, marketing effectiveness solutions have been very resource intensive, expensive and slow. However, the automated data ingestion capability in their platform coupled with cutting-edge machine learning algorithms and the user-friendly Simulation and Forecasting capability enables them to deliver cost-efficient, scalable and real-time solutions.

3LOQ: 3LOQ is an AI start-up founded by Carnegie Mellon alum Anirudh Shah and Sunil Motaparti. Having worked in the field of machine learning and data analytics sector for more than a decade, 3LOQ’s leadership has deep expertise in building extremely efficient algorithms that solve multi-dimensional problems. Their flagship product Habitual.AI is the world’s first AI engine that automates the process of building habits. Habitual.AI triggers intent-driven usage at scale by using cognitive computing, analytics and machine learning.

The patent-pending technology currently enables banks to create habitual users across digital and mobile platforms. It learns how customers use a digital banking product and calculate feature recommendations that are most likely to foster habitual usage. Trusted by leading institutions in global banking, Habitual.AI currently services a total base of more than 10M end-users. It consistently delivers business results in the form of more transactions, more monthly active users (MAUs) and reduced customer churn — all by building customer habits.

Growth Vendors

In the bottom right of the quadrant are “Growth” vendors who are potential contenders that will evolve into the next quadrant in due time. Their combination of powerful in-house capabilities and a mature mix of analytics solutions is recognized by customers across domains and has pivoted the service providers in the Growth quadrant. In terms of Maturity dimension, the Growth vendors provide comprehensive analytics solutions and technological frameworks; their consulting teams effectively build solutions which add value to its consulting offerings. The Growth Vendors’ team effectively works across industry verticals to achieve better business outcomes for clients’ engagements. The two key highlights of Growth vendors are the cost-competitive analytics solutions and the domain-led consulting approach. In the Penetration dimension, the vendors lag behind Pioneers and Seasoned service providers with limited geographic presence. For Growth vendors to pivot to Pioneer quadrant, the service providers will have to deepen their industry presence and geographical reach and build a successful client base.

LTI: LTI’s Mosaic is a unique offering that leverages the power of Data, AI and Automation to overcome the challenges of data-driven decision management. The platform is equipped with state-of-the-art data engineering and cutting-edge advanced analytics capabilities. It simplifies “Data-to-Decision” in hyper-distributed data and hybrid-computing environments with the No-code/Low-code concept, powered by AI logistics, automated intelligence & actionable insights. It harnesses valuable data to generate actionable insights that facilitate business transformation and enhance the quality and speed of decision-making. Mosaic suite is cohesive yet modularized, with 5 core sub-products coupled together:

  1. Mosaic Decisions: Self-service data platform for your hyper-distributed data needs
  2. Mosaic AI: A Catalyst for Enterprise AI adoption
  3. Mosaic Catalog: Cognitive data management platform
  4. Mosaic Lens: A self-driven business analysis solution to discover data as never before using applied AI
  5. Mosaic Automation: AI led Process Automation Platform

Absolutdata: Absolutdata products and services deliver scalable business impact across the enterprise by combining cutting-edge AI and ML with its heritage in analytical frameworks, business understanding and technology. A full suite of AI-powered products and data science services are changing the way global brands make decisions. Absolutdata’s NAVIK AI Platform has pre-built solutions, customizable solutions, enabling services to get an enterprise AI-ready. The growing set of AI-powered SaaS solutions include NAVIK SalesAI, NAVIK MarketingAI and NAVIK ConceptAI. The services teams build custom solutions based on NAVIK AI. Founded in 2001, Absolutdata is based in San Francisco and employs 400 professionals across offices in San Francisco, New York, Chicago, London, Singapore, Dubai and Gurgaon.

The idea of AI coaching has become more central to Absolutdata’s approach as the company has evolved over the past few years.

Absolutdata has created products that bring AI and ML to sales and marketing analytics and forecasting, along with making tactical recommendations.

Tiger Analytics: Tiger Analytics is an AI and advanced analytics consulting firm enabling enterprises to generate business value from data. Today, several Fortune 500 companies engage Tiger to help build cutting-edge solutions and bring in a machine learning and AI perspective to address their business challenges.

Tiger Analytics sets itself apart through a combination of factors with the goal of delivering measurable business impact. It provides a unique approach to blending data science and consulting for business problem-solving. It boasts differentiated talent with 75% of consultants has advanced degrees with learning-focused work culture.

They have in-house assets that reduce project execution times by up to 30% and offer pre-built solutions for key industries such as Insurance, Retail, CPG.

Math Company: In the past, enterprises partnered with conventional service providers to solve problems and incurred ‘economic rent’ but their capabilities remained stagnant. The Math Company’s mission is to enable viable and valuable data and analytics transformations customized to an enterprises’ needs. This transformation journey includes a customizable mix of design, solve and enable services.

Design includes analytics maturity assessment, roadmap design where they infuse an ‘expert practitioner’ mindset in developing key strategies. Solve includes architecting the data governance and structure, solutioning for complex business problems using advanced approaches. Enable services are one of their key differentiators helping Enterprises truly advance their analytics capabilities and maturity. This includes enterprise-level global analytics awareness programs, experiential learning modules, design and deployment of hiring processes.

