Krishnan Raman is Co-founder and CEO at Flutura, a specialist Industrial IOT Intelligence organization serving the Engineering & Energy industries. Krishnan is a pragmatic thought leader in Analytics and Industry 4.0, has been honored as one of the “Bulls of Technology” in Houston, Germany, Japan and regularly speaks in International forums. In an interview with Insights Success Magazine, Krishnan shared his keen observations into Artificial Intelligence (AI) and his journey in developing and leading his company in this new era.
Briefly describe your company and its vision.
Flutura is an AI Solutions company focused on improving two core business objectives of “Asset Up-time” and “Operational Efficiency”. We do this with Cerebra, our AI Platform tuned for IIOT in Oil & Gas, Process Manufacturing, and Heavy machinery manufacturing industries, powering connected asset and connected operations use cases.
Our vision is to unlock at least a billion dollar worth of value for our customers by 2024 and become a leader in providing Reliable Industry Intelligence.
Brief us in detail about the solutions your company provides.
Our AI platform Cerebra helps our customers at various stages with different use cases. Cerebra is designed with domain specific approach in mind and targets the complete value chain. It focuses on three sectors: Oil & Gas, Process Manufacturing and Heavy machinery. We have specific use cases such as
- Automating root cause analysis for the petrochemical industry
- Enabling dynamic operating environments for the operators
- Predicting output quality, potential equipment downtime and performance degradation
- Predicting potential safety threat with the goal of avoiding events risking human, and the environment (oil leakage, blow out, etc.)
- Reducing resource waste
What are the current trends in this market, and give us your views on what can be the future.
The race to become fully autonomous has sped up. Oil and Gas sector is adopting AI solutions at a rapid pace at different stages of the value chain. Critical operations are being driven by new tech. Aspects such as health and safety, autonomous rigs, anomaly detection along with causes, and optimization of equipment using tech, etc using premade AI platforms is getting picked up.
In near future, field engineers will be able to take complex real time data and process it for taking decisions in minutes, and not be dependent on the in-house data science teams. Flutura is already testing a platform like this and the revolution is closer than people think.
According to you, what makes Flutura to remain standalone in the crowded market.
We are the only one to have unique insights into last mile issues in engineering operations for the Oil and Gas, Specialty Chemicals, Heavy Machinery Manufacturing and adjacent sectors.
This has resulted in shaping our product Cerebra with over 400+ features, the most comprehensive in the industry for an Industrial IoT platform. We are at a stage where we have specific digital assistants addressing super surgical engineering issues. Gartner published their 2nd version of the industrial IoT magic quadrant and Flutura’s Cerebra is part of this elite list for the second time.
Another aspect where Flutura is uniquely poised is, we have a world class multi disciplinary team of petroleum engineers, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers & computer science folks shaping Cerebra. We believe that the only way to succeed in the Industrial IoT space is to empower engineers to harness the power of data science. Towards this we are developing first of a kind role for the industry – Industrial Engineering Data Scientist.
What are the benefits your clients are getting that make them to choose your company over your competitors?
Gartner’s voice of customer clearly shows why customers choose us over our competitors.
The love our understanding of the problem statement, and our capabilities to address it at scale. Our focus is to unlock value, in monetary terms.
In one particular use-case, our customers are using our platform to reduce their Cost of Quality. Cerebra’s AI helped enhanced quality – Moved from Quality Inspection (Reactive) to Quality Assurance (Proactive). Cerebra provided actionable insights to identify and eliminate quality bottle-necks. Insights from Cerebra AI help predict product quality, drastically improving the yield. Industry estimates that speciality chemical manufacturing has typically 2-3% of the total output as poor quality. Thereby actively addressed a problem with $300+million enhancement potential globally. The customer complaints drastically reduced by 37% globally.
Flutura has been consistently considered as one of the top IIOT solutions provider.
What company culture you are following that keeps your employees motivated and makes them grow along with you?
At Flutura, our vision drives our culture. Unlocking value for industries is our goal and every employee believes in it. Within the company, transparency and communication are two things we focus on. Honest communication with 100% transparency motivates our employees and brings the family closer.
Apart from the awards and recognition, we ensure that we help enable the employee’s personal vision and mission. Their growth is equally important.
What are the advancements you are going to make in your products in the near future? Or what new products are you going to introduce?
We believe all industrial IoT initiatives would lead towards autonomous operations. We want to be seen as the most reliable industrial intelligence company in the world. We will continue to invest in developing surgical vertical specific products for high value business/engineering problems. We will continue to invest in forming exclusive partnerships to support turnkey deployments with our customers.
What are the achievements and recognition you have achieved over the years?
Flutura has won several awards over the course of time. We recently got mentioned in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Industrial IOT platforms. This is the second time in two consecutive years. It says a lot about our capabilities. Gartner also released a Voice of Customer report in the same category, and it was clear that why our customers love us. We added another feather in the cap when Frost & Sullivan awarded Flutura with the best practices award in the North America Artificial Intelligence In Energy Entrepreneurial company of the year. Nasscom in their annual conference this year named us as Technology leaders in the AI/ML category.
