intense technologies ltd Management discussions


Achieve improved outcomes with technology-enabled services – Key Drivers

Overview of the Industry

Technology-enabled businesses have emerged rapidly in the past few years and data is the cornerstone of this transformation.

The new business landscape is all about data-driven insights. One big area here is around data governance, and how it cascades into security and access.

**The global data analytics market size was exhibited at USD 30 billion in 2022 and is projected to surpass around USD 393.35 billion by 2032, poised to grow at a projected CAGR of 29.4% during the forecast period 2023 to 2032.

The transformative power of cloud, automation and AI is simplifying business operations and accelerating innovation. By integrating machine learning and artificial intelligence to collect and analyze operational data, organizations can unlock tremendous value. According to IDC research, "The foundation of enterprise intelligence lies in AI-driven technology platforms, comprising three pillars: information synthesis, learning capacity, and scalable insights application." **Source: Precedence Research

Company Overview

Leading Companies rely on our enterprise software products and services for enhancing their customer experience. Headquartered in Hyderabad, India, our team serves customers across 4 continents. We are leading players in the Indian Telecom industry, Insurance, and private sector banking domain. With more than 20+ years of experience in the telecom, banking and insurance sectors we have established the value of our award-winning product portfolio. Our list of marquee customers includes top five private banks, top five insurance service providers, and the two top telecom service providers (TSPs) of India. We believe that leveraging technology to deliver mission critical enterprise class applications at scale is the cornerstone of the business impact we deliver. With over 50% market share in the insurance and telecom sectors in India, our highly scalable enterprise-grade solutions generate over 5 million statements and more than 400 million notifications each day.

Intense Technologies produces software products that are designed for digital business transformation. Our platform is cloud-based and designed to seamlessly integrate with our client?s existing systems, providing insightful and ingenious solutions on a global scale. Our strong data management capabilities, backed by powerful analytics and AI help us to position our products as part of the Digital Customer Experience value proposition. Digital ecosystems, strong partnerships, and key alliances bring the best of capabilities through joint business solutions to clients and help us penetrate newer markets in newer geographies.

Your Company offers innovative and customer-centric digital experiences, enabling enterprises, associates, and society to evolve progressively. We are focused on leveraging next-generation technologies to enable end end-to-end digital transformation for global customers.

The company aims at delivering tomorrow?s experiences today and believes that the Future is now. Intense Technologies Limited is a Public Listed Company, incorporated and domiciled in India, and has its primary listing on the National Stock Exchange of India Limited (NSE) and BSE Limited.

Mapping the paradigm shift

Technology spending is forecasted to increase with enterprises investing in value-driven transformation focused on areas like cloud transformation, automation, integration of AI, and data analytics as their top priorities. The demand for digital transformation and infrastructure modernization will continue to drive growth for the industry with accelerated adoption of digital and emerging technologies. IT services include a significant digital component, led by digital transformation, cloudification, platform engineering, AI, building software-as-a-service ("SaaS") enabled products and associated consulting services. As an innovative product and tech-enabled services company, equipped with valuable IP assets in Data Management, Enterprise Communications, MarTech, and BPM, Intense continues to invest in cutting-edge growth engines, including Blockchain, cloud, and low-code technologies.

To ensure continuous progress and evolution in the ever-evolving tech landscape. Intense is strategically positioned to scale and grow in the coming years. Additionally, the technology solutions are tried, tested, and trusted by Fortune 500s across BFSI and Telecom domains.

Driving an agile transformation

During the year under review, we have seen steady growth given that our customers are expanding their work with us. We launched internally a 3-year project- "Project Butterfly" with a focus to scale and expand our tech-enabled service offerings to our existing customers and drive new opportunities to enhance the topline and bottom-line.

As the name suggests, "Project Butterfly" stands for transformation. Like the transformation of a pupa into a butterfly, our journey is underscored by growth and metamorphosis. Just as the pupa undergoes a remarkable transition, our IP and tech-enabled services act as accelerators, a_ording us the invaluable advantages of both time and cost efficiency. In a world fueled by agility and speed, this becomes paramount for ours and our customers? success.

