by Analytics Insight
January 19, 2022
Kelly Dyer is the Co-CEO and Co-Founder and Sukhmani Gill is the Director of AI & ML at SourceFuse
Cloud-based technology is an on-demand technology where users utilize the IT resources over the internet platform and work on pay-per-use mechanisms instead of the previous subscription-based technologies. The use of cloud technologies currently ranges from personal use to operations by larger corporations. SourceFuse Inc. is a company that is transforming how today’s most successful companies develop breakthrough roadmaps leveraging cloud-based technologies. Analytics insight has engaged in an exclusive interview with Kelly Dyer, Co-CEO and Co-Founder & Sukhmani Gill, Director of AI & ML at SourceFuse.
1. Kindly brief us about the company, its specialization, and the services that your company offers.
Kelly & Sukhmani: SourceFuse Inc. is transforming how today’s most successful companies develop breakthrough roadmaps leveraging cloud-based technologies. A leading AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, SourceFuse has delivered over 600 AWS implementations that boost efficiency, ensure compliance, provide actionable insights, and lower TCO. Our goal is to empower enterprises with a full spectrum of innovative, digital-first cloud-native solutions. We work strategically on our 300+ global clients’ business requirements, modernizing their applications to scale rapidly and accelerate innovation on the Cloud, enabling them for their digital-ready future. With 15 years of deep domain expertise, commitment to digital innovation, and customer success. We offer Modernization-led Cloud Migration, Data & Analytics, DevOps, Cloud Strategy, and Managed Cloud Services. SourceFuse has global, regional offices in the US, UK, Australia, and India.
2. With what mission and objectives, the company was set up? In short, tell us about your journey since the inception of the company?
Kelly & Sukhmani: Our first pivotal moment was to become an AWS Partner in 2015. Being an early adopter of Cloud kept us ahead of our competition. Our deep technical expertise and proven customer success in delivering modernized solutions on the Cloud made us rise to an AWS Advanced Consulting Tier in 2018. Developing and delivering secure, scalable cloud solutions caught many organizations with a futuristic business vision. Our second pivotal moment was when we became OneCall’s technology partner and started building their Non-Emergency Medical Transportation (NEMT) solution. OneCall was our first of many global customers in the HCLS industry. Working in this industry made us realize the missing yet necessary bridge between technology and the HCLS industry. We knew cloud computing was the answer! In 2020, we became the 1st AWS Advanced Consulting Partners to achieve the highly coveted AWS Healthcare Competency. This serves as our third pivotal moment as it validates our extensive industry knowledge in delivering custom solutions with HIPAA compliance.
3. Mention some of the awards, achievements, recognitions, and clients’ feedback that you feel are notable and valuable for the company.
Kelly: A workplace is more than a place of business. It’s a community that supports employees and promotes a culture where people can be their most authentic selves. That’s one of the values that SourceFuse strives to deliver to its associates and is the reason for us to become a Great Place to Work for six years in a row! Our associates experience a culture that is unique to SourceFuse. The SourceFuse Culture is driven by our five values – Vibrant, Agile, Integrity, Partner Success, and Nurture. Beyond the value system, we cultivate a welcoming culture with open communication and transparency, a high-trust workplace environment, and a highly engaged associate leadership relationship.
4. Please brief us about yourself and your contributions to the company and the industry.
Kelly – I have over 22 years of experience identifying challenging problems and opportunities that can be solved with software and innovation. I am passionate about product development and disrupting industries through better use of technology, working with start-ups and enterprises alike. I have been a founding part of several different start-ups, and I, along with my Co-CEO and Co-founder, Gautam Ghai, founded SourceFuse in 2006. We originally shared a passion and focus for delivering high-quality open source solutions and have evolved it into a global team that is transforming the way today’s most successful companies build and evolve software from concept to implementation. I also founded the Jax Tech Group, creating a vibrant networking community for like-minded technology experts and enthusiasts in the Jacksonville region.
