Currently catering largely to the manufacturing sector, Minfy Technologies is aiming at global business pie, with the support from AWS. The company is making inroads into India’s government sector, co-working with established SIs in the country. Vijay Jain, Sales Director, Minfy Technologies, shares the company’s roadmap
When the company started, was it directed at the cloud services businesses?
Minfy Technologies was started in 2014 from Hyderabad; then we were looking at cloud as an emerging area. We evaluated numerous options, and coincidentally, Amazon was also looking for a partner in South India.
Over the last three years, we have evolved across different areas and expanded our business across different regions – Bengaluru, Kolkata, Delhi NCR and Mumbai. When we started, we knew the existence of opportunities, but we were unclear of our approach. That was a learning curve for us, as there were not many case studies and examples for our reference. As we evolved, we witnessed numerous opportunities coming our way.
What were the key learnings from your transition and growth phase?
The customer will not start spending from the first day itself. You need to be part of the customer’s journey. We have seen that customers are now increasingly comfortable with cloud – this has also helped us grow.
Do you see more deployments happening; are certain customers still in the evaluation stage?
Our primary customers are from the manufacturing sector. One of our core competencies lies in the area of SAP and HANA. We interact with many CFOs and business owners, and we have experienced that businesses have invested in infrastructure such as SAP and critical ERP. Now when we interact with CFOs and business owners, we have observed that they are influencing decision making. Manufacturing customers are thrilled by capex and opex. However, some customers are interested in scaling their businesses to server-less models.
When you talk to customers about the benefits of the AWS platform, how to you approach them?
We highlight the scale and leadership position of AWS. Secondly, we are able to show customers the benefits of security; Amazon has multiple compliances. Aditionally, we also talk about price drops that AWS offers. Another important factor is hardware refresh, which can be done easily with AWS, at a reduced cost.
How does the AWS team support, in terms of sales pitch, go-to-market strategy or lead generation?
AWS has multiple programmes which are publicly available. Programmes on training and certifications have helped us immensely. These programmes – partially or fully funded – have helped us retain talent. Amazon’s solution team also works closely with our team. Their PoC programmes also help us experiment.
How is Minfy positioned in comparision with traditional partners?
We are working with many big system integrators and traditional players, in the government sector. These players have an established connect with this sector; hence, we leverage each other’s strengths. The market is so huge that we can easily co-exist.
Moreover, we are building skills internally. For example, currently we are working on a machine learning project. We lack substantial skills in machine learning, but we are building that through a consultant from Singapore. In the area of AI, we are working with one of the leading schools, using Alexa. The school is trying to integrate the school management system with Alexa device. We are also working in the smart cities space, which is expected to be completed in the near future.
Besides manufacturing, which are the other focus verticals for the company?
We also have our own solutions catering to the media industry, and web and mobile workloads for the internet and e-commerce domain. These are followed by the government sector, wherein we work with SIs.
As you plan business growth, what are expectations from Amazon?
We expect Amazon to help us expand beyond India. We are trying to understand the key factors for setting up our international business. Instead of adding more services in a limited geography, we aim to deepen existing skills and undergo geographical expansion. Currently we are clocking a revenue of ` 18 to ` 20 crore; and we have set target to achieve ` 50 crore revenue by 2020 – geographical expansion will be a key driver in this. Furthermore, the government vertical will also help in scaling our business. The SIs working in this vertical are looking at deep skills like ours, and flexibility. This forms a major part of our inroads into the government sector.