Our strategic footprint is firmly established in high-volume, recurring revenue landscapes, a testament to our commitment to sustainable growth. By fostering a "Customer Centric" and "Agile" ethos, we are cultivating an organizational culture that puts the customer at the heart of our operations and adapts seamlessly to evolving demands. This transformation also extends to reshaping our innovation strategies and product portfolio, ensuring we remain at the forefront of dynamic industries. This pursuit, while requiring substantial financial investment, is firmly anchored in a steadfast long-term focus, as we lay the foundations for a truly sustainable and thriving enterprise. The capabilities that we have built over the past years, including Customer Communication Management and Data Management, are what large enterprises are looking for. Intense?s market-leading capabilities in data, low code, AI, and automation, puts the company indispensably inside the clients? ecosystem. In several instances the company has emerged as a critical partner for its customers.

This year, we made several investments, and added new capabilities to support future growth, with focused teams in data services, cloud services, SaaS products, and Government Managed Services. Our complete communications suite now comes with transmission services, making this a comprehensive offering.

With IP enabled services and a strong focus in cloud, we have partnered with hyperscalers like AWS, Azure, and IBM to be a preferred partner to customers seeking to use cloud capabilities.

UniServe™ NXT Digital Suite, comes with complete customer lifecycle management, right from campaign management, omnichannel digital customer engagement, bill presentment & payment, and analytics to providing newer services, and robust data management capabilities. Penetrating global markets, leveraging partnerships, and strengthening relationships with existing customers is resulting in consistent revenues streams. We have expanded our portfolio with newer capabilities and services to meet the needs of our customers. Expanding capabilities in key digital technology areas such as AI, product engineering, the digital platform UniServeTM NXT helps enterprises reimagine their digital journeys.

AccordingtoIDC,"TheAIsoftwaremarketgrewrapidly during 2021, and with accelerated digital disruption, the overall AI software market will approach $791.5 billion in revenue in 2025 at a CAGR of 18.4%, with the AI-centric part to approach $192.6 billion at a CAGR of 31.2% over the forecast period.

Despite all-time high inflation and looming recession fears, spending in AI and automation technologies and solutions proceed at full steam. Technology leaders emphasize that lessons learned from past downturns signal that technology is a critical business driver and will help them future proof their business." Further enhancing the Customer Communication Management (CCM) offering is our marketing automation platform orchestrating end-to-end customer journeys, using data, AI and ML, social media integration and interactive communication capabilities.

The communications offering, now incorporates transmission services, enabling us to provide an end-to-end communications solution to our esteemed enterprise clientele, such as banks and insurance companies thus securing long-term partnerships. Year after year we have been recognized by leading analysts such as Gartner, Forrester, Aspire Leaderboard, and most recently Spark Matrix. We believe that these recognitions are a vindication of our technology strengths. We have emerged as leaders in the Private sector banking and Private sector insurance vertical in the CCM domain.

Ensuring Sustainable Growth

A Tech-Enabled Services Company, with a portfolio of elite services, end-to-end communication solutions, and cutting-edge innovations in Data and Cloud technology.

As a tech-enabled service company, we are actively developing a portfolio of elite services, end-to-end communication solutions, with strategic investments in Data and Cloud technology and other cutting-edge innovations to create enhanced value for our customers and stakeholders.

Riding the cloud for growth acceleration and enabling new revenue models

We have partnered with cloud infrastructure providers like AWS, Azure, and IBM to offer Software as a Service offering of our solutions across geographies. Our cloud capabilities create seamless experiences in public, private, and hybrid clouds. Scaling our cloud capabilities, especially around cloud advisory, data on cloud, cloud security, SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, and private cloud

New deals in the banking and insurance sectors

We have penetrated deeper into the domestic insurance, financial services and banking verticals and are channeling our efforts for maximum results, going deeper into areas we have strength in like Services and Insurance.

Customer engagement at the forefront

We conduct Quarterly CSAT surveys to get feedback from our existing customers to continuously improve support, and operations and work on technology innovation. It is heartening to note we are continuously getting a rating of 4 out of 5 on an average across all our customer engagements. We know this from our interactions with customers and partners who have appreciated our efforts in going beyond the normal to support business continuity.

Our Focus

Focusing on technologies enabled by the cloud, our digital customer engagement solutions are now cloud-hosted, delivering experiences that delight customers. Our commitment to delivering cutting-edge solutions is evident through our data services, cloud services, and managed services.

