In an exclusive conversation with CXO News & APAC News Network, Joseph Sudheer Reddy Thumma, Promoter, Chairman, and Global CEO of Magellanic Cloud, outlines the current dynamics and future roadmaps of their cloud, IT, and drone services businesses.
What solutions and services are currently available in India’s Magellanic Cloud portfolio?
Magellanic Cloud’s current portfolio of solutions and services involves drone manufacturing, e-surveillance, IT and IT services, and staffing and recruitment services. We are working with emerging technologies like GenAI, Machine learning, video analytics, etc.
Our solution, like VMS, is a testament to our commitment to “Make in India.” This indigenous solution enhances security and provides comprehensive insights, enabling more effective monitoring and threat detection as it integrates advanced analytics to offer real-time data and actionable intelligence, which is crucial for both urban and rural security frameworks.
The company is at the forefront of emerging technologies such as Generative AI and DevOps, driving technological advancements in the Indian market that fortify business performance and yield customer satisfaction.
Our comprehensive staffing solutions help organizations meet the diverse & the right talent at the right time. By leveraging tailored staffing strategies, we empower businesses to enhance their operational efficiency, foster innovation, and achieve sustained growth in an increasingly competitive landscape, committing to excellence.
We are pioneering efforts in both drone manufacturing and inspection services. Our drones are utilized extensively in the defense sector for surveillance and reconnaissance and in the agriculture sector for monitoring crops and optimizing farming practices. This technology not only enhances operational capabilities but also supports sustainable agriculture practices.
What was the rationale behind Magellanic Cloud’s recent bolstering of its leadership team?
The rationale behind strengthening our leadership team is to sharpen our strategic focus, accelerate growth, and expand & enhance our market footprint. This approach is designed to diversify our existing portfolio by leveraging the deep expertise of seasoned professionals whose valuable experience will enhance our capabilities. By bolstering our leadership, we set a foundation for continuous innovation and growth while upholding operational excellence.
This strategy will also help us remain agile and deliver exceptional solutions in digital transformation, driving sustainable growth and creating lasting value for clients, shareholders, and stakeholders.
How would you measure the impact of the Magellanic Cloud’s inorganic growth? What has been the impact of the acquisitions of Motivity Lab, IVIS, and Provigil, among others?
Magellanic Cloud measures the impact of its inorganic growth through a comprehensive evaluation of key performance indicators, including revenue growth, market share expansion, and increased customer base.
The strategic acquisitions of Motivity Lab, IVIS, and Provigil have brought significant advantages to Magellanic Cloud by expanding our client base and enhancing our brand equity. These companies, including some with Fortune 500 clientele, already possess substantial brand equity and trust, which they now transcend to Magellanic Cloud. This expanded clientele and strengthened brand reputation have bolstered our market position and increased trust among our existing and new clients.
Technologically, these acquisitions have had a profound impact. Provigil has enriched our IT services and solutions portfolio, allowing us to deliver more comprehensive and advanced tech services. IVIS has enhanced our e-surveillance and security solutions, giving us a competitive advantage in this critical market segment with solutions like VMS. Additionally, Motivity Lab has significantly improved our product engineering and development capabilities, enabling us to offer more robust and innovative solutions and technological advancements like GenAI.
Overall, these acquisitions have led to improved operational efficiencies, greater innovation, and a stronger market position for Magellanic Cloud, ensuring we remain agile and capable of delivering exceptional technological advancements in an ever-evolving digital landscape.
What are the key pillars of Magellanic Cloud’s GTM strategy in India? What are some of the key initiatives under this strategy?
Magellanic Cloud’s go-to-market (GTM) strategy in India is built on several key pillars designed to drive growth and enhance our market presence. Central to our approach is the expansion into new markets and industries, including private sectors such as hospitality and real estate, broadening our focus beyond our original emphasis on government bodies and public sector units (PSUs). Additionally, new clients & businesses are critical as we target emerging markets and forge relationships with private entities.
Our GTM strategy also involves developing tailored solutions and services for these new sectors while expanding into the global market, particularly in North America and the Middle East.
