Wait! So Cloud is the Spinach?

It’s one thing to start a new venture with a disruptive model. But can everyone keep up with the explosive momentum it picks up – without any warnings? Cloud can help a platform to pump up all the muscle one needs here. A Popeye tells us how.

Just make the slit and pour the wonderful green stuff into your mouth. The pecs and biceps start bulging in an instant. That should make you ready to punch a challenger in a jiffy! Helping you fight and conquer anyone, make Olive smile with non-stop claps and enjoy the swagger of a happy background score.

The movers and shakers of the application economy could not have asked for a better bottle of spinach than cloud here. The spikes can come at any time. Customer retention can be a tough metric to wrestle with. There may not be a lot of time or resources to turn into a Hulk, especially when your distinct advantage is your agility, per se.

Surely, digging in your feet deeper than before is a new challenge – very different than arriving. If anyone knows that best, it is CleverTap, a digital analytics player that has been redefining the market in many ways since its inception. So when this new-age customer engagement and retention platform for brands needed that extra power to knock-out market jumps and dips, it grabbed that spinach called cloud with great timing and flair.

As Anand Jain, Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer, CleverTap will unfold in this interview – the spinach works miracles. But unlike a Popeye, you don’t have to drink it only when you ‘absolutely’ have to. There is more that Cloud can bring to bolster up your competitive advantage. It can be a staple, a breakfast instead of some rainy-day steroid.

Especially when we hear Supratim Biswas, Chief Revenue Officer, CleverTap say with confidence that cloud is the ultimate equalizer. “Right now we have optimised for growth. We have the most revenue-efficient apps on AWS. What we are strong in is how efficiently we use AWS.” He has no doubt, whatsoever, that the company is moving forward well in a market that was ruled by the likes of Adobe and Salesforce so far. There is a sweet spot that exists for CleverTap even if it can co-exist and collaborate with erstwhile leaders.

Indeed, data and its speed can assume a new gravity when you are a player that is about that killer-mix of analytics and engagement which helps applications to jump that valley from user sign-ins to stay-ins. When your platform processes billions of data events a month so that your clients can identify, target, engage, measure, and monetize users across mobile and web – can you let any gap pull you back? Real-time data analytics at scale and large instance sizes – without the cushion of a Cloud? Not really.

With operations in 5 continents, 10 countries, this start-up has been moving swiftly away from the tag of a start-up. The last we heard, CleverTap set up an AWS instance for a customer pilot in Korea in less than 72 hours. And it can now set up a data centre in less than one week.

Is that what being a Popeye means? Knowing how, how fast and when to use the cloud? We turn to Jain for explaining this from his own hands-on sailing with AWS.

Tell us something about your company’s foothold? Is there a specific problem that you are trying to solve?

CleverTap is a customer engagement and retention platform that helps brands maximize user lifetime-value. We have moved beyond outdated marketing automation tools to provide organizations of all sizes with deep insights into user behaviour and usage-trends across web and mobile.

We are happy and proud that today some 8,000 consumer brands around the world, including Vodafone, Star, Sony, Discovery, Fandango LATAM, Carousell, and Gojek are using us for better user engagement and retention- and thus - long term revenue.

As you can comprehend now, we are trying to solve the tricky part that every application-venture faces – user-retention. We spent the first few years building the platform but the last three and a half years have been used for monetizing the platform. We help our customers not only retain their users but also engage them so strongly that they stay consistent and generate revenues. This is a different scenario than just worrying about customer-churn.

How are you catering to this problem?

Like I see it, user-acquisition is just one part of the game. User-retention is where the strength, context and ingenuity of any application play out. It’s about timing and personalization. Translated well – it’s about data and how well you use it. You cannot afford to lose any time or latency there. The user needs to be sure – yes, the application cares for me. I am more than a piece of statistics to it.

Also, the prediction act is not as easy in the online world as it is in the physical world. The challenge is to know and serve exactly what the user wants vs. tuning him/her off with the wrong stuff. We use our technology to help applications give the right experience to the users at the right time.

We help apps travel between retention to engagement well.

What makes a cloud investment relevant for CleverTap?

AWS gave us a solid and scalable ground when we wanted to sort out our infrastructure battles. We needed something to scale rapidly so that frequent traffic-swells could be handled well - Without unnecessary capital expenditures and we needed this across Asia so that we had the ability to scale at quick instances. CleverTap started using AWS six and a half years ago.

What is it about born-in-the-AWS–Cloud that creates a new advantage in the market?

When you are in the mobile-app world, personalization drives engagement and retention. And individualization deepens the relationship between customer and company. It’s individualization that not only increases revenue, but helps with new revenue streams as well.

That’s where it helps immensely to have a technology partner that can scale with the peak demands and dance well with the flexibility that our customers need but without missing out on the need to engage and retain their users. This is where we are sure-footed with Cloud. We are able to deploy parallel isolated environments on AWS within hours to meet customer data regulatory requirements.

Any examples?

To give you a sense of the dynamic nature of this space, CleverTap ingests over 10 billion data points on an average day. This tends to be 50 per cent higher during peak activities/events. I remember how CleverTap’s Customer Journeys allowed multiple campaigns and campaign touch-points to drive over one million tickets sold on the BookMyShow app in the first 24 hours of the release of the movie Avengers: Endgame in India. With AWS, we can play at a high abstraction layer and we do not have to worry about uptime. The application needs to scale well and that’s where AWS comes in.

Is it possible to run Cloud with a lean DevOps staff?

My head of DevOps runs a very tight ship. It all depends on the robustness of documentation and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).

You also used Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)?

Yes, we used it to ensure persistence of data so that we do not lose the data. We also use AWS services such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), AWS CloudFormation, Amazon Simple Storage Service, Amazon Redshift.

Do you see Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) being game-changers for this space soon?

ML helps to learn from data. Data generation is easy but finding patterns and making them actionable – that’s where the game is. How do you know what to serve and when? ML is a back-end. To make data work, and at scale – is where CleverTap helps. We are leveraging data to learn about the customer.

What about competitors like Salesforce or Adobe?

They do not sell to start-ups. But with AWS firmly supporting our back, we are now in a level-playing field. We are able to rapidly deploy without missing out on compliance and security imperatives. All boxes are checked and we get a lot of speed and confidence to go forth in this market.

Is Cloud going to help ahead for future goals too?

Since our inception to now, we have expanded our facilities in many continents. We now have to ensure that data, even the geo-sensitive one, can be deployed in a region without losing much time. We can now set up a data centre in less than a week. Our set-up can be up and running in a smaller window of time than before. Customers rely on us for scalability and service. They do not care how – they care about uptime and reliability. We are helping customers go for the mobile-first paradigm which is very different from the retrofitting, mobile-second approach.