“AWS has a very established lead as far as the platform is concerned”

Prateek Garg, Managing Director - Progressive Infotech on how his company’s journey has been while exiting from the traditional business that it has been doing and migrating to AWS cloud business - 

Can you tell about the transformation in your organisation?
In 2010-11, we were looking at what to do next. At that stage the first thing I was visualising is that the PC and the mobile will converge. Then I didn’t know, but I felt that the mobile will eventually become the PC and most people will be able to do most of their stuff on the mobile. That time we also saw that the cloud was maturing in the US and a lot of cloud start-up businesses which was running 24X7 were running out of cloud which clearly gave us the sense that the future of the data center in the cloud is not going to be the way it was going then. We were setting update for the customers.

We are a 1200 people organisation in India and have set up a subsidiary in US last year. We are growing about 40% YoY. We have a positive cash flow positive month on month; we have more debts on the books so we are cash rich, we are ready to see if there is an acquisition opportunity where we can acquire a company.

What about your existing customer base that you have been dealing with?
We went and spoke to all customers and we exited from our traditional business very smoothly. We told our client that you can either go to some other partner. We gave everybody six months to 1 year to transit out.  

Apart from your Exclusive partnership with AWS, How are you aligned with AWS compared to others service providers?
We also work with Microsoft and Google, but our lead partnership is with AWS. The key advantage with AWS is that they have a very established lead as far as the platform is concerned. They are far superior in terms of innovation and the number of services that they offer. Microsoft is coming closer to it. Generally speaking AWS still remains the head of everybody. The third thing is that, the number of uses cases worldwide that are available on AWS, nobody is close yet. So, in most cases you are able to put a solution together for a client on AWS. Other two advantages that they bring to the table is that, AWS is a new age company and their focus is completely on client success. So it is easy to work with them; they are transparent, they are trustworthy. Since they completely focus on client success they work with you hand in hand. 

What are the business opportunities you see in India?
Business is growing rapidly for us. We are currently seeing success in 4 verticals, manufacturing, retail, healthcare and media and entertainment but the 5th vertical which we have started working in now is the financial services vertical.

Besides the banking core application, there are a lot of other allied applications and that’s where banks are beginning to use the cloud. As a best practice every bank, they keep their data in different-different data centers. 

Bank is a regulated industry; any regulated industry will have to keep a data center and they may not be able to go to the cloud, unless the regulatory environment starts changing this. This will happen soon as we see the maturity of the cloud, then people will start trusting the cloud more and banking will also start using cloud more. There is a bank in Australia which has moved completely on AWS.

What about the security concern, since cyber security is a big problem across the globe?.
There is a very simple answer to this; you are more secured today in a public cloud than you are in your own data center. The reason being that the security infrastructure and the investment that the public cloud vendors put in. No corporate can even think of it. Like in AWS cloud the security is multi-tier security and it is highly secured, nobody can hack it because they have 24x7 software running and they are constantly monitoring all the threats. There is absolutely no way anybody could replicate it. There is only two hyper scale enterprise grade cloud in the world which is AWS and Microsoft. 

What is your message to the VAR community in the country?
Three lessons which I learnt in these 30 years is that, one is focus is very important so focus on what you do. Secondly, you have to differentiate, you can’t say look I can do everything. You got to differentiate. Third, today we live in the world of disruptions and the rate of innovation is very high. So the third is to constantly experiment in a way that you have to keep trying things. These are the three things that I focus clearly on and articulate clearly. Last is Innovate constantly.

What are the expectations from digital India?
I certainly see from next year we will start benefitting from it. Because digital India is bringing some of very innovative projects, government projects, large projects. We are also excited about the government business but we will have to partner with the larger SIs who are doing that piece of business to work on the cloud. We are investing in building IOT skills and command centres. We are partnering with an American company and very soon we will have command control solution that we are integrating it and putting the whole thing together. So, there are a few opportunities that we are counting.