AWS enabling its Partners Always

The cloud service provider, Amazon Internet Services Private Limited (AISPL) recently organized its AWS Mumbai Summit 2018 where VARINDIA interacted with two of the premium partners who had started their journey with its cloud platform, and back then it was the only choice for them to host their application. Varoon Rajani, Founder & CEO, BlazeClan and Siva, Founder & CEO, PowerupCloud Technologies speak about their experiences with AWS.

Varoon Rajani
Founder & CEO, BlazeClan

Kindly share your journey with AWS.

We started off as a customer of Amazon Web Services (AWS) around 2010-11 where we were building a product which was an online learning system for the masses in India and back then the only choice that we found to host our application at a scale was AWS, otherwise we would have had to invest a lot in data centers.

We learnt a lot around AWS. We used AWS and helped a couple of our friends on the platform, that all opened up our mind that this could be a whole new opportunity for us and AWS was clearly the future. In 2012, we registered as an AWS APN Partner and since then we have been focusing on AWS, building our company on AWS skill sets as well as competencies. We have seen some good success and growth by investing in AWS.

Kindly, mention about BlazeClan's breakthrough product on AWS.

There are multiple but if I speak of one specifically it would be our media asset management called CloudStream. We basically allow media companies of any size and scale to host their digital content on the Cloud, we help them to transcode or reformat that digital content for various different scheme factors, allow them to put in metadata and manage it to complete end-to-end lifecycle of the digital video assets on to the Cloud.

What are the differentiating factors of BlazeClan from competition?

Since 2012 when we registered as an AWS partner on APN Network - and we were probably one of the first few partners - and we have been working very closely with AWS. A lot of good relationships with the leadership team, and mutual trust has been built over the years.

Apart from that, from a technical and delivery perspective something that we need to do for our customers - we are building skill sets, grooming people internally, investing in the AWS competency. So today we have six to seven competencies from AWS. If I talk about India specifically we are the only ones with financial services competencies, we were one of the first Managed Services partners in APAC. We have been a premier partner for the last three years. We are continuing to invest in our competencies, as we are very conscious that we need to stay ahead of the curve by investing into skill sets, competencies which would make us stand out from the competition.

Which are the upcoming verticals?

When we started it was more of startups in 2012 and since then it has evolved. So now any internet facing businesses are one vertical — there are many enterprises which are coming up with their eCommerce, online platforms etc.(which are more of B2C running on the internet is one vertical). Media has been the favoured vertical for us. More of financial services companies or non-banking customers are adopting it today but in the next couple of years we are confident that a lot of banks will start moving to AWS. Financial services is are growing and adopting AWS fast and it is a focus area for us. I believe that the Cloud industry will grow over the next five years at a very rapid pace. In next three to five years it is going to be more than 50% year-on-year growth for all of us.

Siva
Founder & CEO, PowerupCloud Technologies

Kindly share your journey with AWS.

I have been working with Amazon Web Services (AWS) since 2012 in India. I was setting Cloud business for two other partners which gave me a good amount of connect within the AWS team as well. They all knew what we can do with respect to solution sales and consulting on AWS. In June 2015 we decided to come out and start a company, so that is how PowerupCloud was started.

Kindly, mention about PowerupCloud's breakthrough product on AWS.

It is our Chatbot platform IRA which happened in 2016. We did a project for a customer where we automated few of their customer support problems so that is when we realized that there is some potential for a product like this in the market because it is too early in the chatbot arena. We started investing in 2016 and built the platform with few of our initial sponsor customers. It is now quite evolved and used by many Fortune 500 companies. So that is our best product so far on AWS.

Companies are looking towards Chatbots as a way to bring down cost, know more about customers and improve their support functions and business processes. There is a misconception where we see chatbots purely from a customer support automation perspective. A lot of analytics goes into chatbots. Large enterprise customers are able to know more about their consumers because the analytics gives them the data. That is why chatbots are picking up and we are foreseeing the future is about chatbots.

Banking and financial verticals are adopting in a major way because of large customer interactions. Retail, eCommerce, internet businesses are also coming onboard quite fast. We are also building chatbots for a logistics firm, HR IT helpdesk for large companies. Customers who are running large businesses actually have many problems to solve with chatbots, voicebots and machine learning and deep learning, they bring many interesting problems to us. These are the initial sectors which are picking up.

How is AWS enabling you?

AWS is the most important reason that we are here as a technology services company. They have been a great partner and it is a partner-led company; we can really vouch for that. They have always been with us during testing times basically. A lot of credit goes to the team in India, for the way they support partners like us and help us grow our business alongside AWS.

How do you see the acceptance of latest technologies like Big Data, IoT etc. among Indian customers?

The technology adoption in India is slower than the mature markets like US and Australia. But the scenario is changing fast because a lot of startups in Bangalore also have parallel offices outside India, so the latest technologies and development process that we see outside India are the same things we see in India as well. It is a matter of one year probably and we will be able to catch up with the global changes that are happening. India is not far behind.