It was hailed by JobAdvisor in the Top 10 Tech Companies to work in Australia, and recently set up shop in Bangalore. Sydney-based full service data analytics agency Datalicious opened its doors in India’s Silicon Valley earlier last year with a view to base their Centre of Excellence (COE) in India.

The mission was two-fold – attracting great talent and servicing all the markets, especially South East Asia. “As the gateway to Europe and Asia, India was a natural geographic choice to base our second largest office. We have scaled the team to about 20 people in Banglaore with a majority of our project delivery now happening from India,” affirmed Siddharth Manuja, Datalicious’s India Country Manager.

The company already has offices across the globe including Manila, Singapore that offered Datalicious a unique opportunity to enter the South East Asian market and stack up big ticket clients across Thailand India and Indonesia. Some of the heavyweight companies in Datalicious’s roster are Bluestone, RedBus and Goibibo.

So why set up shop in India specifically? Speaking to Analytics India Magazine, Manuja sheds light on the Indian expansion plan and the pressing need to bolster global product development and delivery goals. “Datalicious was at an important juncture in terms of global growth and through India we are able to access the high quality of talent that is coming out of the Indian university system.”

According to Manuja, the sheer number of Indian students in technology was a big enough reason to open a COE in India.  There are over 4 million students in India studying engineering compared to only 67,000 in Australia. The statistics are definitely staggering. “The company also started seeing excellent growth around the South East Asian region, including India and Europe and we are extremely well-positioned to support and innovate,” he said.

The Country Manager is not new to the data analytics space. With past stints at Facebook and HCL Technologies, he knew how to drive insights from petabytes of data. “I started my career working on content management and online advertising, and later gravitated towards analytics as I found that to be the common thread in driving success for multiple functions. I have spent the last 6 years in different roles in the data analytics space. With Datalicious we extend that principle across a multitude of channels, ensuring marketers reach the right people, in the right place, at the right time – using insights and algorithms researched and developed here in India.” he said.

Besides setting up an excellent team in India, what Manuja will bring to the table is his vast years of experience, expanding the reach of Datalicious in Indian market, overseeing operations, delivery and sales.

Datalicious Journey — from Digital Agency to Data Technology firm

Over the years, Datalicious has evolved from a full service data agency to a data technology company rolling out marketing analytics products such as SuperTag, DataCollector, DataExchange and the advance marketing analytics platform OptimaHub that enables marketers to make the best decisions in spending and attribution.

Founded by Christian Bartens, the present CEO oversaw the transformation – turning Datalicious into a technology firm offering a wide range of services such as data warehousing, data mining, modelling, and reporting besides mobile and web analytics and media attribution. Datalicious further strengthened its portfolio by inking a partnership with Google becoming the key Google Analytics Premium partners in the region that generated new revenue streams for them.

The Australian company intensified its focus on India not just because of the exceptional talent pool, but also the astounding numbers – the market for marketing analytics is about $1.7 billion dollars and growing at a healthy rate.

Digital Marketing in India has evolved from web analytics and mapping customer sentiments to customer lifecycle management, mobile and media attribution, a major offering from Datalicious that helps marketers understand the customer’s interaction with the brand across the digital touchpoints. When it comes to optimizing marketing spend, Datalicious answers the crucial questions such as — how to allocate budgets across marketing channels to maximise the return on investment (ROI).

However, Datalicious doesn’t lack competition.  From Axtria to MarketShare, small and big companies have expanded their footprint into India and are offering customer-focused solutions to marketers and helping them improve their marketing decisions through insightful data. But it is a reality that Manuja is already aware of. He said, “Going back to the number of students studying degrees in this area that means there is going to a lot of people not only moving into existing analytics companies, but starting their own as well. This will create a healthy, competitive analytics marketplace in India and we look forward to being a part of the ecosystem.”