The COVID – 19 pandemic has caused drastic changes in many industries, especially the Information Technology (IT) industry. The negative impacts during this situation are more compared to positive effects. The significant weaknesses the IT industry is facing now is due to the fall in the economy, as a lot of companies are forced to ask their employees to work from home (remotely) keeping in account the public health concerns. The spread of this deadly virus has caused a lot of tech conferences to get canceled, which could have been a great partnership opportunity for many companies to expand their horizons. A few of the meetings were shifted to teleconferences, but this won’t have the same reach, and the conference attendees will not be able to have the networking opportunity as they would be attending the actual conference. “With COVID-19 and remote working being the new normal, cybersecurity and e-collaboration are going to be popular. I see traction in the fields of Augmented Reality in learning space, and higher adoptions of low-code/no-code platforms by businesses,” opines Sachin Nigam, CTO, Goavega Software.
Having completed his graduation in Mathematics and Statistics from the University of Lucknow, Sachin started his career in the early 2000s in a startup focused on offshore product engineering and moved to the United States for few years and worked at Keane Inc (before boredom struck) and he decided to come to India for good. Having worked exclusively with IT services organizations, Sachin founded Goavega as he feels the entire IT services can be looked at differently – from being resource-centric to being value-centric. The fact that the company has been an exclusive technology team for their client and works on bleeding-edge and cutting-edge technology confirms its value approach..
Providing Top-notch IT Solutions
As the Co-founder and CTO, Sachin is responsible for defining the technology road map, mapping business needs to technology and driving digital transformation strategy for their customers. He adds, “I am also responsible for the growth of our organization and making sure that we are working towards our mission and vision statement”. With more and more businesses being operated online due to the pandemic, a strong cybersecurity policy is an absolute must. Having a well-defined cybersecurity policy (and enforcing it) can go a long way in protecting not only the corporate and financial data of the company but also ensure the safety of end consumers, partners, and vendors.
Awarded ‘CTO of the Year’ at the Leadership Summit and Awards in 2019, Sachin focuses on achieving what he wants by breaking his goals into smaller measurable tasks as it helps in tracking progress granularly. “I also rely a lot on my intuition and when things are not that great, I tell myself – ‘intuition whispers true: we are not dust, we are magic!’,” quips Sachin. Believing in ‘the whole is greater than the sum of its parts’, Sachin takes teamwork quite seriously. Everyone within a team, irrespective of their seniority or years of experience, has an important role to play, so no feedback/opinion is trivial, and everyone should have a chance to share their thoughts and ideas. “A leader also must “walk the talk” to gain the respect of his team—a go-getter any day over a thought leader,” he adds.
Adapting to the ‘New Normal’
Believing that humans are always meant to be social and working in silos was never our forte, Sachin feels face to face interaction is what adds the human touch, otherwise it is easy to confuse a person with a bot on a phone call without any emotions being at play. He adds, “The other thing with in-person teams is that it works well for the junior members in the team—working alone for someone just starting their career can be a little overwhelming and takes out the mentor/mentee aspect of working within a team”. Looking at the bright side, having a clear work/off-work schedule and being in touch with your team over e-collaboration tools would help in making one feel less disconcerting as remote working is the new normal and would continue to be so pretty well into the future. Goavega’s clients are based out of different timezones, which makes it easier for them to include remote technology as a part of their daily work lives.
Passionate about the open-source community in the technology space, Sachin reminisces, “I still remember back in 2010 when I was evaluating enterprise search tools for one of our customers how an open-source product (Lucene) beat the million-dollar commercial products (Search Appliance) hands down on almost all fronts. The other instance being how Firefox radically changed the way internet/browsers used to be for good,”. He is also a regular contributor in this field. Moving to multi-Cloud computing this year, Goavega was always a “Cloud-first” organization and now they have distributed their IT workload across AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. Looking forward, Sachin has prioritized to continue adding value to their customers through technology innovation. “I see low-code/no-code platforms as market disruptors in the near future so we will be investing in R&D on that field. 5G is another game changer and will have a meaningful impact in the field of IoT, Autonomous Vehicles, and the gaming industry”, concludes Sachin.