In our market performance review of 2022, Sid Bhatia, Regional Vice President & General Manager, Middle East & Turkey at Dataiku opines how the company has performed in the year.
“Dataiku is now the choice of platform for close to 50 of the largest data-driven organizations in the Middle East”
Sid Bhatia, Regional Vice President & General Manager, Middle East & Turkey at Dataiku
Can you briefly touch on how 2022 was for your company in the region?
The Dataiku Middle East customer base is growing very aggressively. Regionally, we are working with top-tier organizations in the Telecommunication, Financial Services, Manufacturing, Oil & Gas & Large Public sectors, that are focused on moving beyond talking about AI/ML as buzzwords and are instead laser-focused on finding practical use cases for the technology, in a way that is collaborative and sustainable for the long term and creates true business value.
Dataiku is supporting agility in organizations’ data efforts via collaborative, elastic, and responsible AI, all at an enterprise scale. At its core, Dataiku believes that in order to stay relevant in today’s changing world, companies need to harness Enterprise AI as a widespread organizational asset instead of siloing it into a specific team or role.
What were some of the big milestones for the company in 2022
- Growing customer base across industries
- Customer retention & expansion
- Extremely positive customer feedback on the quality of software and services offered & hence great customer satisfaction scores
- Hiring top talent; the employee count has grown by 100% with significant investments in Customer Success, implementation, engagement managers, customer-facing data science teams
- Huge success of our partnerships program in 2022 with Dataiku becoming the platform of choice for all leading SI, consulting companies & boutique houses
Which industries have you seen the most traction in 2022 and why?
Dataiku is the leading choice for public sector entities in the Middle East, but we have seen a lot of traction in Banking, Energy & Manufacturing too. Dataiku’s Middle East customer base is growing very aggressively across sectors & the reason for this growth is Dataiku’s focus on project and customer success. We are committed to ensuring that companies achieve positive business outcomes through their engagement and interaction with our product, and our customer success team does this by interacting regularly with and understanding each individual enterprise’s unique needs. We want to highlight the incredible work of Dataiku’s Customer Success team and show what role they play in the day-to-day data science efforts of our customers.
How many net new customers have you added this year?
Dataiku is now the choice of platform for close to 50 of the largest data-driven organizations in the Middle East, covering sectors such as Telecommunication, Financial Services, Insurance, Manufacturing, Energy & Large Public sector entities that we have onboarded in the last couple of years alone.
Leveraging a customer-centric engagement approach, Dataiku has built a robust reputation across the region, empowering public and private enterprises with comprehensive AI solutions built on our innovative Data Science Studio (DSS) platform — a solution that democratizes data science by catering to a range of users, from the non-technical to statisticians and software developers. DSS is designed to remove friction in data access, cleaning, modeling, and deployment, leading to comprehensive information suites that greatly enhance operational efficiency, regardless of the scale or industry of the user base.
What is your regional strategy as we head into 2023?
Today, the democratization of data science across the enterprise, and tools that put data into the hands of the many and not just the elite few (like data scientists or even analysts), means that companies are using more data in more ways than ever before. And that’s extremely valuable; in fact, the companies that have seen the most success in using data to drive the business take this approach. Data democratization is the path forward to eventually enabling AI services. The idea is deeply intertwined with the concepts of collaboration as well as self-service analytics.
With demand for the DSML platform growing at scale, we believe our partner channel program is central to our ongoing success. We build meaningful, lasting partnerships by carefully evaluating what each company gets from the collaboration, in terms of their individual strategy, capabilities, resources, and offerings. Our partners range from large system integrators, global consulting companies, and technology vendors to boutique houses focused on value-rich niche solutions.
In 2023 we are also further expanding our Africa operations too which includes investing in people on the ground to serve our growing customer base. Dataiku is growing fast regionally as one of the best-performing regions worldwide.