5. What is your biggest USP that differentiates the company from competitors?
Kelly & Sukhmani: SourceFuse, as an organization, believes in the power of the Cloud. Our mission of accelerating our customer’s digital transformation journeys requires us to reinvent ourselves continuously. Our associates play a significant role in bringing together SourceFuse differentiators. Over 60 SourceFuse associates are certified on AWS Cloud in various segments like security, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), Alexa, and more. SourceFuse is accredited with three AWS Competencies and four Service Delivery Programs. Genuinely understanding the HCLS industry’s needs around data security and compliance, we upgraded our security compliance services by becoming HIPAA Compliant and ISO 27001 compliant. We also have over 50 HIPAA-certified associates, further adding to our differentiator bucket. Strategically, our differentiators lie in our ability to understand and leverage technology using new-age innovation techniques, and modernizing legacy applications is our core strength. We use modernizing techniques like API-based gateways, containerization, microservices, and serverless architecture to unlock legacy technology roadblocks. Our Data & Analytics services play a significant role in empowering decision-makers with quick and relevant business insights in all our solutions. SourceFuse also readily contributes to the open-source communities, and our catalog of microservices, built on IBM’s LoopBack, has been downloaded more than 585,000+ times by developers across the world.
6. How is Big Data/AI evolving today in the industry? What are the most important trends that you see emerging across the globe?
Sukhmani: Data has been the most critical factor in the success of an AI solution, and with consistent development and innovation in high-performance computing, Big Data has been used to power AI solutions. Nowadays, as the volume, velocity, and variety of data continue to grow, AI is being used to manage data more and more as enterprises begin to build intelligent data pipelines. There is an increase in data management solutions leveraging AI. We also expect to see large-scale adoption of AI within the IT industry and a lot of focus on explainable AI, which will create solutions that humans can understand compared to the black boxes, which cannot explain why a model reached a particular decision.
7. Please brief us about the products/services/solutions you provide to your customers and how they get value from it.
Kelly & Sukhmani: SourceFuse empowers enterprises with a full spectrum of innovative, digital-first cloud-native solutions. With 15 years of deep domain expertise, commitment to digital innovation, and customer success, our services include Data Management & Analytics, Workflow Automation, Modernization-Led Cloud Migration, DevOps, Cloud Strategy, and Managed Cloud Services.
Some of our solutions developed to include our AI-powered innovations that accelerate the future of digital healthcare with applications that redefine patient-centric care, AI-enabled telemedicine with real-time clinical decision support intervention and language translation, remote patient monitoring and care delivery, online video consultations, fully integrated hospital management, patient data anonymization, data extraction, remote health education, and many others. SourceFuse’s Healthcare Life Sciences BU has three product offerings – SF Medic, FlixMD, helloMD.online.
8. The industry is seeing a rising importance of business and technology enablers like virtualization, convergence, and Cloud. How do you see these emerging technologies impact your business sector?
Sukhamni – The Cloud has been an essential enabler for the last few years across all our solutions. But now, due to regulations like GDPR and organizations wanting localized data, a new trend of multi-cloud deployments seems to be emerging. There is also a lot more experimentation being done on open-source software. Organizations have begun bringing their mission-critical applications to Kubernetes. With AI/ML now being used across all aspects of modern business, AI/ML on Kubernetes will increase adoption. Kubernetes brings the perfect platform capabilities like scalability, workload portability, access to GPUs, etc. to AI/ML
9. How do you plan to revolutionize the US market?
Kelly – For the US market, we bring a combination of skills, resources, and experiences that allow us to accelerate time to market for new software dramatically. In addition, our holistic approach across the team, process, skills, and technologies allow us to be a critical strategic partner for our clients to effectively leverage the latest software and cloud technologies together to serve their markets. Built upon this experience are our enterprise frameworks and microservices that will allow us to continue to revolutionize the US market by dramatically accelerating the pace and quality of software systems evolution.