Key initiatives include:
- Expanding our services and solutions to non-government bodies.
- Building industry exposure to tap into new markets.
- Enhancing brand equity.
Through these efforts, Magellanic Cloud aims to drive significant growth and establish a strong foothold across diverse industries and regions.
What are Magellanic Cloud’s unique differentiators in India over other cloud provider competitors?
Magellanic Cloud is much more than a pure-play cloud provider, offering a diversified basket of services and solutions underpinned by deep expertise in cutting-edge technologies such as Generative AI, Machine Learning, and IoT. Our offerings extend beyond cloud services to include e-surveillance, staffing solutions, and advanced drone manufacturing and inspection services across diverse sectors in India.
Two major differentiators set us apart in the Indian market: firstly, all our solutions symbolize our strong commitment to the “Make in India” initiative—a tough promise for the value of supporting local manufacturing and contributing to the national economy. We are secondly self-sufficient vis-à -vis having the internal capability to develop, test, create, and customize solutions on our own for the provided solutions & services, offering an end-to-end portfolio of services cohesively to our clients.
Which are the verticals where the Magellanic Cloud is witnessing maximum traction? What are some of these use cases, especially among marquee customers?
We are currently seeing significant traction in our e-surveillance and drone verticals. In the e-surveillance segment, there is a growing demand for “Make in India” solutions beyond traditional security services. Today’s clients seek data-centric solutions that enhance security, generate valuable insights, drive business growth, and advance internal systems. This shift underscores the need for comprehensive solutions that integrate advanced data analytics with security measures.
We are experiencing increasing traction in our Drone vertical, particularly within the Defence and Agriculture sectors. The government’s initiatives, such as NamoDidi, highlight the push for utilizing agricultural drones to assist with tasks like crop monitoring, fertilizer spraying, and seed sowing.
In the defense sector, we have effectively tackled the logistical challenges associated with operating at high altitudes. By deploying advanced drone technology, we have significantly streamlined our operations. This has reduced the need for extensive manpower, which has especially proven valuable in remote or rugged terrains where traditional methods of logistics and supply chain management can be cumbersome and inefficient.
We are working on a set of very impactful use cases across our marquee customers, addressing specific industry needs. Intelligent and cutting-edge technologies augmenting compliance, security, and risk mitigation are major deliverables in the BFSI sector. Our city and large space surveillance systems provide real-time monitoring and threat detection to help increase public safety and security. Manage huge crowds, avoid overcrowding, and ensure a safe environment in temples and pilgrimage sites using our state-of-the-art surveillance solutions.
How have the IVIS and Provigil acquisitions helped deepen Magellanic Cloud’s BFSI foray?
In the BFSI sector, surveillance and compliance issues present substantial challenges. Magellanic Cloud’s acquisition of IVIS & Provigil was its first step towards fixing these security and compliance issues along with IVIS & Provigil in the BFSI Foray, and that too with solutions that are “Make in India.” This move has facilitated an expansion into thousands of locations across India, significantly increasing the company’s clientele.
This indigenous solution not only enhanced security but also provided insights that are enabled by the new emerging technology, artificial intelligence, enabling more effective monitoring and threat detection as it integrates. Data-centric software, platform customization, and advanced AI-based analytics to offer real-time data and actionable intelligence are crucial for both urban and rural security frameworks, and that’s where Magellanic Cloud, along with IVIS and Provigil, created its unique market standing.
What are the updates on Magellanic Cloud’s drone business?
Scandron, a subsidiary of Magellanic Cloud, is actively collaborating with the defense forces to demonstrate its logistics capabilities at medium and high altitudes, handling payloads of up to 50 kg under extreme conditions. Scantron is also anticipating type certification for its agricultural drones, which would enable large-scale participation in the Namo Drone Didi initiatives. Scantron is also engaged with various government and semi-government bodies in drafting numerous policies.
With India’s first DGCA-type-certified logistics drone, Scandron is preparing to launch commercial operations with various logistics companies, delivering B2B services across multiple cities in India. Our state-of-the-art manufacturing and R&D operations in Bengaluru continuously innovate, addressing various use cases in both the commercial and defense segments.
