DigitalOcean wants its developers to convert their ideas into actual business application

DigitalOcean marks its presence with 12 data centers across the world and a small team in each data center. Prabhakar Jayakumar, Country Director, DigitalOcean India opens up about its products and services, community service, open source and its India Business.

Prabhakar asserts, “The other cloud providers focus on the enterprise and create vendor lock-ins with a push for additional DevOps processes. We as a company, keep the developers at the core of what we are trying to do. We continue to create our products and services mirrored around simplicity, community service and open source, which makes life a lot easier. Our focus is that our solution should be so intuitive that developers should emphasize on converting their ideas into actual business applications, and leave all the infrastructure heavy lifting to an infrastructure provider like us. So our key differentiation is to focus on the developers, while everybody else is focused on the enterprise segment.”

India market strategy

With a little over three years’ experience in India, DigitalOcean’s channel growth has been organic. The community what they have built, the tutorials, the local community chapters, have been great. It helps the developers to learn not just about their brand, but also learn about technology, and open tools.

Prabhakar says, “In fact, the community is one of the biggest drivers of new users into the platform. We used the traditional channel to grow our awareness in the market. We are now building an outbound sales team as well as a solution Partner Program, For the channel partner ecosystem, we are setting them up with tools and services that enable them to go and sell DigitalOcean into the market”

He further shared, “We have now kick-started the reseller partner model in India. Since last three years we have a program called HATCH. Today, we tie up with accelerators, incubators, venture capital firms, not just in the country, but globally. All the startups that are aligned to these kinds of organizations, we enable a bunch of benefits for them through the HATCH program. We give them a year's worth of DigitalOcean Cloud Credits, and these are the startups that are still in the bootstrap mode, potentially, or in series A stage. In terms of just the partner ecosystem for HATCH we have impacted more than 700 startups in the country through the HATCH program.”

Prabhakar confirms, "The basic building blocks that you would want to think about when you look at security are firewalls. In our case, you have a lot more granular control, as a system administrator, to know which ports are enabling for others to access your systems. So in that way, you are automatically keeping a lot of bad factors out without being immune to those facts. The second one is the cloud firewall that we built in. It is actually a free product, which is again, built in an additional layer of security. The third one is the hardware layer. So we use a lot of tools at our actual server level that keeps a lot of attacks at bay. We also know that because we are not a managed service provider, we will never be able to implement security at an application level. But we give you access to the kind of best tutorials and best practices that you can read from guides and as a system administrator go back and implement those practical applications.”

A Key Differentiator

Prabhakar feels that DigitalOcean will come as a fresh air to its customers. “With DigitalOcean users are actually making a lot of time available for the developers and system administrators to focus on other things in the business than having DevOps. So the workforce is getting more productive. Secondly the transparency and simplicity that we built in the pricing automatically translates into cost savings for customers as a business. The third one is the community that we have built around ourselves, makes customer interact with others and learn technology. It is not just open to DigitalOcean customers, but everybody else, irrespective of what they do. These are great forums for people to come and learn things on open source,” he concludes.