Kanjhlia discusses changing market needs, how essential analytics and cyber security has become across all industries, and the modules associated with OneView™.

UMC: What is the company culture like at Rolta?

Raj Kanjhlia: Being a provider of innovative IP-led solutions for Asset intensive & Engineering industries, Rolta is different from traditional IT services players. Rolta places significant emphasis on risk taking and encourages initiatives and innovation at all levels – employees, divisions, and company.

Rolta’s vision - To continuously INNOVATE and provide knowledge-based IT solutions that deliver remarkable INSIGHTS and lasting IMPACT in the way our world operates.

UMC: What is the Rolta Foundation?

Kanjhlia: Rolta started operation almost 30-years ago, with focus on Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and Engineering Design, as it served as the face of Intergraph in India. In 2017, Rolta continues to focus on these areas but with its own IP and core strengths. A few years ago, aware of the changing market needs and technological direction of the industry, Rolta began developing its own IP-led solutions in Big-data Analytics (OneView Enterprise Suite) and database/BI migration platform (SmartMigrate). It was a conscious decision to focus on solutions rather than services, unlike most of its peers in the industry.

UMC: General George S. Patton once said, "If everybody is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking." Do you feel that is an accurate idea with regard to innovating technology and keeping the door open to new ideas within the company?

Kanjhlia: Absolutely, innovation is the lifeline of all industries, especially in Information Technology. It is known that every innovation is borne out of a problem statement. Rolta has seized each challenge as an opportunity and created the existing business by thinking and acting differently from the herd. This is also embedded in Rolta’s Vision statement.

UMC: Rolta serves various industries. Do your engagements outside the sphere of the utility industry help in developing products and services for your utility clients? 

Kanjhlia: Yes, they do. With focus on Asset intensive & Engineering industry, most of our solutions are intertwined across Energy & Utilities, Oil & Gas, Chemicals and Process industry, Transport etc. Be it any of the Rolta IP - OneView™ Enterprise Suite, SmartMigrate, OnPoint, or iPerspective, etc. all of these solutions are applicable to these industries and we infuse and leverage learnings from one industry for the benefit of others industries.

UMC: Tell me about Rolta OneView™. What are the modules associated with this product?

Kanjhlia: Rolta’s flagship solution, OneView, is a comprehensive industry specific enterprise analytics solution which is Big Data and Cloud ready. It brings unique value through role based actionable insights, fuses IT-OT, GIS, Engineering and IoT data and correlates operational and business intelligence. This helps drive organizational strategy across the value chain, through informed decisions, resulting in desired business transformation.

OneView™ has 4000+ built-in KPI’s and an integrated industry-oriented knowledge model that provides enterprise wide, multi-site and cross-functional visibility across areas such as Operations, Assets, Maintenance and Reliability, Customers, Supply Chain, Health Safety and Environment, Sustainability, Projects, and Business (Sales & Marketing, Finance & HR) for effective decision making.

OneView is being used by Oil & gas (upstream, mid-stream and downstream), Energy & Utilities, Chemical, Transport companies, etc. It has received recognition from SAP, Gartner, Frost & Sullivan, and McKinsey.

UMC: Based on Rolta’s experience with defense and security, how concerned do you believe the utility industry should be about cyber security? 

Kanjhlia: Today, cyber security is an important issue not only for the utility industry, but across all industries. The asset-intensive Oil & Gas, Utilities & Water are the core industries and are more vulnerable due to their dispersed assets and proliferation of IoT, making them more susceptible to cyber-attacks. Hence, there’s an increased need for hardening the physical infrastructure, systems, and process to avoid a major event.

UMC: What were the biggest obstacles that Alabama Power Company encountered in their endeavors to improve their Integrated Distribution Management System? How did Rolta help them achieve their goals?

Kanjhlia: Alabama Power wanted to have an integrated BI dashboard for the transmission business based on a prototype done for them in order to enhance their existing dashboards. Rolta leveraged its OneView solution to provide an integrated BI dashboard that included up to 15 Fact and Dimension Tables in Phase I. The project also involved building the integration mappings with 5 source systems for data extraction. This data was staged into the new BI data warehouse to support the dashboard and data entry screens. The OneView dashboard was integrated with GIS web maps for project tracking.

 UMC: In your opinion, what is the next “big thing” with regard to technology and the utility industry?

Kanjhlia: With IoT, Smart Meters, Wind-turbines, Solar PV, DERs, Social Media, customers are generating and storing humungous amounts of data; a task which would have been difficult to fathom a decade earlier. Now, it is critical to have a system which brings data from various sources together – homogenizes it, massages it, and provides actionable business insights. Such a system should help customers operate more efficiently, meet regulatory compliance, and solve business problems. OneView addresses all of these issues out-of-the-box. The customer gets a proven solution with lower TCO, rapid go-live, and risk-free deployment with guaranteed outcomes.