e& enterprise is impacting different verticals with its different technologies and digital solutions. In an exclusive with CEO Salvador Anglada, he shared the essence behind its latest acquisition, the core strategies behind creating business value, the importance of customer experience and the emerging trends within the enterprise business space.
Partnerships and collaborations are one of the pillars of e& enterprise. We've just heard about your Smartworld acquisition. Can you give us details about this recent venture?
We’re going to merge Smartworld with our own to create one single unit and rebrand it as part of the e& enterprise family as “e& enterprise iot and ai.”
We are very happy with the acquisition that we just completed because it will reinforce significantly our capabilities as a system integrator, specifically in the IoT space. We have a big practice as an e& enterprise, but this acquisition solidifies the implementation and operation of the different solutions that we have in the market. We’re going to lead more at this stage.
Can you share the core strategies of e& enterprise in creating business value in different sectors?
I would say that there is no single vertical that we are not impacting, thanks to our different technologies and digital solutions.
All across, we are creating value as we have big practices in different verticals of activity. One of the big ones is on the government and smart city sides – helping the districts to automate and optimize the way they are doing things in terms of technology.
Good examples are projects like Hassantuk, which is the fire alarm system for the whole UAE, or projects that are allowing us to automate the whole smart grid for electricity companies, allowing users to have much more information and create efficiencies. Alongside that, we're working a lot on Industry 4.0, using technologies like robots and drones, as well as digital twins, where we replicate the processes of the companies that allowed them to optimize on the digital side.
You recently launched the EngageX CPaaS platform to elevate the quality of customer experience for enterprises and government entities. What is the importance of customer experience for e& enterprise’s long-term growth?
The importance of customer experience is absolutely critical. Improving customer journeys in this new world will allow us to compete, regardless of the vertical.
In the past, the way to interact with a customer was either through a call center or by going into a shop. Today, the opportunities are massive — you can go to the website or an app, using tools like WhatsApp or a virtual agent.
With EngageX, what we're doing is helping customers in their relationship with their own customers by opening up different digital channels where they can interact and create smooth processes with their customers. We understand the business of the customer. Thus, we propose a way to move forward by redesigning the process and implementing all of these in our platform. And that creates the experience that the customers are looking for.
From your perspective, what trends in the enterprise business scene will progress in the Industry 4.0 era?
Everybody talks about digitalization, but now for me, it's a must. You will not be able to compete in the future if you don't use digital technologies and you just leverage your business.
Maybe the most important one for me, and it is still something that we are lagging behind compared with other countries in the world, is the cloudification of your business. Cloud is important because it is not just an efficiency gain, it’s a customer experience gain. Moving your applications to the cloud, and even creating a cloud-native application, is critical to expanding your business, interacting with different customers and having the ability to scale up and down and be more agile.
The other one that I think is very important and still has a long way to go is artificial intelligence. The idea of using the data that we produce in predicting what is going to happen is crucial for both the frontend and backend. On the front side, AI will result in understanding the customer on what they must follow in order to acquire a new product or service, and forecast the business properly.
While on the back side, this will mean understanding what the point of failure is on specific elements of your processes and trying to act in advance in order to gain efficiency. There is a big opportunity, and we are democratizing this with our tools and our platform. I predict a big expansion of AI usage in different verticals, particularly in the region.
