Working in the Prolifics Innovation Center

The Innovation Center reflects our culture of curiosity and collaboration, and offers our customers (as well as our employees) the opportunity for continuous improvement, future competencies and empowering technologies that cut across all applications and platforms. Here’s some background on the Innovation Center and the experiences of three Prolifians who are part of it.

What and where is the Innovation Center?

The Prolifics Innovation Center is not a physical place – it’s the virtual focal point for collaborative innovation on a global scale. The Innovation Center sprang from a redesign of Prolifics’ entire business model to make innovation a core competency that drives our organization. Its core tenets include:

• Design Thinking – challenging assumptions and changing perspectives to ensure we’re tackling the right problems
• New Technology – accessing the latest, most promising technology and innovating in ways never thought possible
• Sandbox Creativity – building, testing and experimenting with new solutions in a productive, value-generating environment
• Co-Creation – creating solutions with our clients that are meaningful to their problems, customers and industry, always with an eye on the future and potential opportunities

Greg Hodgkinson, Prolifics’ Chief Technology Officer (CTO) leads our Innovation Center. Greg joined Prolifics in 2007 through its acquisition of 7irene, a visionary service-oriented architecture (SOA) platform company that he co-founded in the United Kingdom. Greg has a track record of establishing teams that deliver innovation. He has been named an “IBM Champion” seven years running, and has written textbook chapters and other publications on SOA software solutions and agile testing.

Greg structures the Innovation Center projects using an iterative, agile methodology. Utilizing a sprint – showcase – evaluate – repeat approach, the Innovation Center follows an incremental, interactive path to maximize the value in our innovation portfolio.  

What do Prolifians think of the Innovation Center?

Harald Smith

Working out of the northeast US, Harald is a solution architect and part of the Prolifics information management practice, focusing on application modernization, data governance and data privacy. He joined Prolifics in 2020, bringing with him more than 20 years of data management software expertise, including software architecture, product management and consulting. Data privacy is one of the hot topics in the Innovation Center, which fits in nicely with Harald’s experience and background.

“The Innovation Center is where you can communicate ideas, ask questions, make it very friendly, very encouraging. There’s no right or wrong answer,” said Harald. “And really engaging a lot of different views of individuals, and the diversity of views, is important. It helps get everybody’s mind on a particular problem and their unique ways of thinking about problems, and that helps create an interesting blend, and I think more effective solutions.”

Harald has worked for companies that have dedicated innovation centers, and those that don’t. For Harald, having an innovation center is part of a mindset and thought process focused on helping customers achieve value, as opposed to just focusing on meeting revenue targets and maximizing sales. For Harald, a lack of an innovation center would mean a lack of innovation – in turn meaning a company can only go so far. As part of the Innovation Center, Harald sees what his peers are doing, sparking ideas to generate new value in new spaces or in new ways.

“It’s the cross-fertilization of ideas that really becomes a very central point to an innovation center,” said Harald. “And I think that’s one of the things that you often find with organizations that don’t have it – they can do a lot of good work, but they don’t get this cross-fertilization of ideas where you can suddenly get some real inspirations, and suddenly leaps of value over other organizations.”

Rahul Sahay

Rahul is an Associate Data Architect at our Hyderabad, India location. He was drawn to Prolifics because of how the new technologies we’re working with – like advances in artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) – dovetailed with his own interests and education.

Once at Prolifics, Rahul saw the type of work going on in the Innovation Center. Rahul wasn’t shy about raising his hand and saying he’d like to be part of it. “So, I approached my practice head, we had a discussion,” said Rahul. “He said, ‘Yeah, there are a couple of things that will need your help.’”

“We are doing a lot of stuff in our Innovation Center. I mean, almost in every area we have identified a topic and they are working on it. Innovation is there everywhere, but we know, at the end of it all, innovation makes sense only when we know what is happening end-to-end, and if we can build it in the end-to-end pipeline, so it is going to add value,” said Rahul.

Working at Prolifics

Prolifics is a global technology solutions provider that supports diverse industry verticals. With more than 40 years in business, we have successfully empowered over 3,000 customers around the world by implementing customized, innovative, end-to-end technology solutions. We are a mid-sized company (our global employee strength is 1,500) with a rock-solid foundation and an aggressive growth plan. Not only does this translate into “opportunity for career growth,” but it also enables us to have a highly collaborative workplace, resulting in growth in terms of learning and mentorship as well.