IBM Cloud has helped them to leverage modernized content to other firms, says Happiest Minds

First things first. Before you conjure up irrelevant perceptions around the name, Happiest Minds is no charity or a medical company. It is a Bengaluru-based IT services firm founded by former Mindtree Chairman Ashok Soota.

Started about eight years ago with the aim of putting “people” at the center of everything and creating a happy atmosphere for its clients, Happiest Minds reported record profitability in the 2019 financial year with organic growth of 16 percent and the company gives some of the credit for its rise to IBM Cloud.

In its digital business services, IBM Cloud has powered the company’s Digital mCaaS (managed content as a service) platform through which it launched a new software-as-a-service (SaaS) business product for its clients globally.

This platform is used to modernize and digitize the content of its clients most of which are research firms and create new revenue streams for them using digital engagement capabilities.

“For example, if you read a report whether on a website or in a PDF format the content is likely to be static in nature. To change that we work with the clients and help them make their content modernized and bring in a lot of digital features that can help them engage better with their clients,” says Shiva Vittal, Director, Digital Business Platforms, Happiest Minds.

“Our clients are most interested in learning how their content is being consumed. They would like to engage users through a lot of interactivity. With PDF, it is not possible. So we provide a lot of interactive capabilities and good security,” Vittal said, adding that its clients using the mCaaS platform are spread across the world.

Happiest Minds employs around 2,000 people and has offices in several countries, including the US.

Vittal said there is hardly any competition to its content modernization services, although two boutique companies offering similar services have sprung up in the US.

“While the margin of profit in traditional IT services is around 30 percent, in the managed Content as a Service, the profit margin could be much greater,” he said.

Happiest Minds is fully powered by IBM Cloud.

“Amazon is very strong in infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) but I don’t think anybody in the world (as of 2019) is as strong as IBM when it comes to platform-as-a-service (PaaS).

“The Cloud Foundry capabilities help us to very easily amalgamate all our activities. Everything we do is on Cloud, not on-premise,” Vittal added.

IBM Cloud helps the platform scale, manage traffic during peak consumption time, offer secure services and access to various applications.

According to Vikas Arora, IBM Cloud and Cognitive Software Leader, IBM India/South Asia, with the help of IBM Cloud, Happiest Minds has been able to develop a SaaS-based digital content brokering platform, “helping customers effectively solve the challenge of content consumption by digitizing modernizing and creating newer revenue streams”.

Besides its digital business services, Happiest Minds also offers infrastructure management and security services and product engineering services.