The key pointers are:

AI, Cloud, and Big Data continue to gain momentum:

In a changing business landscape, our focus is on enhancing automation, data analytics, AI, digital experience, amplified by the cloud. Our Digital Suite of services and solutions are driving accelerated cloud-powered transformations for clients. Strengthening our own digital prowess through the cloud we offer faster modernization benefits.

Growing our market share

We continue to gain market share because of our customers confidence in our ability to successfully navigate their digital journeys. With the acceleration of digital adoption across industries, we see immense potential to engage and partner with newer customers as they transform, adapt, and thrive while we accelerate innovation and digital capabilities to capitalize on the expanding market opportunities.

Comprehensive digital customer engagement for seamless customer interactions

Our strategic focus on customer-centric initiatives with UniServeTM Reach, a marketing automation platform, has yielded remarkable insights that drive business optimization. The omnichannel journey analysis offers a nuanced perspective & empowers us to offer actionable insights that lead to improved business outcomes. The digital customer engagement includes last-mile transmission for seamless customer interactions Strengthening the leadership team by increasing sales presence in matured markets, strengthening marketing, pre-sales, consulting, and business development teams is a strategic initiative. The year gone by has seen new Leadership Hiring with Nitin Sarda joining the company as our CFO.

Partnerships & Alliances

Were exploring financial and business partnerships to enhance our agility and deliver better results. We have nurtured premier ecosystem alliances with System Integrators, and software companies, to be able to offer holistic solutions to our clients.

Our Strengths

We are a global enterprise software products company, headquartered in India with a strong and emerging presence in USA, LATAM, EMEA and APAC. We believe we are well-positioned in the global competitive market with almost three decades of experience in product development, digital offerings, and IT services, uniquely positioned to help enterprises across the world embrace digital transformation with our Digital and AI First Strategy.

• We offer end-to-end tech-enabled service offering in consulting, software application development, data, product engineering, cloud, and business process management.

• Our digital customer engagement includes last-mile transmission for seamless connections and exceptional interactions.

• Our industry-led IP solutions have garnered strong resonance with our esteemed customers, and we are dedicated to further developing and scaling these solutions. There has been a significant uptick in the adoption of our tech-enabled services, leveraging our invaluable IP assets. This holds immense strategic importance for us and underlines our growing impact in the industry.

• We have invested in cutting-edge solutions that is evident through our data services, cloud services, and managed services tailored for governments.

• By enabling businesses with deep tech capabilities, we empower them to confidently embrace emerging technologies.

• Our internal research and development teams identify, develop, and deploy new offerings leveraging next-generation technologies. These give us the ability to keep pace with ever-changing technology and how they apply to customer requirements.

As industries evolve, our unwavering dedication to providing robust and transformative solutions makes us a trusted partner for growth and success.

We have a strong and well-recognized brand. Our flagship UniServe™ NXT Digital Suite offers differentiated solutions for our client?s business processes. Our solutions are cloud-based and seamlessly integrate into the clients? existing systems, obviating the need to rip and replace existing hardware or software, leading to a rapid return on investment, with technology not being a hurdle. We serve customers in telecom, banking, insurance, and government verticals who contribute a significant annuity and services revenue.

Our Competition

In the domains we operate there are many global players and we have been evaluated by research agencies like Gartner, Spark Matrix and Aspire for our capabilities. We experience a rapidly changing marketplace with new competitors in niche technology areas. We see intense competition in traditional services, a rapidly changing marketplace, and the emergence of new players in niche technology areas.

In addition to this, insourcing of technology services by the technology departments of our clients is another ongoing competitive threat.

Risks faced by the Company.