How has the Scandron acquisition helped in the growth of this drone business?
For over a century, Scandron has been a global leader in providing commercial, industrial, and defense drone-based solutions. Through this acquisition, Magellanic Cloud has significantly enhanced its capabilities in manufacturing, developing, and operating drones, leveraging Scandron’s extensive expertise and technological advancements.
Scandron’s extensive portfolio features a range of advanced drones, including logistics drones for the defense sector with a payload capacity of up to 70 kg, autonomous agricultural drones designed for precise spraying, and custom drones engineered for diverse applications. These drones are distinguished by their speed, intelligence, cost-efficiency, safety, and repeatability, underpinned by cutting-edge AI technologies. Furthermore, Scandron’s innovations empower Magellanic Cloud to offer comprehensive Drone as a Service (DAAS), encompassing services such as confined space inspections, industrial inspections, and ultrasonic thickness measurements.
These advancements have catapulted Magellanic Cloud to the forefront of the drone industry, enabling them to deliver innovative, high-impact solutions that address their customers’ dynamic and diverse needs.
What are the dynamics of the agro-drone market in India? How are regulations driving this market?
Drones are revolutionizing the Indian agricultural sector, with initiatives like NAMO Didi and the Production-Linked Incentive (PLI) scheme facilitating their use in spraying fertilizers and pesticides, crop surveillance, field monitoring, and livestock management. These technologies enhance efficient irrigation, real-time data collection, and precise agrochemical application, leading to notable resource savings and increased crop yields. Despite these benefits, the sector faces a critical challenge: reliance on land border-sharing countries for drone technology and components.
Magellanic Cloud leads the agro-drone market by focusing on reducing the dependency on land border-sharing countries for drone manufacturing. At the same time, their domestic production supports the Make in India initiative, thus assuring a constant quality drone supply specifically made to meet Indian farmers’ needs. The company offers farmers DaaS solutions, allowing them access to advanced drone technologies without bearing the high upfront ownership costs. That way, drones can be adopted across all agricultural sectors and not leave small-scale farmers behind in this great technological advancement.
Supportive regulations and government policies are crucial in driving the agro-drone market in India. Through financial incentives, training programs, and collaborative policymaking, government and industry leaders like Magellanic Cloud are paving the way for India’s sustainable and technologically advanced agricultural sector. We’re actively collaborating with government bodies for policymaking and ensuring that regulations support the growth of the drone market while maintaining needed oversight and a regulatory environment that balances innovation with concern for safety and operational efficiency.
What will Magellanic Cloud’s key focus areas be in IT services, e-surveillance, and drone technology in the next few quarters?
Regarding IT services, we are set to drive our growth strategy by actively pursuing the strategic acquisition of companies specializing in emerging technologies. This approach will be pivotal in expanding our market presence and enhancing our technological capabilities. In parallel, we’re focusing on key IT service areas, including developing advanced Generative AI solutions and improving MLOps to streamline the deployment and management of machine learning models. Ensuring robust security to guard against prompt injections and addressing critical data governance issues, such as AI hallucinations, will be central to our strategy. Additionally, we will implement strong data governance practices to uphold data integrity and privacy.
Our objective for the e-surveillance sector is to build our capabilities by integrating AI and machine learning technologies. These emerging technologies will heighten security steps by providing situational insights in real time, thereby helping in proactive risk management across sectors. The rich and data-driven insights generate opportunities for much more effective predictive analysis in the longer term. We will also leverage AI and IoT to make any security framework responsive to changing threats and operational challenges to enhance present-day security protocols.
In the coming quarters, Magellanic Cloud will strategically focus on several key areas in drone technology, leveraging recent developments and partnerships with DGCA for its logistics drone and with CriticaLog India to offer B2B logistic services.
Magellanic Cloud will also optimize drone technology for efficient and timesaving B2B deliveries, focusing on courier service hubs rather than the economically challenging retail e-commerce and food delivery markets in India. This approach aligns with the company’s goal to offer practical, high-impact solutions that meet industry needs and drive operational efficiency.
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