A tech veteran with a mission to automate Indian enterprises with robotics

Former Siemens, SAP, Microsoft exec and current head of RPA software firm Blue Prism in India, Peter Gartenberg believes large enterprises in the country have miles to go in adopting automation

Earlier this year, Blue Prism, a UK-based robotic process automation (RPA) software firm, launched a GitHub-like community targeting global capability centres (GCCs) in India to help them run their operations more efficiently. 

The man helping Blue Prism in this effort is Peter Gartenberg, an America-born top executive who has made India as his home after spending close to two decades in the country, working with global technology companies such as Siemens, Infor, SAP and Microsoft. Last December, Gartenberg joined Blue Prism to head its India operations with a mandate to help the firm acquire a leadership position among India-based GCCs, Indian enterprises and system integrators. 

Originally called captive centres in the early 1990s, GCCs in India are now known as global in-house centres (GICs), and are essentially offshore units that perform designated functions for large organisations. 

"Originally, they were looking at labour arbitrage and these kind of things. And now, really, innovation is a key part of these GCCs in India...that community was the first adopter of large-scale automation. And predominantly that large-scale automation was with Blue Prism," said Gartenberg. Blue Prism is focused on large-scale enterprise automation programmes, which GCCs in India began adopting about four years ago. 

Gartenberg added that Blue Prism has a huge community of India-based clients such Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro, Microsoft, EY, that are doing a lot of work in RPA to service their customers outside India. 

The recently launched India GCC Community is looking to help some of these partners. Asserting that there is a lot of talent "sitting in India",  Gartenberg says his firm wants to get them plugged in to this community, to also drive their innovation Blue Prism. 

Before Blue Prism, Garternberg had worked with Microsoft in India, where as General Manager, he was leading the tech giant's India Enterprise business. The last 18 of his 30-odd years in the industry have been based in India. 

Prior to Microsoft, Gartenberg was working with German software maker SAP as its MD and president for theIndian subcontinent, and before that, he led the Asia-Pacific operations of Siemens’ Enterprise Telecommunications business as its chairman, MD and executive VP.

That makes Gartenberg the perfect candidate for understanding and expanding business the Indian market, not least because he lives next door to Bollywood superstar Shahrukh Khan -- though, of course, he isn't really star-struck. But it helps that he has roots in Punjab from his grandfather's side, who met his grandmother at the University of California --  something that would have made of a great movie script in those times. 

However, Gartenberg’s interest in, and passion for India is evident from the way he speaks about the evolution of automation in the enterprise landscape. While business process management firms in the country are often seen to be among the earliest mass adopters of RPA, the manner in which the success of RPA is quantified and measured has changed. 

Gartenberg said RPA has evolved from an FTE (the number of hours worked by an employee on a full-time basis)-focussed tool to serving customers better by improving their processes and adding value to their business by improving manual processes.

For example, one of Blue Prism's clients in the US has pipelines running into several miles in a harsh environmental area. RPA provides the client with the ability to monitor the pipeline using computer vision. With artificial intelligence (AI) built into the system, evaluating the corrosion of the pipes becomes much easier, replacing an earlier process that needed a human to monitor several television feeds. 

But is the India GCC Community not similar to GitHub? The community of RPA professionals coming together to share their knowledge is quite similar, says Gartenberg, but the community here is more niche in terms of the areas it addresses. The focus is on the GCC community because they are the ones doing maximum work with RPA. 

"So for us, they're a very strategic community, because we think they're a big innovator...if you go into the Indian enterprise market, that's been a bit of a laggard compared to global (firms)," said Gartenberg. “And it's nothing against Indian enterprises. I've been working with them for almost 20 years here, but in this area of automation, Indian enterprises were relatively slow to adopt ... (and) scale strategic automation.”