In just two years, they have managed to work with over 25+ large Global Enterprises across 10+ countries and grow our strength to 200+ employees. Some examples of their work include building Analytics CoEs across the globe, transforming decision making by developing solutions using new age data sources (ex: IoT systems) & advanced analytics approaches (ex: Deep learning, System Dynamics).

Course5 Intelligence: Course5 Intelligence drives digital transformation for businesses through advanced Digital Analytics and Artificial Intelligence (AI). They use 360-degree data synthesis and AI-driven digital engineering to help clients make the most effective moves related to their customers, markets and competition.

They provide holistic business solutions that help clients leverage and optimize their existing data and other investments to improve their top line and bottom line. They have a strong focus on customer-centricity that has resulted in several multi-year engagements with many clients.

They create value for our clients through Deep industry and domain expertise (Digital + Tech + Business + Data), Digital Suite and Research AI Suite to accelerate solutions, Solution toolkits and frameworks for specific business questions, Critical understanding of advanced digital technologies related to Analytics and Data Science, Marketing, and Business/Competitive Intelligence, Application of state-of-the-art AI and next-generation technologies for cognitive automation and enhanced knowledge discovery and more.

Challengers

“Challengers”, in the bottom left of the quadrant are a new breed of competitive Service Providers who with their robust training and delivery approach, go-to-market abilities have emerged as contenders in the analytics and data science space. These vendors are often niche players, serving limited geographies but they have the potential to catch up to Growth vendors by improving their market presence and optimizing their portfolio. In both the dimensions, Penetration and Maturity, the Challengers lag behind other vendors in the quadrant due to their company size and breadth of offerings. By setting up exclusive pre-sales and consulting teams, Challengers can expand their geographic footprint and step ahead in the game.

Lymbyc: Lymbyc took shape with the idea of infusing cutting edge technology into insight generation. Their vision is to empower the business leader with insights at the point of decision making, and in real time, as opposed to the existing processes which run into weeks and months.

Their unique proposition lies in how they have utilized artificial intelligence, big data and machine learning in creating what they call the “World’s first virtual analyst” – Leni. Leni is a world-class analytics product that can crunch massive data into insights by leveraging Artificial Intelligence framework on a Big Data layer. Leni curates embedded intelligence across all data sources and provides predictive insights driven by its adaptive ML engine. With an aim to democratize analytics in the most consumable form, Leni, powered by its proprietary NLP engine, allows business users to ask questions in plain English and receive actionable insight across analytics complexity –  exploratory/descriptive, diagnostic, and predictive within seconds.

Datalicious: Sydney-headquartered Datalicious which operates out of the APAC region uses scientific methods to generate valuable insights to optimize marketing campaigns and improve the customer’s brand experience. Their attribution model takes into account user behaviour which is state of the art. Their core product offering OptimaHub is built for Media Attribution and Media Mix Modelling allow accurate insights for decision-making.

FN MathLogic: FN MathLogic has deep domain expertise in the area of BFSI, healthcare and telecom. They are a niche data science organization specializing in providing cutting edge solutions to complex real world business problems. Their key differentiator is their expertise in the use of advanced analytics including Deep Learning & Machine Learning. The company aims to provide customised solutions to clients and they believe each client and market requires a specific approach to understand the nuances of their issues. Their analytical solutions are tailored to the client’s business objectives.

G Square: They are an AI-driven analytics company catering to the financial services Industry in India and offshore markets, providing descriptive, prescriptive and predictive analytics solutions in the B2B space for clients in Banking, Fintech, AMC, Wealth management & NBFC space. They are a product driven company supported by services model. Their key products are Narrator, Bigdator and Derivator. The product model is SaaS based pricing. Some of their key clients include Axis Bank, YES Bank, RBL Bank, APICORP Saudi Arabia, SBI MF, Invesco MF, Rubique, Capital First etc.

With strong expertise in Artificial Intelligence, Machine learning and apply strong data engineering, their uniqueness lies in using their own in-house technology and proprietary algorithms for building models along with conventional methods. They have an output driven work approach which provides a lot of comfort to the clients. Repeat business from clients is a testimonials to the same. Their proprietary products, plug and play analytics approach & relevance to client needs are key differentiators that makes them stand out with respect to others in the Industry.

TechVantage: TechVantage is a Product engineering company specializing in building software powered by Analytics, Machine learning and Artificial intelligence. They build products for clients and also build products that they take to market.

Their key differentiation lies in the fact that they are a full stack data scientists. They just don’t build data models but have skills to help operationalize the model and make it usable in a business context. With a good exposure and deep expertise, they package model into a usable piece of software that can be applied in day to day operations.

BluePi Consulting: Provides advanced analytics solutions for different industry domains, in the area of Sales Prediction, Process Automation through Machine Learning, NLP, Customer Segmentation and Risk Profiling. Established in 2012, BluePi Consulting, based out of India has its own analytics solution piStats, which provides analytics, push notifications and personalized recommendation requirements.

SIBIA Analytics: They offer analytics products and platforms in a SaaS model so that businesses of any size can benefit. They are a complete solution agency that works across data aggregation, data management, analytics and insights, and data visualization through proprietary web hosted dashboards. They have built our solution using open source, cloud and big data technologies.