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XaaS Will Be The Number One Cloud Opportunity

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As enterprises migrate more of their applications, data and development efforts into the cloud, its adoption in the recent years has been growing phenomenally. Blazeclan Technologies, a born-in-the-cloud consulting company that provides customers around the globe with advisory, cloud migration, Big Data and analytics. An AWS Premier Cloud consulting partner and Microsoft Gold partner, it helps enterprises embrace the digital transformation, increase agility and user experience through its expertise in multi-cloud, AI and advanced analytics. In a recent discussion with Varoon D. Rajani, Co-Founder & CEO – Blazeclan Technologies, explains how businesses can drive innovation with cloud technologies, why everything-as-a-Service (XaaS) is becoming the new normal in the cloud and Blazeclan’s business roadmap for 2020.

CXOToday: With increased cloud adoption by the enterprise, the cloud services market is getting extremely crowded. How are you driving innovation in the cloud to stay ahead in the digital economy?

Varoon D. Rajani: Enterprise adoption of public cloud is increasing since the last 18 months in India. As an organization, we have been helping our customers on Cloud adoption and innovation for the last 8 years now. We have built a lot of automation to launch and deploy cloud infrastructure in a matter of minutes, even for the most regulated and secure environments. We have built a number of acceleration frameworks for our customers to help them migrate to cloud. Within our organization, we have invested in teams that are focused on innovation. We continue to innovate on behalf of our customers by building tools, frameworks and scripts which will help them move faster and in a seamless manner.

CXOToday: As enterprises build and evolve their cloud strategies, concepts like XaaS is coming to be a reality. As a specialist AWS partner, what are your views on driving this demand and how XaaS will be a differentiating factor in the market.

Varoon D. Rajani: While a lot of the services are available as services, we are still far away from having a world where XaaS is a reality. More than XaaS, what we see customers benefiting the most is from the on-demand availability of services, pegged with pay as you use pricing. Customers do not want to invest heavily in products upfront, and then worry about utilization. They would prefer to use on demand services as and when required. Majority of the start-ups and more and more enterprises are now moving to this model.

CXOToday: How are you helping enterprises in their digital transformation journey? Other than BFSI and government, where do you see the traction in India as far as cloud adoption is concerned?

Varoon D. Rajani: We help our customers with cloud-led and cloud enabled digital transformation. We believe, an organization can be truly digital only if they are agile and nimble in responding to their customer and market demands. To be truly agile and nimble, organizations need agile infrastructure along with agile processes, which is what public cloud is. We help our customers with cloud advisory and migration services, automation of their entire IT tool chain along with managed services of their cloud infrastructure. Apart from this, we are also helping our customers adapt to agile and develop processes by building a Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE).

On the application side we help our customers by building cloud native, micro services led architectures and applications. This will allow them to scale their digital platforms at low cost and high availability. Apart from this, we also have a team that helps our customers to build data lakes on Cloud. It enables them to make smarter choices for their business.

We are also building a team which is specialized on Machine Learning and AI. We see it as the next logical step where the customer demand will increase for us.

BFSI is one the biggest users of public cloud in India. Within BFSI, Insurance and NBFCs are the biggest adopters of cloud. All the major Media and Entertainment companies are big users of Public Cloud. Enterprises across sectors are moving critical applications like their ERP systems to cloud, and we see that trend increasing every day. Data and Analytics is another area where customers see the benefit of cheaper storage and faster processing time on Public Cloud. Many of our customers are building or planning to build large scale data warehouses on cloud.

CXOToday: The industry is gradually moving from a scale-based model to a skill-based model with niche skills in streams like data sciences, cloud integrators and emerging technologies peaking in demand. What is Blazeclan’s plans in increasing upskilling program for its employees?

Varoon D. Rajani: We are continuously hiring and training our teams to make sure we are at the forefront of the shifts in the technology platforms. We are training teams to ensure that we maintain the fine balance between being agile and following the framework of processes. This is a key part of any large enterprise that we serve. An enterprise which has the right processes that allow them to respond quickly to any changes will succeed in this digital native world.

From a technical perspective, we have partnered with the AWS Educate program. We hire fresh graduates from universities who are trained and certified on AWS. We are one of the first companies to partner with AWS on this program. Our the initial batch of hires has been a great start.

CXOToday: What are some of the pain points of CIOs you are focusing on and how?

Varoon D. Rajani: The most common pain point faced by CIOs today is how to move infra seamlessly and predictably to cloud.  Governance and security on cloud is another rising concern. Optimizing applications and expenditure on cloud is one more area where CIOs look for our expertise.

Building skill sets on cloud tends to get difficult and dealing with the changes that cloud brings in terms of processes and people can be quite challenging. We help our customers address these issues with agile development processes and by bringing in more automation. This, along with the agile infrastructure, helps larger enterprises to scale and respond to changing demands rapidly. We have seen large enterprises transform and are now ready to take over their nimbler start-ups successfully.

CXOToday: Please tell us about your business roadmap for 2020? Tell us about the latest and upcoming plans you have with AWS?

Varoon D. Rajani: The long term is vision is to be managing at least 20% of the Cloud infrastructure globally. Company’s endeavor is to be the go-to partner for enterprises globally for their cloud and digital requirements.  In addition to being a Premier Partner of AWS, we are investing in building a strong Machine Learning practice. The cost of data storage and processing getting lowered every day. Hence running machine learning algorithms on large swathes of data within an enterprise is becoming affordable and technically feasible.

Today, most of our customers want to run various machine learning algorithms. The idea is to predict customer churn, improve maintenance of machinery, cross sell and up sell products. This in turn leads to better their revenues and profits. We see this trend raising in the coming years.

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Sohini Bagchi
Sohini Bagchi is Editor at CXOToday, a published author and a storyteller. She can be reached at [email protected]