Varoon Rajani, Co-founder and CEO, Blazeclan Technologies shares the company’s cloud journey and how it has been helping customers build and transform their applications and businesses using public cloud
What is Blazeclan’s core business specialization area and how has been the growth of your line of business?
Blazeclan’s core business specialization is enabling transformation for our customers using public cloud, specifically Amazon Web Services. Over the last few years, we have seen a significant growth in our business. We have been helping customers from start-ups to enterprises to build and transform their applications and businesses using public cloud. While 5 years back enterprises in India weren’t open to the idea of using public cloud, today the scenario has changed. All major enterprises are using public cloud for one or more of their workloads, and we see a major uptake in the usage of public cloud over the next few years.
Tell us about your partnership with AWS. What are the new areas of investment this year?
We are a Premier Partner of AWS having achieved 4 competencies and Managed Services Partner (MSP) status. We became an AWS partner in 2012 and since then we have grown our organization with the increasing adaption of AWS cloud platform. Our offerings today include Cloud Advisory, Automation, Managed Services, Cloud Native Application Development and Analytics. We are investing in all these areas and building stronger and larger teams as the demand for all these services is growing rapidly.
Outside of these, we are investing in building a strong Machine Learning practice. With the cost of data storage and processing getting lowered every day, running machine learning algorithms on large swathes of data within an enterprise is becoming affordable and technically feasible. Today, most of our customers would want to run various machine learning algorithms to predict customer churn, improve maintenance of machinery, cross sell and up sell products among other things to better their revenues and profits.
AWS is focused on simplifying business and technology to improve organizational goal. Please comment.
AWS provides the platform and we bring the skills to build on that platform. Our goal is to help our customers use cloud in the right way, and help them leverage the scalability, elasticity, and automation to improve their business processes as well as business applications. Our automation practices bring in the predictability required to run multiple build cycles of the application and reduce human errors. Blazeclan’s Cloud Assure framework does away with the complex governance while migrating large data centers to cloud for enterprises. Once the customers are on cloud, our Cloudlytics.com platform helps the customers to audit and govern the cloud security and different compliances that an enterprise may have to follow. We are always looking to simplify the cloud adaption for our customers.
How do see the growth of digital transformation among enterprises and their preparedness for this journey?
At Blazeclan, we believe in cloud-led and cloud-enabled transformation. Any business looking to go digital or scale in today’s fast paced environment has to have cloud as its core of their technology landscape. Since our inception, we have been a user of AWS cloud for all the projects that we have delivered for our customers. We have helped companies to move entire data centers to cloud across APAC.
Besides, we are helping customers to build new digital businesses on cloud and data lakes on AWS, and help them with machine learning on top of it. There are multiple use cases here. One recent example is a large NBFC lending business whom we helped launch a new digital business in less than 6 months timeline. This was a major success, wherein the complete business runs on AWS. We have helped a beverages company in Malaysia to shutdown their data center in less than 4 months and move all their applications and infrastructure to AWS. Our focus and niche is public cloud, primarily AWS. We are born in the cloud and we help enterprises with cloud workloads and do not work on legacy data center workloads.
What’s the bottom line for customers? What are some of the unique customer’s challenges you are addressing?
The bottom line for the customers is to be more agile to their end consumers need. With the rise of internet and cloud computing, there are start-ups and digital native businesses that have grown significantly over the last few years. These two technological shifts along with the change in the development processes and access to large amount of capital has totally changed the business landscape.
The entry barriers in the traditional business have come down significantly and it is possible for large number of digital native businesses to disrupt entire sectors. These digital native businesses are agile, come up with new business models quickly, and are ready to change their business models faster than the traditional enterprises. Today’s consumers want the convenience of digital applications which makes it simpler for them to transact with businesses of their choice as well as at their fingertips. As a business if you are not agile and responding to your consumers’ need or innovating on their behalf, you are going to lose out. Traditional businesses are feeling this change, and the biggest challenge for them is to change their long-standing processes and cut down the bureaucracy and respond fast to customers demands.
We help our customers become more agile on the technology front by shifting their software development processes towards agile development processes and bringing in more automation. This, along with the agile infrastructure where you build infrastructure as a core, helps larger enterprises to scale and respond to changing demands rapidly. We have seen large enterprises transform and are ready to take over their nimbler start-ups successfully.
How much of your focus is on training and reskilling to meet the digital transformation needs?
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 which 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 to 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 and the initial batch of hires has been a great start.
What opportunities and challenges do you see as you grow in your business?
We believe that public cloud is going to be the new normal, and Blazeclan as a business has been focused on this for the last 7 years. Since the enterprise adoption of public cloud has just started to increase, we have an opportunity to grow multi-fold as a business by helping our customers to scale on cloud and be more competitive in this digital world.
The biggest challenges we face are hiring and skilling the right team. While we focus on hiring the right people, it is always difficult to do that in a fast-paced growth environment and finding the right people with right skill sets with an attitude to adapt quickly to changes is challenging.
