Two priorities for G7CR - global expansion and presence in the SMB space

G7CR Technologies India is an Expert Azure Managed Services Partner driving cloud transformation for over 800+ businesses across India. It provides cloud hosting services on Microsoft Azure packaged with all related support services for free. The services include managing cloud servers, monitoring cloud deployments, cloud architectural design, cloud security services, cloud governance services, 24x7 telephonic support and implementing advance technologies like power BI, analysis services, artificial intelligence, bots and machine learning.

Christopher Richard, Founder - G7CR gives an account of his company in an interview with VARINDIA -

Could you please tell us more about the company?

We are 10 year old organization. In the first 7 years of our operations, we operated in the technology consulting and BPO space. Three years ago we started our cloud division which is a separate business unit. It was a complete independent operational team and that’s the business which we are continuously growing it today. Cloud normally in India is done by the Microsoft, Google or AWS; these are the main cloud players in the market and normally cloud is purchased from these players through a partner.

As BPOs still run, we have not closed down the division.

How many people have founded this company?

I am one of the founders; the original founders of the company were Jahanath and Sridevi. It was originally opened by them in the back office to a group called G7. I took over this company from them in 2011 from the original promoters; so today I own 96% in the company.

Where are you headquartered?

We are headquartered in Bangalore. We are expanding it to London and Singapore in next three months and have initiated the registration of the office and the setup, but we are currently operated in Bangalore, where we have two offices.

What is the strength of your customer base like in India? Who are your customers?

We have over 650 customers today in our space; the lowest paying customer pays me Rs 150 per month and the highest paying customer or the biggest paying customer pays me 3 crore per month, that’s the strength.

Could you also give me the brief about the kind of cloud services you provide?

Lot of people are now moving to the cloud as it is a globally expanding business. Majorly people buy this through a partner. We give the customers 24X7 support; in other words, if somebody is moving towards cloud through G7, then the customer does not need to have a resource in his component. We do everything for him, right from migrating him from where he currently exists as well as giving him the entire monitoring to ensure the entire systems are running. In case something goes wrong they come to us and we ensure to give him backup. We take care of his DADR, high availability, his disaster recovery, his security and also problem solving; if he is having an issue he can just call on 24x 7 line and our technical engineer straight away work on the issue and solve the issue. All of this at no cost.

Could you also brief about the several state run projects that you had been a part of in India?

Our cloud division in itself is around 3 years old. Around 6 months ago we started our public sector division. Currently we were involved in open bridge with Punjab & Kerala. As of now we have not got revenue from any of them yet. We are hoping since it’s a six months old division we should start focus on public sector and it should happen shortly.

In fact we were little hesitant initially because we are scared of the government in terms of the payment and other things but once we understood the basic, we are able to understand how this market works. We got the division setup, which is what we learnt from Microsoft. We are working along with the Microsoft public sector team in lots of bids which we are bidding together.

What is your GTM strategy?

Currently we are a solo worker and work directly with our customers. We really don’t call them customers today. All my customers have their own software products and now they are hosting it on cloud. So apart from giving them the technology support we also help them cross sell to another 600 customers. We help our customers with GTM strategies but currently we don’t have a partner network which helps sell cloud. But it’s in the pipeline.

Going forward what will be your roadmap in terms of market expansion?

We are highly focused on immediate growth that is going to come from global expansion. The second thing that we are looking at is the SMB market, because we understand that most of the cloud companies are interested in customers whose consumption is 5000 dollars per month. Something lower than that, most of the OEMs are not even interested. So we are planning to expand in this space. We want a focus on 200 dollar per month customers and not 5000 dollars because we want to enter in the SMB space. We want to target at least one million of them. We are creating a suite of products which we will be launching later this year.