Q&A with Kinshuk Rakshith
As part of our Q&A blog series, Kinshuk Rakshith, InterSystems Sales Engineer, discusses the importance of data and why organisations that take care of it will advance more quickly to increased profitability.
What’s your job role at InterSystems and what does it involve?
I have been a Sales Engineer at InterSystems for the last year. My role involves using my technology experience and expertise to make a convincing case to potential clients for the full range of our services.
Can you give a brief background of your career prior to InterSystems?
Before I came to InterSystems I had built up considerable experience in testing and simulation and in public health software projects, supporting clinical research teams. I’ve now developed pretty wide-ranging experience across many technologies, including eBusiness application deployment, software engineering and infrastructure administration.
My career really started with a year at Microsoft as a Windows XP SPs Tech Support Engineer Level 2. Then I spent eight great years at SanDisk where among other things I worked on software to simulate hardware for the next generation of flash storage devices and filed a US patent.
Three years as a data systems analyst at the University of California, Davis, then gave me valuable experience of developing public health web applications, administering database and web front-end for clinical research support, while designing and implementing a data pipeline for multiple applications and reporting systems. I was certainly busy!
What attracted you to the role/business?
I love extracting the true value from data, making it meaningful for potential clients, but also giving them a different view of their business. It can be revelatory for them.
Why does data matter?
All data is useful, no matter how old. If you know how to clean it up and analyse it you can spot trends and predict the future – data matters profoundly in the contemporary world. It is the basis for the major advances we will see in healthcare, for example.
What’s the biggest challenge when seeking to use data for business benefits?
The biggest challenge is getting data to the point where an organisation can seriously use it to gain new insights about itself and uncover intelligence it never possessed before. Businesses have to take that task seriously and invest appropriately. It is certainly worth it because the results can be astoundingly beneficial.
How do you see data and its uses evolving in the future?
Artificial intelligence and machine learning are the future, but many are still in the relatively early stages of its adoption. Businesses are analysing their data and working out where its meaning and value lie. Once they reach that point of maturity, they can engage with someone who has a data science background who can present the data in different ways. It’s always worth engaging a data scientist. There is so much value to be had from someone who can make full sense of the data.
What are the biggest benefits you’ve seen in the utilisation of AI while working at InterSystems?
It’s about producing faster results. A business using AI can identify much more quickly which areas of their operations they should concentrate on because they are more effective or profitable. You can never achieve this with manual methods.
With AI, business leaders see which areas will produce best results in terms of profitability or increasing the reliability of products and services with the least amount of effort or investment. There are many metrics by which a company might measure itself with AI. What is certain is that the results will be delivered fast and will be rigorously accurate.
