Freshworks, an Indian software company, creates cloud-based solutions for businesses. Manish Mishra, Head – MEA, Freshworks, interacts with The Integrator on the company’s mission to create easy digitalization opportunity for enterprises.

What role does Freshworks play in their digital transformation journey of enterprises?

While in the aftermath of the pandemic, organizations have understood the need for an accelerated pace of digital transformation to optimize their digital-first engagement with employees and customers, many have been left wondering where to start. IT and business leaders cannot simply execute on a couple key initiatives and then rest on their laurels. A successful digital transformation journey is one of continuous evaluation of the company.

Digital technologies are only useful when they have been wholeheartedly embraced by the intended user base. This is where Freshworks’ democratic design principles yield results. Our software is designed from the bottom up to be easy to pick up and learn by the front-line user in sales, support, marketing, or IT. At Freshworks, we strive to put more power into the hands of end-users through intuitive interfaces, easy integrations, and straightforward workflows.

Discuss the role of cloud and its services in digital transformation

Cloud is key to digital transformation. It provides the platform for enterprises to digitalize operations with far less risk, predictable operational costs, and a dramatically flattened technical curve.

For this reason, Freshworks has ensured that our software is purpose built for the cloud and also for our end users, making it easy to set up and run. And we work very hard to make sure it works seamlessly for everyone. Unlike traditional enterprise software companies that design for the Fortune 500 executive suite, we design for the millions of organizations that need business software to work out-of-the-box, empowering end-users to be productive in no time with beautiful software they will love.

How do you distinguish between Freshworks and its competitors in offering cyber protection within its solution range?

We believe our out-of-box security features, alignment to global industry standards, and security best practices, are competitive differentiators. We have a robust product and software security process, incorporating security in every stage of the product life cycle to optimize our ability to thwart the ongoing digital threats. The continuous testing and monitoring approach also accelerates our time-to-market and improves the quality of the solution we offer, which has enabled us to earn and maintain the trust of more than 58,000 customers across the globe.

Elaborate on the opportunities of SMEs and large enterprises while choosing to transform digital applications and devices

With the democratization of digitization, today, both SMEs and large enterprises have the ability to leverage the latest technologies to advance their IT transformation agendas as they look to drive business outcomes. We are already starting to see businesses deploy AI and IoT infrastructure without owning a single server or proprietary piece of cognitive code. Modern no-code interfaces will become more popular as a lack of programming knowledge will cease to become a barrier to offering world-class customer and employee experiences through cloud technology.

We also believe organizations stand to benefit tremendously from deploying chatbots. Regional businesses are having to re-evaluate the employee experience because now that talent has become a global market – thanks to the success of remote work – employees can be a lot more discerning when selecting an employer.

And of course, all this is underpinned by the steady march towards cloud as with greater adoption of SaaS and PaaS, more organizations have the ability to adopt such cutting-edge innovations.