Rakuten India forays into B2B technology products; launches 'SixthSense'

with a 300-member data sciences and AI organisation that builds capabilities that are used by all of our businesses, whether its computer vision, text, speech or voice, Gopinath said.Rakuten SixthSense is launching in India and will gradually be rolled out to other global regions.SixthSense is in the observability and monitoring space.

Rakuten India, the Bengaluru-based technology arm of Rakuten Group, on Wednesday announced its foray into B2B technology products with the launch of 'SixthSense'.

Rakuten SixthSense - a 'Code to Customer' Observability platform - has been developed in India and will help provide businesses and IT leaders intuitive end-to-end visibility of the entire IT environment.

Rakuten India is the largest of Rakuten's nine technology hubs outside Japan. It has over 1,500 people and there are plans to ramp up the headcount further over the next 2-3 years.

''Rakuten India was started about six years ago with about 100 or so employees, primarily to tap into the technology talent in India to establish a technology centre and today, we are the second largest product, technology and R&D centre for Rakuten globally, we are about 1,500-plus employees now and we're looking to further scale,'' Rakuten India CEO Sunil Gopinath told PTI.

The goal is to build this to a 2,000-3,000 member organisation in the next two to three years, he added.

A lot of Rakuten's businesses - be it commerce, FinTech, cloud, mobile or ads and media, a lot of the key businesses are powered by the technology built in Rakuten India, he said.

''We also have a very big Center of Excellence for data science and AI for Rakuten, Inc... with a 300-member data sciences and AI organisation that builds capabilities that are used by all of our businesses, whether it's computer vision, text, speech or voice,'' Gopinath said.

Rakuten SixthSense is launching in India and will gradually be rolled out to other global regions.

''SixthSense is in the observability and monitoring space. Globally, observability itself is a USD 30 billion-plus kind of market and we feel we have a very solid product that we are bringing to the market...we have tested it in-house across dozens of Rakuten's businesses and they are all using it successfully,'' he said.

Gopinath explained that with a significant increase in data generated from across the business, there is an urgent need, especially in the midst of a continuously transforming digital environment, to glean insights from data at a faster rate and with a higher ROI (return on investment) for businesses to stay competitive.

''We have selected India as the first launch market as the region has always been a hub of exceptional engineering talent and a mature market that offers exciting opportunities for growth as Indian enterprises drive significant changes in their existing IT environments to support their growing customer needs,'' Gopinath said.

As a SaaS platform, it delivers speed to customers while its pay-as-you-grow model offers customers a balance of value and investment.

''With our strong capabilities in data sciences and AI, Rakuten Sixth Sense will deliver on advanced capabilities that will differentiate it. I expect Rakuten SixthSense to become a significant revenue contributor within Rakuten's global technology hubs,'' he said.

(This story has not been edited by Devdiscourse staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)