The Data and Content KPO Powering Big Business – with Vlad Zulueta of Innodata

In this week’s episode of the Outsource Accelerator Podcast, Derek Gallimore is joined by Vlad Zulueta, the Project Manager for Strategic Management at Innodata.

Derek and Vlad discussed Innodata, global employment, artificial intelligence, and protecting customer data.

What Innodata does

Innodata is a global data engineering company with offices in various countries around the world. In the Philippines, they have offices in Manila, Legaspi City, and Cebu.

Vlad described the company as, “We provide a complete portfolio of content services, from digitization and imaging to data conversion and editorial services and down to the Knowledge Process Outsourcing.

We also design and deploy enterprise content management, digital publishing, and knowledge management systems that help organizations improve information flow.”

Vlad added that Innodata does editorial and production services.

“In editorial services, we do abstracting and indexing. We do medical and healthcare content-related projects. We do research and analysis [as well as] artificial intelligence and large language models – providing them with the necessary data that will be used to train the large language models.

Now for production services: We produce e-books. Then we also do composition, data capture, and data entry. This is one of the earlier production services that we deliver to our customers, and part of it is data conversion and XML services.”

Working with global teams

Innodata has offices in the Philippines, United States, Canada, United Kingdom, India, Sri Lanka, Israel, and Germany. As a global firm, Innodata “operates as a matrix organization.”

According to Vlad, the company’s operations are “organized per delivery unit, so the delivery unit is not fixed in one location.”

While the Philippines takes the bulk of the headcount, “we distribute the workload or the projects to each of those countries most of the time.”

This is also part of the firm’s business continuity strategy. Vlad said, “In case something happens in one facility, we can still move some of the operations to other facilities.”

Working with a global team made Innodata embrace remote work, even prior to the pandemic. 

Vlad noted that remote work has helped the company’s employees “become more flexible.”

He added, “[Remote work] has helped us in our customer dealings, most especially in our business continuity.

For example, in he Philippines, we encounter a lot of typhoons throughout the year. Being dispersed widely all across the country has helped us in terms of [minimizing] disruption to our operations.”

Protecting customer data

Since the firm handles client data, it makes sense that they’re stringent with data protection.

Delving on this, Vlad said, “We have very strict data privacy rules and regulations in our company. Information security and data privacy are very, very important for us.

When we engage with the customer, we have [a] non-disclosure agreement with them. Externally we comply with that strictly. Internally as well, we make sure that all the team members from the management down to the subject matter experts are well aware of the protection of the data that we provide to the customer.

We cannot just disclose it to anyone. This is to ensure that the customer’s confidence in protecting the data is protected.”

Innodata has built very strong relationships with its clients, many of whom have been involved with the company for decades.

According to Vlad, “We make sure that we become partners with [our clients] and not just service providers.”

To learn more about Innodata, visit their website or LinkedIn page.