Gatorade, Red Bull or Cloud?

MUMBAI, INDIA: Time and maintenance headaches are not exactly the provisions that start-ups can afford when they have other pressing matters like blazing a new trail, pushing the elevator upwards and disrupting the past tense on hand.

They need to guzzle adrenaline whether it’s around the coffee-machines or IT juices. The basements are already full of buzzing minds, tectonic ideas and make-shift desks, hence, leaving not much room (literally) for any compute or storage clobber.

That, perhaps, explains why Cloud biggies like AWS have amassed such huge market shares giving startups the ease and variety of renting cloud servers and freeing them of the inevitable burden of cobbling together data centers and storage stacks. When start-ups can pay for what they sip instead of what the whole bottle costs, who needs an expensive, AMC-warped elephant in the backyard?

Enter 2016 and a Pacific Crest survey (that entailed 300 companies with a 2015 median revenue of $5 million) indicated AWS as the leader (50 per cent as against Microsoft’s four percent and Salesforce’s two per cent) in the small and medium sized cloud app service market. April 2017 and the pattern shows no sign of fading. Synergy Research points out Amazon having 40 per cent of the public IaaS market, even as Google, Microsoft, IBM etc. tossed up a combined share of the next big slice and clocked way-better-than-earlier growth numbers.

In fact, Forrester Research's report, 'The State of Cloud Platform Standard, Q4 2016,' also observed OpenStack and AWS as the de facto standards when it comes to compute and storage in the cloud.

Things are not going to change drastically as we move forward. Gartner has prognosticated that by 2020, 90 per cent of organisations could be adopting hybrid infrastructure management and AWS and Azure would be dominating this market.

IDC, too, augurs that public cloud market might more than double in a span of three years; to $195 billion by 2020. Forrester, on its part, puts the overall market size by 2020 somewhere around $236 billion instead.

What makes these growth numbers possible? Why are start-ups salivating at this new genre of you-spend-per-use, leave-the-backyard-to-us alternatives?

At AWS Summit in Mumbai, we got a chance to grab some chatter with Adwit Sharma, Senior Solution Consultant, Gupshup, an omni messaging platform. He lets us in on some highs that using Cloud has transpired into for this digital front-runner.

Why does Cloud help so much?

Our entire infrastructure was hosted on AWS 2013 onwards and since then we are true-blue users of Cloud. We wanted to be a lean and productive company. Our leadership brings 30 years’ worth of expertise and insights from the Silicon Valley and they knew that Cloud is the optimal answer for scalability issues. It also comes as a strong answer for security issues as we need not invest too much on security and we can reap the clout and expertise they have in this area.

And you are happy?

Absolutely! For instance, AWS Lambda is extremely amazing when it comes to auto-scaling systems. We don’t have to maintain and look after the systems when auto-scaling is in play. We should have shifted much earlier. With 4 billion SMSs a month, we command about 40 per cent of India’s market. Cloud has been helpful in our growth. It has freed us of resources and mental bandwidth and we can focus on what our business really needs to innovate on.

What can be done better- going ahead?

Money and trust are important determinants of any investment in technology. Knowledge has to be continuously built up to assure enterprises about the advantages that come with Cloud.

Adwit Sharma, Gupshup

So technology, or how one deploys technology, matters for a start-up?

Yes. We use a lot of technology as the perfect catalyst. It helps us to match up to the expectations of the market and releases resources to invest elsewhere. There are so many attractive scaling options with Cloud.

Is Cloud, by its quintessential nature, easier for start-ups to use than for legacy-strapped enterprises?

It’s actually a leadership mindset so maybe you can say so. It’s about having the right tool at the right place at the right time. We have talent from some of the greatest institutions like IIT-Mumbai so the culture and comfort levels of minds at work here also aligns with the kind of technology put to use.