Salesforce expands focus on India’s public sector to drive digital transformation

Salesforce, earlier this year, announced the launch of its Public Sector division in India to drive transformation, aimed at empowering government agencies and public sector organisations to transform citizen experiences with its technology. Arun Kumar Parameswaran, MD – Sales, Salesforce India, talks to businessline about the company’s increasing focus on the country’s public sector.

Several global IT companies including Salesforce seem to be focusing on India’s public sector. What is the current state of this sector and digital transformation journey? What role has Salesforce played?

We have said consistently for the last five years that India, from a public digital infrastructure stack, probably ranks number one worldwide. What we’ve built here is ahead of its time and in scale, and there’s very little close in comparison in the Western world. Digitally, the country is advantaged with their payments, and we’re building all kinds of digital infrastructure. We saw an opportunity to contribute to that from a nation-building perspective and thought it was the right time to enter. While we took our time to get into the market, we wanted to ensure we did it right.

We have a solution called GovCloud, a suite of people solutions built to support agencies to build stronger connections between governments and citizens to provide a better experience for citizens. We’ve built many capabilities into GovCloud.

Today, a big challenge almost every state government has is that no single view of that citizen exists. A solution like a data cloud allows governments to build that single view. It’s about putting the citizens at the heart and building a 360-degree view of them in that particular state or jurisdiction. There’s a huge opportunity for us to engage with governments in that space.

We’ve used analytics as a powerful mechanism to draw insights for leaders in the respective public sector agencies and governments to visualize how certain schemes are performing, who they are reaching and to provide a visual map. There’s a great opportunity for us to continue to leverage that. 

Government systems are fairly complex and require complex integration. MuleSoft is a leader in that space. It is an integration solution. There’s a great opportunity to work with governments and agencies around the country to help them. We can bring several solutions to market for the public sector in India and that’s what we’re focused on. 

Are you increasingly looking at India’s public sector as opposed to servicing enterprises in the country?

We just started that business so there’s a lot of focus and investment there. The enterprise and the traditional, or the SMB space, is a fairly established segment and is the bread and butter of our business today in the country. The public sector is like the startup fuel within our business and therefore, is getting a lot of our time, attention, and investments.

What are some state governments you’ve collaborated with? What solutions have you developed for them?

One is the chief minister’s dashboard of the Department of Orissa, where you can see all the programs and where those schemes are being run, what has been the disbursements. 

Mostly it’s been in the field of analytics. We are in conversations with several states about bringing data together and building a world record of the citizens. One strength is how we handle service and contact center management. Running a call center or a simple department in a state means talking to hundreds of millions of people who want access. We’re exploring how to deliver a great customer experience on par with what people are used to in the rest of the world.

We also have the traditional CRM use cases, which the company is known for. Unifying citizen data is a unique use case we are equipped to handle at scale – processing hundreds of millions of unified customer profiles to look at a customer from a single view. 

Many governments are struggling because they don’t have a unified view of their citizen. It sits in respective departments and siloed systems, which is the same problem that corporations and enterprises have, only it’s 10 times worse and of a higher scale in the case of governments. 

Can you elaborate on the digital lending use case?

Lending has been a strength of Salesforce for the last four years. We power the lending platforms for a lot of banks, VFCs, and fintechs around the country. Originally, were helping various organizations build their journeys from scratch. Customers then pointed out that most of them were doing the same thing. For example, when it came to a home loan journey, most had similar requirements. Those journeys are fairly consistent between different organizations. Rather than us building every one of these uniquely, we could create a platform that does a lot of this out of the box.

So, for the first time in the history of Salesforce, we built something specific for a country. The Digital Lending Platform for India has several India-specific integrations around KYC, risk screening, employment verification, identification, and video KYC. Digital lending is a product present globally. But the India-specific product has India-specific integrations the team has built; it’s made out of the box and customers don’t have to build these by themselves. We’ve made this very simple for them to use. 

How do you take an application and process it? We’ve built an underwriting capability so people can make quick credit decisions for lending money to people. We’ve created a fairly simple disbursement module that does brief disbursement operations.

With the account aggregator framework and several initiatives the government has taken, it’s opened up credit and capital to a larger base of customers around the country. This becomes a critical part of powering the growth of our economy in the future. 

How have your India teams been engaging in building these solutions for the country? 

An advantage we have is that a large number of our technology and product teams are based out of India, specifically in Bangalore and Hyderabad. We also have support from our global teams to engage with these folks to identify capabilities that will help the India business. So it’s made in India for India.

Are you examining certain verticals or categories in the public sector?

In the public sector, we have broadly three categories. The first is individual state governments and initiatives that run within the state. That can be across a variety of topics including health, finance, tax, revenue, and sanitation. There’s a focus on governments and what they are doing to drive a better experience and quality of life for citizens in their respective states.

Secondly, there’s a lot of focus on the traditional public sector or state-owned enterprises. That cuts across manufacturing, oil, energy, and gas, all of which have robust plans from a digital transformation standpoint. There’s a tremendous opportunity for us to partner with those organizations. 

Then, at the top of the pyramid, are ministries -Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Railways, HRD, etc. Each runs many different initiatives nationally. 

Is there scope for collaborating with Indian startups or other organizations in the country concerning the public sector? 

The growth of Salesforce has been attributed in a major way to our ecosystem. Our trailblazer ecosystem is an advantage for us. We probably have the second-largest trailblazer ecosystem in India after the US. The Salesforce ecosystem is thriving here with a growing network of established strategic partners, start-ups, over 2 million Salesforce developers, and more Trailhead users than any market outside the US. 

We also have a vibrant App Exchange ecosystem. These are essentially startups and independent software vendors who build applications for various capabilities across a variety of markets and verticals. 

The third one is a system integration partner ecosystem. We have a fairly large number of partners operating in this space, so we operate through these different ecosystem partners to help drive greater coverage. 

More importantly, we can’t have solutions for everything. Salesforce is not the panacea for every problem the government might have. In some cases, we might be 80 percent of the solution, while the remaining 20 percent is completed by a partner. We work with several startups, established firms, and established system integration partners like the Big Four. 

Published on November 4, 2024

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