Ascend
Technology Transformation and Architecture Expert

Dynamic and Progressive businesses often are advancing their strategy, transforming and striving to operate effectively with optimal costs structure. The Ascend is called up on, often to, increase client’s profitable growth and gain competitive advantage. Having been in the business for over 14 years, The Ascend primarily focuses on technology strategy and delivery solutions with keen focus on delivering Pragmatic Insights and Predictable Outcomes^TM, using Enterprise Architecture (EA) as a strategy and architecture tool, and advancing digital enablement and business analytics outcomes. The firm uses EA as a guiding principle and strategy to enable business architecture, pre-merger due diligence, post-merger integration, as well as event-driven solutions. If companies might go through an IPO or need to split or diversify, these events can be effectively managed using EA.

The goal of the EA process is to delineate the relationships between these elements and make sure they are aligned to produce the desired results. Business architecture provides a way to systematically capture the thousands of relationships (that currently exist in hundreds of places, including people’s heads) so the business can reliably navigate change (regardless of scale and complexity). This ability to model relationships using capabilities to align strategy and operations provides the “glue” to guide decisions used to prioritize and respond to change (internal and external). These responses to change come in the form of initiatives (outcome driven) upon which solutions are designed and implemented using a collaborative application of architecture disciplines to improve technical service delivery to balance the short-term needs for operational excellence (business and functional service delivery) and long term needs as expressed through strategy.

“When I talk to a CIO or a CTO, I talk about three things: Portfolio management for technology, IT governance, and enterprise architecture as a tool to govern portfolio management,” says Sri Navalpakkam, President and Managing Partner at The Ascend. The Ascend’s enterprise architecture practice along with an industry-leading business architecture execution framework compliments and advances two core tenets, the first is digital transformation, where business processes that have been very cumbersome or through manual input are digitized, allowing for quicker time to market while also attaining customer obsession, empowering client’s loyal customers with ‘right sized’ interactions and increasing customer lifetime value (CLV). The second is business analytics, where user data collected from continually various sources, including social media and smartphones is analyzed for real-time insights that are often deployed into customer’s business processes. While EA is a part of the technology strategy solutions practice, the complementarity with digital transformation solutions (DTS) practice and business analytics solutions (BAS) drives more symbiotic business value. These three practices allow client companies to become predictive and digital enterprises. When companies hire The Ascend, typically we conduct a current state assessment, future state definition and a launch-sequenced pragmatic roadmap. The journey roadmap includes actionable recommendations and an implementation plan, typically executed in agile 30-60-90-day iterative cycles over a period of 18 months or two+ years, ensuring that the value is imminent, measured, visible, and cumulative.

“We take down islands of information and content to streamline and automate the business with end-to-end solutions. One of our unique offerings is robotic process automation (RPA) combined with AI that works toward breaking the silos exists in the business today,” explains Navalpakkam.

Ascend uses a proven, field-tested, proprietary methodology called Accelo^TM that guides most engagements with a comprehensive toolkit and allows clients with nuanced, adept change management approach.

The Ascend doesn’t prescribe solutions to the client; they work with them collaboratively to create Pragmatic Insights and Predictable Outcomes^TM that drive profitable revenue growth, position for competitive differentiation and optimize operations and costs

Ascend delivers digital AI-driven advanced analytics to create an enterprise platform for its customers. Leveraging the platform, the company provides real-time insights and AI-driven analytical models for enhancing sales-marketing analytics, customer lifetime value, retention models, and credit risk models, to name a few. “The platforms we developed collects data and enables Insights-as-a-Service (IaaS^TM) and Insights-as-a-Platform (IaaP^TM), and delivers it to customers for real-time decision-making capabilities,” explains Navalpakkam.

In one instance, a private equity company that was looking to revamp their technology portfolio brought in The Ascend, who came up with a roadmap by examining the company’s portfolio from a business process and technology standpoint. “Successfully delivering using their EA toolkit, we helped the company modernize their technology portfolio while optimizing their internal IT teams” - says Navalpakkam. Being a product company that delivered solutions to banks and financial institutions, The Ascend removed costing from their operations, improved margins, helped them innovate and create new sources of revenue. The firm was then sold to another PE investor with a return of 10x EBITDA multiple.
The Ascend’s work with clients collaboratively creates ‘win themes’ to maximize returns and value. The ‘Win themes,’ are unique solutions to every client, and every client’s situation. When complete, The Ascend leaves the value-added assets, allowing them to elaborate and build up on, as necessary. Over the years, the company has been a valued partner to some of the leading organizations across the globe in industries ranging from manufacturing, and supply chain to finance. In the long run, Ascend envisions being a forerunner in the realm of digital transformation using its RPA, AI, and advanced analytics. “We want to be at the cornerstone of innovation and drive value for our customers and help them embark on the digital journey with advanced AI-driven analytics,” concludes Navalpakkam.