Webscale to invest more in cloud-based solutions

Today, the concept of digitisation is no more left as a choice to anyone, it is inevitable and surely becomes a needed commodity to grow and expand one’s business. Simultaneously, this wave of digitisation is affecting every person on earth, and one of its new components i.e., ‘cloud computing’ is also seen as a good practice to adopt among the internet users. Cloud computing is helping the people and enterprises to save their data on cloud storage instead of their system and hardware storage. Thus, it makes the process of storing the data much more convenient to the users and the enterprises. In a chat with VARINDIA, Sonal Puri, CEO of Webscale talks about the company’s plan for expansion of its business globally. When discussing about the company’s future expansion and market strategy, Sonal also talked about the status of Webscale's eco-system and its channel structure, as well as its prospective plans to grow, especially in context of clouding and e-commerce market -

Can you brief us about Webscale's India presence and its overall market strategy?

Our Bengaluru office has recently expanded, and it’s now home to our largest team worldwide. The core functions out of the office are demand generation, support, sales and marketing.

Webscale develops and sells a cloud-based ADC or application delivery controller – in our case, this is a software solution that when deployed between a customer’s website and the internet, enables dramatic improvements in performance, availability (uptime and scalability) and security. Our core market today is e-commerce, but we are now expanding into the broader mid-market, and while our sales model is largely direct today, we are aggressively building our channel, both in India and more widely across the US, APAC, and European regions.

What are your long-term plans in the country with respect to cloud and the e-commerce market?

We expect to invest heavily here, with regards to hiring talent and expanding our sales and support operations to businesses in the region, as well as globally. Considering India’s explosive growth from an e-commerce perspective, as well as in cloud services, this region is a great market fit for Webscale. We believe India is the perfect launchpad for our cloud-native, cloud-agnostic solutions, to the rest of Asia, and with a solid established base here, we will be able to make significant progress in our goal towards building a billion-dollar global business.

How instrumental is the channel for the company's growth in the region?

We see the channel, especially in the India market, as a key component to our overall growth strategy. As such, we are actively engaging with system integrators and managed service providers whose business today is focused on helping companies move their critical applications from static datacenters to the public cloud. With experience gained from migrating more than 500 e-commerce storefronts to the cloud, Webscale can help businesses achieve peace of mind with fast, friction-less transitions.

Similarly, we believe there are significant growth opportunities with local cloud providers seeking feature parity with the larger, established cloud providers (AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure) in order to compete on a more level playing field. By enabling these local providers with advanced functionality such as predictive application auto-scaling, web application firewalls, disaster recovery, and intelligent caching, we believe we can bring great value to their businesses.

What is the current status of your channel eco-system in the country? What is the channel structure like?

The types of partner we are engaging with fall into three categories - technology integrators, referral partners and resellers. We have signed agreements in place today with several partners and we are aggressively accelerating our on boarding processes to quickly embrace the rapidly growing market opportunity.

How different or unique is Webscale technology from other technology players in the same domain?

The cloud-native application delivery controller (ADC) was brought to market by Webscale as an industry first, and it breaks through the limitations of other application performance architectures.

Available and sold as a service, with a monthly subscription, Webscale is easily deployed close to a customer’s web application, providing an unprecedented 360-degree view into all the sessions entering and exiting the application. Our data plane senses application and session behaviour and, combined with the decision engine of the Webscale control plane, makes real-time decisions for performance, infrastructure scaling, and security.

Traditional solutions in this segment, such as content delivery networks (CDN), lack precise visibility and control into the application, making availability issues difficult to predict and prevent in a timely way, leading to sub-optimal application performance and eventual failure.

This level of application insight and control is one of the key advantages and differentiators for Webscale.

What kind of channel programs or strategies do you design that complements your company's current business model and practices?

The channel is the growth engine for Webscale’s business. As such, we are looking to build programs that facilitate an indirect vs direct sales model, with a strong network of local partners. These partners will be trusted advisors in the segment, well positioned to further propagate Webscale services to relevant prospects in the country.

As a SaaS business, channel partners joining Webscale’s program will receive multiple benefits, not just in the level of sales support, go to market planning and co-marketing that we will provide, but also from a solid, repeatable sales process, which of course means repeatable margins. No CAPEX to manage and no inventory – just a powerful software offering that not only brings huge value to application owners, but also to cloud providers and even CDN companies looking to enhance their own feature set in order to compete, at scale, with larger incumbents.