Global, economic and regulatory situation Consistent approach of the Market towards technology (digital products and services) is subject to fluctuations, which depend on both economic and regulatory factors of the markets in which they operate. Due to a substantial increase in unemployment rates across certain countries in which we operate (including the United States, United Kingdom, and MEA regions) governments have imposed restrictive legislations limiting companies in those countries partnering with us, or could inhibit our ability to staff client projects in a timely manner, which may impact our revenue and profitability.
Global, economic and regulatory situation New and changing regulatory compliances, corporate governance and public disclosure requirements add uncertainty to our compliance policies and increase our costs of compliance.
Per-country restrictions on visas, increases in required minimum wage levels for visa-dependent employees, and / or increased enforcement may affect our ability to compete, resulting in various adversities.
Supply-side risks The economic fallout and the subsequent recovery from COVID-19 could decrease our customers? spending on technology. The economic fallout results in supply chain disruptions which might adversely impact the demand for prospective projects, cause cancellations or ramp-downs of existing projects, increased requests for furloughs, increase pricing pressure, higher travel restrictions, impose supply-side constraints, and adversely impact cash conversion cycles.
Dependence on skilled manpower As an enterprise software products company with solutions addressing niche technologies, there is greater dependency on manpower with specialized domain skills both to work on the roadmap of our platform and to deploy solutions at customer locations. There is always a threat of manpower attrition and the risk of not being able to scale up skilled expertise on time resulting in delays in achieving our milestones. Our success depends largely on our management team and key personnel and our ability to attract and retain them.
Long sales cycles Long sales cycles because of restrictions on travel, marketing events, and in-person client meetings may result in sub- optimal branding and delays in our sales and commercial processes. Any delay is detrimental to the business. And sales delay can be equally adverse on our revenue. Long sales cycles due to various factors directly affect the timing of predicted revenues.
Dependence on business partners Globally, we are dependent on many system integrators and partners to improve our reach to global markets and ride on their brand. While we are scaling and expanding our reach to global markets and exploring direct sales opportunities, there will be pressures on margins in the immediate term. We may engage in acquisitions, strategic investments, strategic partnerships or alliances, or other ventures that may or may not be successful given the current pandemic situation. Changes in the policies of the Indian Government or political instability may adversely affect the economic conditions in India generally, which could impact our business and prospects.
Proprietary technology There can be instances of misappropriation of our technological expertise or reverse engineering of our solutions. Legal standards and scope of protection in many countries may not provide adequate protection to our proprietary technology/technologies. We have filed copyright and patent for around four of our innovative IPs to avoid misappropriation.

Our Business Development Strategies

Keeping in view the opportunities created and market trends across the world, the following are our strategies to capitalize and take your company to the next level.

• Cloud/SaaS- We seek to deliver capabilities that create seamless experiences in public, private, and hybrid cloud, across PaaS, SaaS, and IaaS landscapes.

• CCM on cloud- Our modern, cloud-based CCM is a customer communications and experience solution hosted on the cloud.

• Business Development, Sales, and Marketing- Our talent strategy continues to be a key focus. We?ve made long-term investments in capability building across business development, sales, delivery, and innovation; thereby supporting a healthy pipeline, across geographies.

• New digital experiences – The need for improved experiences is shaped by business agility, scaled innovation, and ecosystems. We have a strategic focus on areas of relevance for our clients. The demand for new service and technology offerings, including cloud solutions, marketing automation platforms, and chatbot integration, is encouraging.

• Work with System Integrators and Partners to penetrate newer markets, and newer geographies. We?re focused on building global partnerships to improve our reach and leverage local relationships of our partners to accelerate growth.

• The Company?s industry-led IP solutions have garnered strong resonance with customers, and the team remains dedicated to further developing and scaling these solutions.

• Award-winning portfolio - The capabilities that we have built over the past years, including customer communication management and data management, are what large enterprises are looking for. Our market-leading capabilities in data and analytics, low code, AI, automation, are enabling us to be a critical partner for our customers.

• Driving growth going ahead, given cross-sell/up-sell opportunities with our long-standing engagements, enhancement of product capabilities, adding new clients, and winning large transformational deals

Market Potential: Gartner Predictions

• 80% of Executives Think Automation Can Be Applied to Any Business Decision. One-third of organizations are applying AI across several business units.

• 79% of Corporate Strategists See AI and Analytics as Critical to Their Success Over the Next Two Years

• By 2026, as much as 75% of organisations will adopt a digital transformation model predicated on cloud as the fundamental underlying platform.

• By 2024, Gartner expects 50% of new system deployments in the cloud will be based on a cohesive cloud data ecosystem rather than on manually integrated point solutions.

• The data management software (excluding DBMS) market grew by 7.9% in U.S. dollars in 2022, to reach $10.44 billion.

