“We have an incredible growth story, thanks to AWS”

Shantanu Mathur, Country head, Knowlarity talks about how his business has transformed by working with AWS -

Can you talk about your engagement with AWS?
We work very closely to AWS; we go out and get new partners and customers along with them.  We market ourselves to their customers and also host lots of events together.

Very recently we sponsored an event in Mumbai which was actually funded by AWS as part of a partner investment programme. AWS has a fantastic marketing team, they keep us engaged, making us and the enterprises, work together and do a lot of goals, discussions and goal marketing and GTM activities. We are the technology partners for Amazon web services. And I think the reason AWS was very excited was the amount of products we use; we use all the products, anything which is there in offer like Redshift (Redshift is a fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service in the cloud), server management tools, Q/A stuff, voice automation software, new tech stuff etc.  With this we have completely changed as a tech company, from having servers etc to have a completely new thing like Quick View and all the different tools to manage our entire business.

How have you shaped your business post tie up with Amazon?
It is more of technology stacks that change drastically, from a business model perspective what Amazon showed us little bit was the success of a channel partner program, and we taking some pages out of the book and moving a lot of GTM in India. From a direct model to a channel partner program, AWS is one of our strategic partners which is taking us out there.  There are a couple of other partners like this which we are now setting up. But I think the big change which happen with us is, addressing bunch of our large partners which is what they are bringing on the table for us. 

What are the opportunities you see with AWS? 
We don’t particularly sell AWS products, either we are resellers of AWS, or we are their consumers. As a technological partner, our technology is similar/sync very well with the other things which happen with AWS. We deal in a lot of different things and because of that (by using AWS very closely), we are able to optimize the data transfer between our customers and our partners. It is a win-win case for AWS and Knowlarity. We created a very synergistic and mutually beneficial relationship and the trust has built up. 

AWS is a technical services provider; we made a very comprehensive decision when we went with AWS. They have incredible products like, Lambda (Lambda is an instance where you can get computing running calculations and doing searches for you) has brought so much of our server requirements down, it is incredible how much Lambda and some of the other tools have priced to kill the competition. So for me as a start-up and an established player there is nothing better than using something like that. We use Lambda to do things which are not mission critical at this point of time but there are more calculations, reporting and other stuffs which needs to be done. Lambda basically has saved us a lot of service space. 

How is your India business altogether? 
The business has been fantastic and bigger than it has ever been, growing faster than it ever has and more ambitious than it ever has been. We are right now targeting to grow 10 times in revenue in next three years. We have very aggressive growth goals and we are extremely focused into growing our channel partners. We work with top companies across the countries be it traditional, be it new age. We cater to over 5 to 6 million calls a day which we service; we have over 10 thousand customers and have a fully blown team presenting across the country. We have a network of around 500 partners out of which we have classified some very niche 50 or 60 top channel partners. 

So it is an incredible story that happened in India. Enterprise software is going to be the sweet spot thing now. That is where the growth is and that is where all the business has now become comfortable with, thanks to AWS and other people. As the mid-market is willing to pay for technology, we have now 10,000+ customers and a great transformation in the mid-market space.  We are the first step into digitisation. Our systems digitise all types of calls and that will appear on the panel (that you got these number of calls, at this time, and now you need to call back or revert through the message, it will all appear on the panel). B2B and B2C is what we digitise.  

What has been your learning from your partnership with AWS?
I tried to learn from AWS a lot. What made them a global giant is the fact that they are very organised and very structured. That is what we are trying to imbibe from them. We built a lot of product on top of cloud computing, analytical products, customized natural language processing reports, keyword sensingand so on.  

We have basically figured out what works for each vertical, and put them  to use in a very easy  to use and understandable package for everyone, which also makes selling very easy. We have 4 times more sales productivity in the last 1 year, or the simple reason that we have made the team intelligent about how to sell.