‘Cloud’ is going to be the catchword in 2021 as digital transformation is happening across the globe. The pandemic has also put the thrust on the cloud as the quicker adoption means higher the value of relevance. Dr. Christopher Richard, MD & Chief Cloud Architect, G7 CR Technologies India Pvt Ltd has elaborated on this unique and diverse topic in dialogue with My Mobile.
The case for digital transformation has never been more urgent. How do you see the pandemic giving a thrust to India in being one of the leading cloud hubs?
Digital transformation, tech intensity, open-mindedness to tech adaption, and the changes that tech addition can bring are now more urgent than ever before. These of course are all global sentiments and give a thrust to India, coz we have the world’s biggest market for the cloud with us on the way from being a developing nation to a developed nation. With the density of people and the purchasing power, we continue to see an increase in demand and being one of the world’s largest in number of Startups, SMBs and consumers. We have everything to drive cloud consumption to the skies. Now the pandemic has helped in this thrust by nudging the snail CEOs and CTOs to drive the adaption of tech quicker and they have realized the relevance of cloud in their technology road map.
To accelerate business innovation, Startups, SMBs and SMEs plan to migrate the majority of their internal IT workloads to the public cloud. What are your plans to tap the growing market of Cloud Services in India and neighboring countries?
Startups, SMBs and SMEs have always been close to our hearts and business with them has been an emotional need more than the bottom line or top line driven need. We plan to further intensify our relationship with them by ensuring we create a whole package of value surrounding technology that creates a partnership with them in the true sense of helping them grow as we grow. Our Digital transformation walls are built around a program called CPR (Capital, People and Revenue) and the program has dedicated focus to be the guiding force to help the Startups, SMBs and SMEs capitalize, skill and motivate their people and help with GTM across the globe to drive their revenues. We have also setup the Drona Technology center to drive skill enablement for all the resources of all who partner with us in their digital transformation journey along with soon to be launched CPL (Cloud players league) which will be similar to the IPL, but involve players from the companies that partner with us. We are in the process of setting up a dedicated cricket stadium in Bangalore for this purpose. We will launch other programs that help motivate and engage the resources of the entire SMB, SME, and startup community. We will be driving marketing, PR, and lead generation activities for the community across the globe along with our spread, and we now cover the whole of MEA as a market opportunity. In addition to all of this, we will also act as investment advisors and bring investment support to them from partner organizations.
Tell us how the cloud played a major role during the pandemic and how it helped companies operate from home. Do you see this growth continue even in 2021?
I will definitely say that the pandemic woke the whole business IT leadership to a realization that, while we may talk about digital transformation for our server infrastructure, we made a huge mistake in ignoring our desktops in this vision. Most of our opportunities during the pandemic to help people work from home, has been to convert the traditional physical desktop\laptop into VDI hosted on the cloud. We have personally moved, stabilized, and have in use over 20000+ desktops in the past 6 months, and we see this growing further in 2021. If we used a Chinese calendar, I would like to declare 2021 as going to be the “Year of the digital desktop transformation.”
While the business apps that allow you have video meets and greets and drive some amount of business automation and digital visibility, moving your whole desktop to the cloud for a few dollars and moving company strategy to BYOD (bring your own device) will be what further grows the cloud and drives consumption.
The onset of the covid-19 pandemic was the starting point of the Cloud 2.0 era. How do you see this as an opportunity to help the cloud computing Industry touching new heights in the years to come?
Cloud computing is here to stay and though it has only been growing, the COVID-19 pandemic has fastened this growth and it will continue to grow and reach greater heights in years to come, but yes, the cloud OEMs that will continue to grow in the long run will be the ones that learn that this is the time to consolidate and build more strong ties with the SMBs, SMEs and startups. They are after all your future enterprises. The Cloud OEMs who are not self-centered toward the SMB, SME and startup community during these times and instead use this as an opportunity to increase prices and strengthen bottom lines will see a drop in the curve once the industry normalizes and will eventually lose to compete.
How cloud adoption can help give a push to a new revenue stream for the telecom sector?
The telecom industry for whatever reason is not the leader in the cloud market, and they have only themselves to blame for this. They had the connectivity control, they had the customer base, all they needed was a data center and platform. But who can tell a set of people who sold SIMs and connections and were driven by customer count to look around for other opportunities and business lines. But now since they missed the bus when it was in their backyard, their only option now is to use the strength of their customer reach and connectivity control and partner with existing cloud OEMs to create another revenue opportunity, and today we do see such partnerships happening and will become a high driver of revenue for both parties involved.
How do you think India’s Cloud market will manage the supply chain in 2021?
With the need for contactless and with the need of visibility, automation of the supply chain is going to be in huge demand. The ISVs have lived up and already have a stack of products ready to suit today’s demands in supply chain automation. With on-prem data centers not even in the stream of thoughts, the cloud will benefit from this demand. It is 700% faster and 300% lower in cost to deploy a supply chain solution on the cloud than on your own infrastructure. So, this turns out to be a no brainer, it’s just simple math.