A Global Team Delivers On Next Generation Solutions

To paraphrase Emerson for the digital age: Build a better chatbot and the world will beat a path to your door. At least that’s what Ascendum Solutions is hoping as it develops a "smarter" generation of chatbots – one of several exciting innovations being developed by global teams at the Blue Ash, Ohio-based tech firm.

It’s hardly just chatbots. Ascendum’s investment and research into the whole area of virtual assistants, augmented reality and Over-the-Top (OTT) products is quickly setting the company apart as a leader in the field.

Kris Nair, Ascendum president & CEO, says the company’s collaborative global talent teams, from Cincinnati to two locations in India, is one secret to its success. More importantly, Nair says the teams stay focused on next-generation technology.

As Nair puts it: "The one question every business is asking today when it comes to technology is: Are we there yet? That’s where Ascendum comes in, because we help them accelerate the speed of digital transformation. Not every tech company can do that."

Ascendum is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Vora Ventures, the privately-held Cincinnati equity group specializing in building innovative IT companies with several global locations. Ascendum services medium and small businesses and numerous Fortune 1,000 companies, providing digital transformation solutions, quality assurance services, Software as a Service (SaaS)-based product solutions and staffing to enterprise clients.

"Scaling high quality talent is the reason we hire globally," Nair says. "I think talent is the key in this business."

Ascendum has developed numerous solutions focused on enhancing the experience in the digital space for customers and employees. Its apps and mainframe automations systems have been developed for numerous industries including health care, education, field services, banking and even a smarter vending machine.

Nair says one of Ascendum’s most exciting areas of innovation is in chatbots, a technology that has often seen mixed results when perhaps deployed too quickly and where businesses expect too much. Nair says their innovation is aimed at overcoming those chatbot flaws.

"We are investing very heavily in self-learning of the chatbots and investing in creating our own natural language understanding (NLU) engine," says Nair. "We don’t believe the NLU engines out there today are good enough. This technology is where websites were in the early 2000s. The conversational designs of the future will be completely immersive and intuitive."

Nair says the Ascendum focus in the whole area of virtual assistants and augmented reality is to develop apps that can be configured based on user’s behavior. He also sees huge growth in OTT systems and the augmented reality space that can deliver practical solutions.

"You want the app to be able to analyze the journey of the customer, how that customer interacts with the app, whether it’s contacting a call center or browsing the web. We want the app to understand what the customer really wants."

Ascendum has nearly 2,000 employees world-wide, with over 700 based in Cincinnati, now the sixth largest IT services firm in Cincinnati.

"We’ve been growing 50 percent every year," Nair says. "What has set us apart is the quality of our growth, both in acquisitions and team building. The largest growth is in our innovation teams. We expect those to grow 300 percent in the next year."

Ascendum is located at the Vora Information Technology Center, 10290 Alliance Rd., Blue Ash, Ohio 45242. For information, call 513.792.5100 or visit www.

ascendum.com