• Communication Service Providers are adopting composability approaches, by investing in scalable technologies to accelerate business outcomes.

• By 2025, 50% of large organisations will have failed to unify engagement channels, resulting in a disjointed and siloed CX that lacks context.

Recommendations

• Organizations today view cloud as a highly strategic platform for digital transformation, which is requiring cloud providers to offer more sophisticated capabilities as the competition for digital services heats up. In the current market, hyperscale cloud providers are driving the cloud agenda.

• From the next generation of augmented user experiences and beyond, data and analytics, these changes will require organizations to resource optimize, accelerate change, drive innovation, and transform.

• Organizations need to maximize business value from ongoing AI initiatives, optimize our resources, speed up change, and drive innovation.

• With customers readily adopting digital applications and platforms for interacting with businesses, delivering contextual customer experience across their customer journeys has become a key priority to drive customer engagement and loyalty.

• Asbusinessescontinuetoscaletheirdigitalcommunication, driving for that unified experience, it is imperative to focus on Customer Data, Personalization, Journey Maps and to address Business siloed, environments.

 

**Source: Gartner

These factors emphasize the expanding scope of technology in enterprises and reinstate rising growth opportunities in the future. With our AI-first strategy, Intense is guided by that road map to help enterprises to build a competitive edge, empowers professionals to quickly understand and act on data-driven insights to improve engagement. To remain agile and keep pace with the dynamic technology landscape, we have partnered with global leading players like AWS, Azure, and IBM and are engaging with other players in this space.

Awards and Recognitions

Your Company continued its quest for excellence in its area of business to strengthen its position in global markets. In doing so, several awards and rankings continue to endorse your Company as a thought leader in the industry. Few of the Awards / recognitions received by the Company during the year 2022-23 include:

Recognitions:

• UniServe™ NXT Digital Suite rated the best, ranked Number One in Gartner Peer Insights 2022 by customers securing a 4.7 Rating out of 5.

• Intense Technologies achieves Leader Position in 2023 SPARK Matrix for Customer Communications Management by Quadrant Knowledge Solutions.

• Intense Technologies positioned amongst AnyPrem Customer Communications Management (CCM) Software Leaders for Telecom, Insurance, Public Sector and Utilities verticals in the 2022Aspire CCM-CXM Leaderboard™.

• Additionally, Intense Technologies has been recognized as a Leader in two other segments Vendor Hosted SAAS CCM and Communications Experience Platform (CXP) for the Utilities and Telecom verticals in the same report.

• Intense Technologies positioned in the 2022 SPARK Matrix for Customer Communication Management by Quadrant Knowledge Solutions.

Material developments in human resources / industrial relations, including the number of people employed

Being a product company, our way of imbibing agility to our culture attracts the best talent as they will be exposed to immense learning opportunities, key responsibilities, and faster career growth.

We have the ability to attract and retain high-quality management and technology professionals, and sales personnel globally and at scale.

Human capital

Our people are our biggest assets. The products and services we deliver are of the highest standard and have won the trust of our customers. We continue our endeavor to bring and hone the right talent to advance our business objectives. Our success depends largely upon our highly skilled technology professionals and our ability to hire, attract, motivate, retain and train these personnel.

We at Intense Technologies are also continuously transforming our workforce to digital. The talent management levers help us maintain the right digital talent mix, meet self-sufficiency in digital areas and better engage and retain our talent.

As we prepare to thrive in the future, the new workplace will be a hybrid one with distributed teams becoming more prominent. We expect that the change in the workplace will encourage different workforce models that will help us connect, collaborate, and create a culture of effective engagement, well-being, and productivity.

Recruitment

Our recruitment process is very stringent. We have built our talent pool by recruiting students from reputed universities and colleges across India. We have also recruited experienced, local sales and operational talent in UK and MEA regions. Our rigorous selection process involves aptitude tests, technical and HR interviews to identify the right talent. The selection process continuously evolves to include new methods.

We constantly attract and hire leaders and middle management across the globe across various new age and modern technologies.

