In the rapidly evolving world, it is essential for organizations to be innovative to stay competitive in the market and ensure prolonged success. This need for innovation has empowered great leaders who are capable of influencing and inspiring creative efforts. Just think of how difficult it will be for modern organizations to survive in the dynamic marketplace without the creative ideas of innovative minds?
Innovation is synonymous with creativity—free-flowing creative ideas can do wonders. An innovative leader comprehends the uncanny knack to consider all possibilities and calculated predictions to scale the company’s success to a new level of success. Anto Binish Kaspar, Founder and CEO of Roanuz Softwares has been displaying that know-how through his adept leadership.
Anto is a firm believer in technology, he comprehends how it has the power of doing the unimaginable in the various sectors and its creative application in the sports tech and fantasy gaming domain. With the inception of Roanuz in May 2012, he took a step ahead in the direction that merges innovation with Artificial Intelligence (AI).
In this interview, Insights Success shines the limelight on the groundbreaking journey of Anto Binish Kaspar and his innovations that made him excel as one of the most influential leaders in the industry.
Enlighten our readers about yourself and shed light on your professional tenure in the sports and gaming industry highlighting your contribution in scaling Roanuz Softwares’ success to greater heights.
AI has been transforming various sectors across the world, and what not in recent times! But little did we think of its innovative application in the sports and gaming industry.
I, along with my diverse team, have developed Roanuz, India’s pioneering AI-driven fantasy sports platform. Before the Roanuz Cricket API, there was no way for a startup to subscribe to quality data at an affordable cost. Quality data, Live Stats, AI-powered, affordable cost and no contract – this combination is unique and it’s what is needed for the industry to grow.
I am a firm believer in technology and how it has the power of doing the unimaginable in the various sectors, and its creative application in the sports tech and fantasy gaming domain. With the inception of Roanuz in May 2012, I took a step ahead in the direction that merges innovation with AI. With the company headquartered in Chennai, we hire, train and manage the team that builds state-of-art applications.
Although the company had been working constantly on the development of sports tech, our stance in delivering the best had been consistent by fulfilling the customer requirement.
What professional qualities and values do you think your clients, colleagues, and employees admire in you the most?Â
We, at Roanuz, have been making the best of our efforts to provide customer support with the right solutions. Our main focus on being the best data provider is to satisfy the customer with a timely response and by offering various convenient package plans for all our products and services.
As we remain to stand out as a team, we brainstorm, discuss, exchange ideas and then curate the big innovation with a better shape. Being a team not only makes us very innovative but also builds more power to turn visualization into reality much more efficiently. We admire each other’s capability of bringing out the best with more responsibility and dedication.
Even when COVID-19 persisted with a temporary shutdown of the work from the office situation, the team has been working to its full potential despite the practical inconvenience. That unstoppable work culture has actually enhanced the possibility of creating innovation with technology even more powerfully supported by the entire team’s involvement.
What was the ideology and inspiration behind the establishment of Roanuz Softwares and what strategies would you implement to enhance its operations eventually?
Roanuz was conceptualized, formed and bootstrapped with a dream to make a huge global impact on AI and Sports Tech. Very soon the team realized cricket is far away from the latest tech, and they worked to bring in new innovative possibilities and avenues for the game enthusiasts. We then realized Cricket Dataset quality and availability weren’t as good as other sports like Soccer.
Our strategy to be the best is to continue the innovation in sports tech which keeps us ahead of anyone in this industry with organic sales. What we would like to do is, create awareness among more inventors, businessmen, and sports enthusiasts on what’s possible to achieve with the big data that we have curated, that is the AI-powered solution and live stats.
Amidst all the challenges, as a team, we are absolutely overwhelmed by the support we offer to our customers by understanding the practical difficulties of data development and to power up the services with the right solution.
Being an experienced leader, share your opinion on how the adoption of modern technologies like AI and ML impacts your industry and how is Roanuz Softwares adapting to the change?Â
Though ‘n’ number of technologies evolve in the market, the SaaS industry has proven its footprints much prominently in the IT industry. The SaaS industry being the backbone of all the products-based business sectors, the ways to minimize the workload of the services are still in great demand.
However, at present, there has been a steady growth in Ambient Intelligence with AI. This supports the lives of disabled people, anomaly detection in media, machine learning and natural language processing capabilities which are flourishing enough to be unthinkable.
In the near future, AI will play a critical role in our everyday lives such as suggesting the best playing XI for the match, identifying the possible injuries in sports much in advance by analyzing many factors through the general fitness and number of minutes played, smart policing, space exploration and better Natural Language Processing that will be most beneficial for most Indian languages and much more.
Considering the current industry scenario, what kind of challenges do you face, and how do you plan to overcome them?Â
Though there are many competitors in the market, we have been doing our best to provide a better customer experience in the last nine years. As far as the Indian market’s concerned, it is still so fresh to figure out the best since there have been many fantasy leagues piling up to the grind. Anyhow, the sports data market in India will take a lot more time to reach that outstanding level since one of the sports, which is significantly cricket, has been a dominant force for many decades by now.
The whole industry has always been curious for something new to shape up the needs in tech development firms with the right solutions. There is now not one but many with niche support for everything.
In the earlier days, we found collecting data and storing the data to be the greatest challenge while building up as a startup whereas our AI-infused and the best-ever SaaS architecture with Cricket Editor and the usage of AWS made it possible to stand even in any stronger phase.
What would be your advice to budding entrepreneurs who aspire to venture into the sports and gaming industry?Â
Artificial Intelligence has found its way into almost all the key sectors today. Sports technology is one such sector that has been witnessing newer developments. Roanuz is one such AI-based sports technology company whose creative ideas have opened up new possibilities for the sports enthusiasts.
On the other hand, AI has been showing a steady progression in ambient intelligence, thereby enriching the lives of disabled people and with anomaly detection in the media. Therefore, the possibilities for today’s founders are endless. Also, it is an important responsibility for the founders to ensure your technology is non-abusable, non-harassing and strives to serve against illegal activities.
How do you envision scaling Roanuz Softwares’ operations and offerings in 2022 and beyond?Â
The company’s strategy is to continue the innovations in sports tech that can be ahead of anyone in this industry. Roanuz has been witnessing 2X growth in its sales every year and has already worked with industry stalwarts like Amazon Echo, Opera, Express UK, Kings XI Punjab, Zapr, Gujarat Lions, Machaao, Sportskeeda, Yatra, SilverPush, Freecharge, Starpick and many other Fantasy Sports clients.
We are proud to be in a remarkable position for introducing a new business model to the Sports tech industry. We created a new platform for engineers, innovators and data scientists to innovate sports analytics, prediction and live statistics.
Roanuz currently operates through its three offices; two in India – Chennai and Trivandrum, and the third in Iceland – Reykjavik. In April 2017, Icelandic company 8H EHF merged with Roanuz to form a new branch in Iceland by the name Roanuz EHF.
On the whole, Roanuz Sports works consistently on being the one-stop shop for all sports tech needs globally by enduring the customer’s satisfaction to the fullest with the best ever data providing tech development solutions.
