With the launch of AWS Outposts, the global cloud business for LTI, is going back in its CRM data and looking at customers asking for hybrid cloud model, helping them with proofs of concept and building solutions for them
Powerupcloud Technologies, is one of the leading cloud provider and AWS partners located in Bangalore has seen 2x growth in its cloud business during these challenging times. This born in cloud provider was acquired by LTI in 2019, just before the pandemic hit the world. This unit is spearheading the global cloud business for LTI. The Powerupcloud is also one of the launch partners for AWS Outposts in India and is focused to tap the bigger opportunities.
Speaking exclusive to CRN India, Siva S, Founder and CEO, Powerupcloud Technologies, who lead global cloud consulting at LTI says, “Before LTI’s acquisition of Powerupcloud Technologies, 70 per cent of our business was in India, and we built a highly profitable business on our cloud (and almost 70 per cent business was on AWS). Today, we are 100 per cent owned by LTI, and I’ve been leading the global cloud business for LTI. One of the primary reasons for the acquisition was our AWS competencies. We have AWS Competencies in Data & Analytics, DevOps, Migration, Financial Services, Microsoft Workloads, and Machine Learning. In 2019 we had the highest number of AWS competencies among any other partner in India. The AWS credentials led us to this acquisition.”
Today, the cloud arm of LTI work with Fortune 50 companies covering largest banks, three largest insurance companies, automotive companies, oil and gas companies, pharma, healthcare, banking, manufacturing companies. Last year, it built a cloud governance platform called CloudEnsure. With the increase in the work from home trend, it sees the need for increased cloud governance.
Setting the pipeline for ‘Outposts’ business
Sharing the initial plan for Outposts he says, “We bet a lot on AWS services. Whenever AWS launches new services, we have a Centre of Excellence team that starts working on them and building internal proofs of concept. We had been a launch partner in previous services like ML capability and Amazon Aurora. Today with AWS Outposts, we’ll be going back two years in our CRM data and will look at customers asking for hybrid cloud model and help them with proofs of concept and build the solution for them. We have definitely done mapping with large manufacturing customers who have been keen to move large SAP and ERP to the cloud, but wanted on premises. The second kind of customers are FSI companies who can use AWS Outposts and address regulators’ needs too and the third is the media industry; India is becoming one of the largest media markets globally.”
There is no doubt that the pandemic has accelerated the digital transformation of enterprises and SMEs. Even for Powerupcloud, for example, a large global insurance company that was very comfortable on premises until now, decided to close all their data centres now and move to the cloud in the next 36 months.
Helping customers recover from Covid impact
Talking about how the company dealt with the impact of Covid on business, he informs, “We have been helping our customers in various ways during this pandemic. Ever since March, we set up a separate Covid-19 action team where we started building programs to help large enterprises adopt the work from home model, which is focused on end-user computing. This helped them to move applications faster to the cloud and enable remote work. We do see an increased demand for cloud adoption. We have seen it increases 2x this quarter (April-June) compared to Q4 last year.”
Interestingly, the cloud provider have seen airlines and manufacturing clients are moving to the cloud in a big manner. Their argument is simple as they see this pandemic as a lean time to advance their IT. Typically, in regular business periods, applications need to go on downtime and pause work streams, etc. Known industries like FSI and media are moving faster to the cloud, at the same time, industries which are hit harder like manufacturing, airline, etc. are using this time to modernise technology.
Siva further adds, “AWS has always been the cloud darling for startups. With AWS Outposts, I really see that AWS has a massive chance to grab the enterprise market share in India. This is a true hybrid cloud service out there in the market. AWS Outposts will solve these issues and will be adopted by enterprises too. This is an opportunity for AWS and partners like us to grab a large market share in enterprise too. We are definitely expecting more demand from both the public and commercial sector in India, and this will lead us into hiring and building talent.”
Cloud adoption in Covid times
Globally, companies are building large scale data lakes on the cloud. With Covid-19 especially, they are understanding the power of the cloud. Cloud is helping businesses use data and insights and take better decisions. “In our pipeline, we’re helping one of the world’s largest ventilator manufacturing companies to help them migrate their data workloads to AWS, and help them build ML engines so they can build better efficiency for their ventilators,” he sums up.
