India team a core innovation engine across Applied Systems: CTO Belanger

India offered a large base of talented and capable engineers, said Rich Belanger, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Illinois-based Applied Systems

Applied Systems the cloud-based software for insurance, acquired Bangalore-based EZLynx in 2021, which further strengthened its presence in the country. Rich Belanger, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Applied Systems, the Illinois-based firm in an interview told Sourabh Lele that India offered a large base of talented and capable engineers. The $1.8 billion company, which provides cloud-based software products for insurance automation and brokerage management, expects strong growth in the country in the coming years. Here are some of the excerpts from the interview:

This is the first time you are visiting India after the pandemic. The Insurtech industry was seen going through a transformation in the last couple of years. What changes do you see at Applied Systems?

One of the things that have happened as part of the pandemic is that it has accelerated the digital transformation of insurance buying and selling in the United States. So we're seeing our customers embrace a whole online life cycle of insurance. The pandemic has accelerated the adoption of 100 per cent online business in the insurance industry.

We are also seeing a lot of benefits from the revolution in cloud computing. We can do things much faster and at a lower cost than we were ever able to do in the past. They allow us to do things that five years ago would have been just inaccessible because they were too expensive. So cloud computing is enabling us to respond much more quickly and more cost-effectively, to that growth in demand for online experiences.

Your company in recent years has adopted an open-source model for tools and technology stack. What is causing this shift? 

We are huge fans of the open-source model. We grew up in Microsoft’s legacy ecosystem, but we are now using Microsoft's .NET Core framework, which is open source. Much of our cloud computing work is in Kubernetes, which is Google's open-source containerization management tool. Whether it's GitLab for our CI/CD pipelines that we're embracing open source across the entire product portfolio, open source allows us to deliver more value faster to our customers, without the overhead of some of that legacy, enterprise software providers.

How are you leveraging emerging technologies like AI and ML to improve your products?

We're building insurance tools that help optimise our customers, workflows, making them more efficient, and more productive. We are using the Google Data storage platform Google BigQuery, combined with GCS, which allows us to use Google's TensorFlow, which is an open-source AI ML platform. TensorFlow has been a huge win in the open-source community. It has allowed people to develop AI solutions 1000 times less expensive than they could have four or five years ago. So we see huge amounts of opportunity there.

So we see a lot of opportunities for product innovation by using neural network-powered technology to uncover insights that are buried in the petabytes and petabytes of data we manage on behalf of our customers.

What is the headcount of your team working from India? What role does it play in global product development?

The total headcount of the India team is about 222 people and we're growing. I think we are growing by about 10 per cent in 2023. We grew fairly significantly in 2022, as well. The India team is integral to our global product development organization. It owns key products that we sell all over the world, with product management, engineering, and Quality Assurance, all working together to build and release innovative new products that solve key problems for our customers.

We see the India team as a sort of core innovation engine across Applied Systems. So we're investing in additional capabilities around analytics and expanding product development both for our core epic product as well as our family of extended solutions. So India is an integral part of our global product development team and we expect to see strong growth in 2023 and beyond.

How do you see the global economic downturn impacting the demand outlook for your company? 

We are seeing our growth holding up very robustly. We were watching things very carefully in 2022. But we had just a fantastic year in 2022 without any real economic headwinds. Applied is very well positioned in the market. We are not immune to the business cycle. We don't see dramatic growth. We are not seeing growth in the shape of a big hockey stick going up. But we are not seeing anything going down either. We continue to see good demand for our products, our customers are not pulling back on purchases, and we are not seeing the sales cycles have significantly increased. I think we see a pretty balanced market without massive increases in demand, but with no real substantive reductions, either.