10. How do you see the company and the industry in the future ahead?
Kelly: SourceFuse has seen more than 100% Y-o-Y revenue growth in the last three years and a 122% growth in employee strength. We have always worked with one motto, “Your Success is Our Success.” We have been fortunate to work with organizations and people who could equate with SourceFuse’s strategy, technology advancements, and innovative techniques, which eventually led them to refer us to their business network. In 2020, we hired a Global Marketing Head who immediately resonated with our organization’s culture and mission. Aligning our Sales and Marketing processes and efforts with our Organization’s Vision helped us reach wider audiences. With our recent geographic expansion in the UK and Australia, we will continue to build bespoke secure, scalable cloud solutions, leveraging our open-source catalog of microservices, accelerating our customer’s business plan ~50% faster than industry benchmarks. According to Gartner, worldwide IT spending is projected to total $4.5 trillion in 2022, an increase of 5.5% from 2021. I see this as an excellent opportunity for SourceFuse – I predict that 2022 will be the year of data analytics & AI/ML and legacy app modernization.
11. Where do you see the company in the coming five years?
Kelly: We aim to grow five-fold in five years and are excited to unlock value in the cloud business. We believe that SourceFuse will be a leading one-stop company in America to meet the demand for all the cloud-native needs. We started back in 2006, and we have worked round the clock to get to where we are today, achieving great success and hitting significant milestones along the way. We are looking at strategic business expansion plans with some mergers and acquisitions in the coming five years, generating employment.
12. Would you please share some significant achievements of SourceFuse under your leadership?
Kelly: To mention some significant achievements, I would like to start by saying that since our journey started in 2006, we have kept leveling up our AWS partnership, and in 2021 SourceFuse became the first and only AWS Advanced Consulting Partner India and APAC to achieve AWS Healthcare Competency. SourceFuse renewal business was 95% in 2021, and thanks to the skills and expertise of all our employees, we are now a 300+ global customer company.
13. Can you highlight the latest employment trends in the big data and analytics industry?
Sukhmani: As businesses are getting more data-savvy, there is a consistent increase in job roles in this field. There is a shortage of data engineers, ML engineers across the globe. Organizations are increasing their focus on hiring raw talent and scaling them up using advanced learning and development programs to overcome this challenge. From a job seeker’s point of view, having a blend of skills is crucial to succeeding in this market as the adoption of AI solutions continues to increase.
14. What are the concerns that organizations have before using Analytics?
Sukhmani: Analytics has moved from a competitive advantage to an essential requirement within organizations, but as I said, the first step is the hardest and is valid for any organization beginning its analytics journey. Based on our experience, they struggle with outlining an analytics roadmap for the organization and identifying the right business problem they are looking to solve. They are also unsure about the quality of the available data and lack the relevant skills or expertise within the organization.
15. What have been the most significant challenges you have faced at the forefront of analytics?
Sukhmani – The challenges that we have faced always vary based on the analytics maturity of our clients. For a company starting their analytics journey, generally, the struggle lies in first identifying a starting point and then gathering relevant and usable data that exists in silos within the organization. Once this is overcome, the next challenge lies in moving from solution proofs-of-concept to deployment or, from a change management perspective, to get the business user to trust the data. This involves multiple teams coming together and new technologies being added to a company’s existing technology stack.
16. How can C-suite executives leverage data to deliver business value to their organizations?
Kelly: At SourceFuse, we believe data is king, but only if organizations have the capability of turning data into actionable insights and intelligence. By unlocking the full potential of AI and ML for data analytics, C-suite executives can visualize market trends, make informed business decisions, and stay ahead of the competition. Predictive analytics will help answer the question “What happened?” but diagnostic analytics can also help answer “Why did it happen?”. With this level of automation, business leaders can make mission-critical queries at the touch of a button.