For Mindsprint, it’s about achieving long term success with partners

“I always say this to partners, the uncanny ability to spot successful partnerships is basically not to evaluate the return from a particular partnership today, but to see the potential of where the partnership can grow in 5-10 years,” said Suresh Sundararajan, CEO and Co-Founder, Mindsprint.

Mindsprint became an independent entity in 2023 after being part of the Olam Group’s business and technology unit in India. Even when the unit was operating independently within the Olam Group, it was already offering its services to about 40 customers globally.

Today, Mindsprint operates out of Singapore, with a strong workforce in India and serves customers globally. As a technology services provider offering digital transformation, AI, cloud, product engineering, and supply chain optimization services to a global clientele, Mindsprint has a very unique approach to how it works with vendors around the world.

For AI-led applications, Mindsprint partners SAP, for which they are an SAP Gold Partner and also a customer. Mindsprint deployed GROW with SAP to modernize its own global operations, improving efficiency and creating a platform for future growth.

It also partners ServiceNow and Salesforce while for AI-led security, Mindsprint partners CrowdStrike and Google Cloud. Google Cloud is also a hyperscaler partner which also includes Azure and AWS. Mindsprint also partners Snowflake on data analytics and Planview for project management. KYP.ai is the partner for business process management.

To understand more about the partner ecosystem, CRN Asia caught up with Suresh Sundararajan, CEO and Co-Founder, Mindsprint.

What are the key services that Mindsprint offers to customers?

If you look at our broad offerings, we break them into three buckets. The first one is technology services, under which SAP comes in. Besides SAP in technology services, we do digital platform engineering, which ranges from app development, platform modernization, website development and customer experience.

We also have a large, advanced data analytics practice where we can do many projects on data science, image optimization, image analytics, sentiment analysis, advising on data architecture, data warehousing, data lakes, and such. These come under technology services as well.

The next vertical is intelligent enterprise operations. It's basically where we are driving BPO with a lot of automation even having some agentic AI platforms like Sprint AP and procureSprint and we’re growing that business.

The third vertical for us is cybersecurity, where we can do consulting, risk assessment, information privacy, and also deploy a lot of solutions in terms of pen testing, vulnerability assessment, and more. This is how our businesses are structured in these three categories.

So, does Mindsprint work with vendors based on these categories?

We have chosen a few partners with whom we want to work. SAP is a big partner for us. AWS is also a very important partner. We have very good skills in AWS cloud offerings. We are working with Service Now and have five or six customers for whom we are doing Service Now work.

Snowflake, which is part of our data analytics, is a very important partner and we are working with Planview as well. Besides these five we continue to work with Microsoft and Google as well because we have skills.

These are the seven selective partnerships that we are trying to pursue and in terms of how we can build a strong pipeline in working with them.

Are you seeing any specific increase or any specific demand in each of these verticals that are your main focus areas right now?

A lot of inquiries and a lot of business that we do comes from digital platform engineering and advanced data analytics. That's where the bulk of the organizations also need work in their digital transformation journey. Besides that, we see work on the customer experience which is with Salesforce and on infrastructure side through SAP.

We are beginning to open on cybersecurity. But if you broadly look at the deal, a bulk of it would be in technology services, in that would be in digital platform engineering and advanced data analytics.

Is this equal across all the regions that you operate as well?

Yes, and one of the reasons for that is since we are now getting into the market and we don't participate yet in very large deals like 20 million, 15 million where there is complete modernization.

So, most of the companies that are wanting to try and test Mindsprint are looking at digital platform engineering and advanced data analytics. There is a lot of work where the project size is just around 200,000 dollars, 100,000 dollars, 400,000 dollars, etc. And this is also an area where most companies are struggling. There is cloud modernization, data modernization and there is always something to be done and that's where we're also able to bring the differentiation being a small company.

By showing the work that we have done for OLAM as a customer, it agrees to some of the new logos that we are speaking to, and they want to experiment with us in those projects.

Are you also looking to offer more services and go to other sectors as well?

Our primary sectors are today food, agriculture, retail, customer packaged goods, life sciences, and manufacturing. But our horizontal capabilities, if you look at what we have, we are very strong. For example, our SAP offering is really strong. Our digital platform engineering and data analytics are also very strong.

So, I am not in a position to say no to businesses coming from other sectors, though it's always a tough conflict. Internally, my team's asked, why take this? I said, as you're building business, it is a sin to say no, because you know, there's money coming in, there's a customer relationship that's coming in.

Unless we are in a position to say, no, I have too much of my main focus area, I don't want to take anything else, which is a different ballgame. Today, we are in the early stages of building a successful third-party business and reducing dependence on OLAM.

So today, we have, for example, companies in the energy sector. We are working with companies in the finance sector as well. We are bidding for an airlines company, but we are bidding in areas of work that we feel we are strong and can compete with other players.

But the predominant focus will be on those five industry sectors where there is strong horizontal capability. We are not saying no to some of the inbound inquiries that are coming in.

What else can we see from Mindsprint going forward?

For Mindsprint, if you take a five-year time frame, our goal is to nearly triple our sales revenues from where we are today. And more importantly, to significantly reduce the dependence on OLAM, whereby today, if we get 90% of revenues from OLAM, we want to go to a stage where we get 50% of revenue from OLAM, which means we have a very successful base of customers outside OLAM.

And that is done by fine-tuning these three buckets of offerings that we have. More importantly, in the market, it is known for its AI-driven approach. When people talk about MindSprint, they just don't talk AI. They can demonstrate AI when we do work with them. And even internally, they use AI in the way they work for their customers. That's how I would like any of the customers to think of MindSprint as a differentiator in this very competitive space.

Lastly, in your relationship with vendors, what would you like to see more from them?

I always say this to partners, the uncanny ability to spot successful partnerships is basically not to evaluate the return from a particular partnership today, but to see the potential of where the partnership can grow in 5-10 years.

That's what I say because today I'm very small. So, when I go to AWS, I tell them, you're very large, I am nobody to you. But if you believe in some of the offers that we have, and if you think that MindSprint can one day become a very important partner for you, you have to start investing in me. If you purely go by how much revenue you will get today, or this month, or this year, then MindSprint might not be attractive.

Every successful partnership develops by having this view of where this partnership could eventually go. And that's what I want the partners to see in Mindsprint.