Training and development

We are committed to providing opportunities to employees for growth and development of their skills, knowledge, and competencies for improved job performance. The competency development of our employees continues to be a key area of strategic focus for us. Keeping in view of the organization?s strategy, global competition and changing market trends, our L&D functions as a consulting partner for organizational development by coordinating learning requirements with corporate objectives. We operate as a hybrid culture, and training is being imparted to the employees in a hybrid model. e-learning and gamification have a major role and we have adopted and adapted to a culture of self-directed learning through our LMS, thus combining the best of both Digital and Physical Learning. The focus of our training programs is to create a unique experience for learners at Intense Technologies Limited that can enhance the relevance and effectiveness of learning. We have launched new programs for our employees and enhanced our training efforts in multiple areas. The past year saw close to 300 trainings being held for employees across the organization.

Our LMS portal combines teaching, hands-on learning and assessments of in-class training, so as to provide the employees with an enhanced learning experience. In addition to the classroom training, the LMS allows the employees to access the training courses at their convenience and complete the assigned courses from any location, ensuring continuous learning and enhancing productivity. Our skill-based program has twin objectives i.e. increasing the fulfillment of immediate digital skill requirements for client projects and enriching the expertise of our global workforce in next-generation technologies and methodologies.

Compensation

Our people receive competitive salaries and benefits. We have a performance linked compensation program. At Intense, the work practices and values all come together to give its employees a rewarding experience of working and contributing here. In addition to the standard compensation and benefits, we strive to offer diverse career experiences and platforms for creative contributions as well.

While we have not been immune to the impact of ‘The Great Resignation? we have made necessary adjustments, significantly increasing wages to attract and retain exceptional talent. We have strengthened our internal processes, invested strongly in our people, leadership, and technology innovation to accelerate growth, which has further added to our cost structure.

Financial overview

Revenue from operations

The Standalone revenue from operations increased to 86.08 Crs in FY 2022-23 from 80.02 Crs in FY 2021-22. The increase in turnover by 7.57% was made possible with a suitable business strategy.

The Consolidated revenue of the Company in FY 2022-23, having gone up to Rs 90.60 Crs in the year from 83.00 Crs by 9.16% of the previous year.

Profit after Tax

The Standalone profit after tax decreased to Rs 9.53 Crs in the FY 2022-23 as against Rs 15.64 Crs in the previous year. The company has invested in new talent for enabling new segments of Services such as Cloud Services. These investments will yield results in the coming years.

Financial Highlights

( In Crs)

Standalone Consolidated
Particulars 2022-23 2021-22 % Increase/ (Decrease) 2022-23 2021-22 % Increase/ (Decrease)
Sales 86.08 80.02 7.57% 90.60 83.00 9.16%
Other Income 1.24 0.89 39.33% 1.24 0.96 29.17%
Expenditure 75.03 60.16 24.72% 74.99 59.70 25.61%
Employee Cost 41.40 37.49 10.43% 45.66 41.21 10.80%
EBITDA 14.06 22.17 -36.58% 18.63 25.69 -27.48%
PBT 12.29 20.75 -40.77% 16.85 24.26 -30.54%
PAT 9.53 15.64 -39.07% 13.75 19.07 -27.90%
Basic EPS 4.06 6.96 -41.67% 5.86 8.49 -30.98%
Diluted EPS 4.06 6.96 -41.67% 5.86 8.49 -30.91%

Future outlook

Technology is transforming businesses in every industry around the world. In the past year and 2023, we saw emerging technologies, like generative AI, 5G, Low Code No Code, shape the future of industries.

Intense offers a comprehensive range of capabilities that enable our customers to gain a competitive edge. Our strategy revolves around uniting domains, products, services, and partners to craft tailored solutions that yield optimal business outcomes.

Our approach involves harnessing domain expertise, cutting-edge technologies, strategic partnerships, and hyperscalers drive value for our clients.

Central to our ethos is cultivating enduring client relationships rooted in shared visions and outcomes. We forge these connections through a well-governed, co-managed engagement process. In the realm of IT Services, we offer a spectrum of solutions, encompassing custom application development, re-engineering, cloud services, talent services, managed services and data analytics.

In our IT Products division, our award-winning CCM solution is evolving with marketing automation, and campaign management. Rather than standalone products, these offerings synergize with our IT services portfolio to enhance client solutions.

As we chart our path forward, we remain focused on services and digital engagements. We approach System Integration (SI) engagements selectively, directing our resources toward opportunities where we can create the most impactful outcomes.