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Exclusive Interaction - Kanti Prabha, Co-Founder and COO, SirionLabs

Kanti Prabha, Co-Founder and COO, SirionLabs talks about her SaaS platform and the challenges in Corona lockdowns and meeting these challenges.

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Archana Verma
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SirionLabs

Kanti Prabha, Co-founder & COO, SirionLabs, works with SaaS platform. Here she discusses about her work.

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How does SaaS platform give beneficial results to the enterprises?

 Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications have emerged as the ideal choice for enterprise application buyers who continue to face constant burden to mitigate operational costs, explore less capital-intensive alternatives and adopt modern software. Sirion’s highly accessible and scalable SaaS product is built with advanced AI-driven technology that offers a robust enterprise-grade solution.

Sirion’s scalability is something only a SaaS platform can offer, enabling it to process millions of contract documents simultaneously. There is no restriction on the number of users that can collaborate on SirionLabs either.

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SaaS products enable organizations to instantly leverage cutting-edge technologies and innovations built over several years with significant R&D investments by vendors such as SirionLabs.

For example, SirionLabs auto-extracts vital information from contracts, including expected outcomes, computational objects such as base charges, rate cards, pricing adjustments and risks. This data is fed into Sirion’s powerful algorithms and workflows enabling auto-computation of contractual performance requirements. Without SaaS platforms like SirionLabs, organizations would have to rely on manual approaches to manage their contractual relationships which would be less accurate and more time-consuming.

Another big advantage is that SaaS products like SirionLabs can easily integrate with existing enterprise systems and tools so that investments in legacy implementations don’t go waste. To enable automated, real-time tracking of performance against the underlying contractual obligations and service levels, Sirion comes with integrations with other enterprise systems such as Procure-to-Pay, ITSM (IT service management tools), GRC (Governance, Risk & Compliances systems), ERP etc. Sirion auto-validates invoices against the performance and contract data enabling easy identification of invoice discrepancies.

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As further evidence of the effectiveness of the SaaS model to adopt advanced technology, our clients get access to Sirion’s permissioned-ledger architecture which is used in blockchain applications, for shared access to the engagement data for both buyers and supplier teams. This creates a single-source-of-truth across all facets of the engagement removing resistance and improving trust, alignment, and collaboration between the parties.

This holistic approach, made possible by cutting-edge, cloud-based technology, enables enterprises to manage their commercial relationships effectively driving improved business outcomes, reduced spend leakage of up to 10% of the annual spend, 2-5% incremental revenue, enhanced buyer-supplier relationship, and a 60% reduction in contract governance costs.

How has your business growth been in 2020?

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The Covid-19 pandemic is an unparalleled crisis that has caused significant disruption for most businesses. At the same time, it has exposed the weaknesses in supply chains like never before and has amplified the urgency to fix these breaches to create better perception and control for organizations in their supplier and customer arrangements.

Sirion was built precisely for this purpose, allowing customers and suppliers to have greater control and governance while improving efficiencies. The interest in our product has only increased during the pandemic, with the focus on keeping supply chains up and running putting a renewed emphasis on the efficient execution and management of enterprise engagements.

Sirion was able to successfully secure $44million in the Series C funding round led by Tiger Global and Avatar Growth Capital in the middle of the pandemic (in May 2020), this is definitely a reflection of our continued momentum despite the challenging environments.

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Some of the other key indicators of SirionLabs’ continued momentum include 4x growth in number of customers over the past 18 months, positioned as a Visionary in Gartner’s Inaugural Magic Quadrant for Contract Life Cycle Management in March 2020, positioned as a Value Leader in Spend Matters’ Contract Lifecycle Management Solution Map 2020, recognized in Forrester’s CLM Now Tech Report 2020 and completing the Great Place To Work certification this year.

We continue to invest to enhance our engineering competences, especially in AI. We have established a new AI laboratory in Seattle, US in 2020 to accelerate our product roadmap. We have expanded our technology leadership with the recent appointments of our new Chief Technology Officer (Anu Engineer who joined us from Cloudera) and Chief Product Officer (Mahesh Unnikrishnan – joined us from Google) in Seattle. Additionally, we have significantly ramped up our sales and marketing infrastructure under the leadership of our new Chief Revenue Officer, Amol Joshi and enhancing our customer success effectiveness under the leadership of Mark Voytek, who recently joined us as Chief Customer Officer from EY.

A testament to our growth mindset has been our focus on expanding our partner ecosystem. We have been very successful in doing so and brought on board various partner organisations as consulting, implementation, technology, and reseller partners. This ecosystem will power the next phase of our growth, which we have already started witnessing.

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Expanding our product offering, we launched a new product 'SirionAE' this year. The most powerful, AI-driven auto-extraction and contract analytics platform in the market, SirionAE enables organizations to quickly digitise their legacy contract portfolio and gain full visibility into risks, entitlements, and obligations from a central dashboard.

On the heels of this new product announcement, SirionLabs announced the next phase of its evolution with several patent-pending applications. These applications directly further the company's mission by fulfilling smart contracting technology's promises with full visibility into obligations, entitlements, and invoice leakage. The patents deal with the automated extraction of performance segments and metadata values within contract documents and the method and system for determining risk scores post analysis, enabling businesses to process more than 1M documents per day with an increase in tasks through automation by as much as 50%.

What have your challenges been in 2020? How do you meet your challenges?

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Over the past several months, almost every supply chain has been impacted by the ongoing Coronavirus. As businesses navigate these uncertain times, trust, certainty, and accountability have become more relevant than ever in business relationships. Sirion comes to the rescue of organisations, by enabling better control, visibility and collaboration between buyers and suppliers.

A lot of our customers deliver essential services and rely on us to keep their supply chains running. We are helping such businesses and others through enhanced capabilities designed for the current pandemic. Examples include a customized Covid-19 dashboard to quickly analyze potential risks based on geographical scope or terms contained or missing in contracts. We have also recalibrated the Sirion AI-extraction engine to help clients quickly break down contracts into actionable data that can be used to focus on critical clauses such as Force Majeure, Data Protection and Confidentiality, Termination, Insurance Coverage, Business continuity, etc.

The pandemic has definitely created challenges for us putting our leadership capabilities and adaptability to the test both as an organisation as well as at a personal level. One of the biggest challenges before us was quickly ensuring business continuity during the transition to a work-from-home environment.

Thankfully, we did not face any operational issues during the pandemic as SirionLabs’ entire employee base has been remote ready, even before the situation escalated. Our strong business continuity readiness enabled us to seamlessly transition to a ‘work from home’ set-up without any business disruption. Today, our entire workforce is supporting customers from the safety of their homes. To ensure employee safety and productivity during the pandemic, following are some of the initiatives we have taken:

  • We entrusted our HR department to drive virtual employee engagement and ensure emotional well being of our employees. Examples include daily company-wide video calls; employee engagement initiatives such as online quizzes, parties and coffee meetings; COVID specific enhanced family medical cover etc.
  • As employees are working from home, we have ensured that they are technologically equipped. Our technical support teams are remotely enabled to provide 24×7 product support to our users worldwide as per the committed SLAs.
  • We clearly document and communicate progress made against milestones as per the defined roadmap at an employee as well as a team level.

We also leverage productivity tools such as JIRA to assist while dealing with work prioritisation and issue resolution and Slack for internal communication.

Our entire leadership team is focused on extending the required support to our employees and clients during these unparalleled times by evaluating and appropriately responding to all the challenges that come our way.

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