An unexpected journey of experiments that helps a person to discover the unknowns is what we call it as entrepreneurship. It’s like a cricket match with lots of practice and learning, simultaneously the ending of both the scenario is unpredictable. One such person who is travelling in an unknown path by creating a benchmark for industrial IoT platforms is Srikanth Muralidhara, Co-Founder and Chief Customer Officer at Flutura.
For more than a decade, along with his partners Derick and Krishnan, Srikanth played a key role in building the analytics business unit for their erstwhile company. They have been involved in more than 400 transformational projects with fortune 500 companies. He has also been an inspiration to all of them with almost twenty years of experience in the analytics space. The latest event he addressed was the 93rd annual meeting at ISHM, Oklahoma City.
A Wild Life Enthusiast’s Greatest Moments of Joy
Reflecting back on his own career across twenty years, Srikanth came from a regular middle class family who has done his computer science engineering from RVCE Bangalore His dad was a Professor in Bio Chemistry at the Government Science College Bangalore and mother used to work for the Reserve Bank of India.
At an early stage of his career, he was exposed to customer facing roles. Involved in several wild life conservation initiatives, Srikanth said “My most fascinating experience was a week- long Tiger census in one of the largest tiger reserves in Southern India at the Bandipur Tiger Reserve.”
The greatest moments of joy was when the customers placed their trust in him to make them successful. Srikanth believes trust is the highest form of human motivation which brings out the best human values in people and everlasting relationships. This simple principle has helped him as an entrepreneur in several ways and continuing to do so every single day. His first investors and first set of customers were his friends and former customers of Krishnan, Derick.
Transforming Industrial IoT Solutions with World Class Multi- Disciplinary Team
Flutura is a niche big data analytics solution company offering industrial IoT solutions with a vision to transform operational outcomes with its main offices located in Houston and Palo Alto, USA; Bangalore, India. It is one of the very few companies in the world to have unique insights into last mile issues in engineering operations for the Oil and Gas, Specialty Chemicals, Heavy Machinery Manufacturing and adjacent sectors.
Another aspect about Flutura is, it has a world class multi- disciplinary team of petroleum engineers, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers & computer science folks who are shaping Cerebra with over 400+ features. This Product is the most comprehensive in the industry for an Industrial IoT platform. Recently Gartner published their inaugural version of the industrial IoT magic quadrant and Flutura’s Cerebra is part of this elite list.
Today, it has specific digital assistants addressing super surgical engineering issues and they are proud to have some great engineering companies with category leaders in their respective industries as their customers.
Experimenting the Challenges
Srikanth has a different take on risks, since he views everything as experiments. A lot of learning in his journey has happened on the market front. This is the most trickiest issue to tackle as lot of people still don’t understand how fragmented the industrial IoT market is and the buyer’s mental model within this space.
From thereon, they have zeroed the unplanned downtime of heavy machinery and machine influenced process deviations as an area which is vastly underserved. And they also believe this space will continue to evolve in every step from now on and will be towards Large Scale Autonomous Operations which will become all pervasive.
The good thing about having co-founders in the entrepreneurial journey is that a person can have what they calls ‘Core Dump’ sessions. In this session, they let their emotions out and get into a more objective mode of assessing ‘why our experiment failed’. This helps them to get back to a super objective way of assessing failures and designing the next experiment better.
Srikanth’s Advice for Successful Peers
Srikanth said that the world’s economic forum has done a numerous studies and predicts that almost sixty-five percentage of children entering primary school today will end up working in new jobs that don’t yet exist which tells, how the world is changing.
Though with 90% of learning across all spheres including understanding himself from the past five years yet believes there is so much to learn and states “See everything as experiments and seek help, there is plenty available. Articulate your product or service in the buyer’s language and make it tangible.”
Assessing the North Pole and Fine Tuning to Stay on Track
Srikanth views the increasing opportunity to take their products that they are serving by immersing himself into the industries and sectors. Further, he is discovering the next moon shot idea / product features and finding better ways to sell their product by continuously assessing the top friction points which exists for their business today. He is also planning to get into the uncharted territories to explore and expand.
Source :-The 30 Inspiring Entreprenuers to watch in 2018
