Gameplan and differentiator for the Competitive Cloud Era
According to Sridhar, CtrlS has been successful in developing a niche positioning in the Industry which renders any effects from the competition with multi-billion dollar global companies inconsequential. “As long as we continue to provide specialized niche services, customers will come and that’s exactly what has happened till now in our space.” This has been true with clear success of Tier 4 and Community Cloud where CtrlS has been the pioneer. The CtrlS ERP Cloud has over 300 customers; the banking Cloud has had close to 40 customers. “All of this happened in the midst of a highly competitive marketplace. So that’s our strategy: continue to differentiate and provide a different value proposition all together.”
Talking about differentiators in the market that has helped CtrlS maintain its positioning, the CtrlS banking cloud has been making good strides recently, but the biggest one was the ERP, as Sridhar explains, “The ERP is predominantly SAP based and the industry problem with SAP was that too many hands were involved, There was a different implementer, a different license provider, a different system integrator, then came the hardware vendor, the security provider, and management of the application among others. All of this required a big team in the organization to manage multiple agencies. With CtrlS, all of that goes into a single service where a client pays on a monthly basis and gets SLA at the application login. With no headaches of handling at least six or seven different agencies and the security parameters going into it, cost goes down and uptime goes up making it a winning situation. We’ve done a similar thing for insurance industry. We’ve done much more than a community cloud for software vendors and SaaS players. Similarly, we’ve done the same for all regulated industries which require different compliances. All of them have a readymade ‘in the box’ solution with us. Our aim is to cover most of the important verticals in the next two years.”
“There is nobody else in India or globally doing the same thing as of now. I believe this (community cloud) will be very big in the coming two or three years.”
The CtrlS Community Cloud
The biggest USP to the CtrlS Community Cloud offering is the specific customizations that render it apt for the customer’s specific needs. “The Cloud we offer to the banking community is very different from what we offer to the ERP community. For the banking community, we give up to 40 control checks. From a cost point of view, it would be at least 4 times more than ERP which does not require such a bullet proof category security. The ERP customers are happy with 5 or 6 information controls or security checks as we call them.”
The way CtrlS build’s the industry specific Clouds differ from one offering to another. As he reiterates, “Yes, the server, computing space and network components are the same, but beyond that it requires a deep rooted expertise. For example, let’s take the SAP Cloud. We have a huge SAP Center of Excellence with more than 200 people with global Fortune500 customer experience, and that CoE, combined with our other 16 CoEs is able to provide this solution. It calls for a complete mile deep expertise in that particular technology. Else, no company can gain SLA and survive.”
The CtrlS Community Cloud offerings include the entire array of functionalities from test & dev, application administration, complete security, accent management, and other component, making it a conclusive deal for the customer. “After signing to our community cloud, an organization only needs any other vendor when there is need for a major implementation, a major change in application, or the launch a new product of service.”
More than 80 percent of the new business that the company is signing has been coming through Community Cloud. “There is nobody else in India or globally doing the same thing as of now. I believe this (community cloud) will be very big in the coming two or three years.”
CtrlS Datacenter, Mumbai – Asia’s largest Tier 4 Datacenter
Community cloud for CIOs in sectors like Banking and Government
As per Sridhar’s estimates, the community cloud easily brings up savings by 30 to 40 percent and improved uptime in applications. And this keeps the Banking CIOs satisfied, “They are happy souls with uptime up to three 9s and we are now reaching up to four 9s: it’s improving day by day.” The third and the biggest benefit is time to market, “Previously, banks took a long time with even the most efficient CIOs taking at least 8-9 months to launch a branch from an IT perspective. Today this time is 3 weeks thanks to the CtrlS community Cloud. At the same time, if you get a 40 percent decrease in pricing and increase in uptime, it’s a no brainer.”
When it comes to the government sector, Sridhar believes the organizations can save a lot more than other sectors, “They can actually save as much as seventy to eighty percent if you consider the resources in their IT departments.” CtrlS has executed some of the country’s largest projects in their G-Cloud or better, the Government Community Cloud. The country’s largest tax project is run on the CtrlS G-Cloud. Some other major government clients include the Finance Departments of some State Governments, application and registration departments, the country’s largest legislature regulator, a number of Utility companies, and the Municipal Corporation of India’s biggest cities. CtrlS is one of the leading Government cloud providers in India.
“Between Cloud and Datacenter, we are looking at almost USD 400 million of revenue in the next 4-5 years.”
Market Presence and expansion plans
Currently, CtrlS has presence in 5 Countries in Southeast Asia; stronghold in Australia and New Zealand, and 3 Countries in the Middle East. Expansion plans are in pipeline for the rest of the countries in Southeast Asia while Japan tops their plans. The year will also witness expansion to the rest of Middle East with next year’s focus on foray into Africa and South America.
