TORONTO – There is a new solution provider in the Canadian marketplace. Called TribalScale, the company has been in business for a mere seven months but the company has already made waves with the PGA Tour, Microsoft, IBM and Google.
The PGA Tour hired this solution provider to develop a solution to improve the fan experience during golf tournaments.
TribalScale built an app on the Amazon Echo, a hands-free speaker with voice controls. The Echo features the Alexa Voice Service, which normally plays music with 360 degree immersive sound. Alexa can also tell you if it’s sunny or rainy outside and from this base TribalScale created a solution that can inform golf fans about their favourite player or who is making a charge down the back nine at the Players Championship at TPC Sawgrass where this app debuted.
TribalScale takes a mobile-first approach to everything it creates. But according to Sheetal Jaitly, the CEO and founder, TribalScale also looks to improve the end user experience as well. “There is a new wave of computing that is happening right now with the Internet of Things (IoT). We aim to help clients map the user journey in this new connected world,” he said.
TribalScale has been operational since the beginning of this year and has grown to sport 42 employees along with significant vendor alliances with Microsoft, IBM and Google. TribalScale is part of Microsoft’s IOT program and is one of the first accredited Google agency partners in North America.
The Google alliance is a crucial step in TribalScale growth strategy. Jaitly told CDN that they now learn Google’s technology roadmap and work directly with the company on Android development.
“We learn best practices from Google. We get to see the road map and what’s cool is we can influence them too,” he said.
Jaitly compared this program to the Microsoft Gold Partner Program where the solution provider gets trained on design and engineering from the vendor partner. Google also provides TribalScale with referrals.
TribalScale’s mobile-first go to market strategy is augmented by bot technology and artificial intelligence.
Jaitly describes TribalScale as a mobile-first services company focused on IoT. The company has used IBM Watson and Bluemix technology to build connected portals for clients so when a user walks into a room a beacon will automatically log him or her onto their system.
According to Jaitly, all of TribalScale’s project communications are tracked through sentiment analysis to gauge the happiness and productivity of project communication.
One solution, called Botler, acts as a virtual front desk person. A user simply speaks his or her name to Botler and who that person is meeting with and within a few minutes that person shows up at the front desk reception area.
TribalScale is also taking a different approach to the marketplace. Instead of developing and selling solutions similar to others on the CDN Top 100 list, this company wants to be more internal with customers.
Jaitly bases is strategy on the trend that more IT decisions are being made by the line of business decision marker either in human resources, marketing, sales or the finance department.
“You have companies today; say it’s an insurance company, saying they need to be a software company that just happens to also sell insurance. I say let us be your development lab instead of making a big investment into things you do not know. They don’t know how to be a software company so hire us to be your innovation lab,” he said.
Jaitly said these companies usually make an acquisition to bring about this IT knowledge in-house. However, he believes this approach is not agile enough nor is it transformative to take software development to the next level.
“Have your engineers sit down with ours and work on projects together to build your own software,” he added similar to the PGA Tour solution.
