Sandeep Bhargava is the Managing Director, Asia Pacific / Japan, for Rackspace Technology and is instrumental in driving the company’s vision and growth across the APJ region. With over 20+ years of IT Services experience, Sandeep has a strong network globally and across APJ. He has a proven track record of leading teams that deliver financial and operational results. Since joining Rackspace Technology in Sep 2019, Sandeep has built a stellar leadership team that are driven by customer success and on ensure delivering on Rackspace Technology’s renowned Fanatical Experience.
The pandemic has accelerated technology innovation and transformation in India, which has been one of the key factors contributing to a strong post-pandemic economic recovery. According to Gartner, India is expected to spend up to US$100 billion by the end of 2022, with the software segment expected to see the highest growth, at an estimated US$10.5 billion this year. For Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), this is an opportunity for aggressive growth. The market is expected to be competitive, and to participate in this growth, ISVs need to be agile, resilient and accelerate their time to market in delivering solutions to customers.
In this hyper-competitive growth market, ISVs looking to accelerate their innovations and speed up their time to market will do well to look at transforming from traditional on-premises vendors to cloud-native development and production environment. This approach not only accelerates time to value but helps overcome critical bottlenecks in the journey, moving software vendor businesses towards higher business efficiency, advanced innovation and cost-effectiveness.
In addition, software firms can scale much faster than legacy on-premises enterprises, engage global customers, with minimal uptime and resources. The benefits extend beyond costs and time to include delivering a significantly higher quality of service at the lowest possible costs and delivery models.
The business benefits of migrating to the cloud
The right cloud strategy derives more value from technology ecosystems, data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI), enabling ISVs to benefit from increased functional flexibility and shorter time to market. By running essential applications on the cloud, ISVs benefit from diverse capacities, including lean cost management of underlying compute, network, storage, to maximise returns on investment (ROI) and pass on the benefit of cost savings to customers.
Navigating operational challenges and an efficient IT environment with the power of cloud adoption facilitates integrations, innovations and brings about the consistent enterprise scaling needed for enhanced and engaging user experiences continuously. Elastic, scalable models such as ‘pay as you grow’ and an increased global data centre presence with comprehensive ground support equip ISV businesses with the much-needed confidence to make the shift to the cloud. With the advent of public and hyperscaler cloud service providers in India, the country is rapidly becoming a leading cloud growth market in the region. With pervasive deployment and development of cloud infrastructure by global players including AWS, Google and Microsoft, end-user experience with high workload performance and lower latency improved rapidly in the country.
Leveraging the value of a multi cloud is critically important in enabling digital operational environments for customers.
Simplifying the cloud-migration journey for ISVs
While managing the software vendor’s cloud migration transition effectively can seem daunting and complex at first. But the critical step is choosing the right cloud strategy designed to deliver the expertise targeted by the business, scale with ease, mitigate common risks and accelerate investment returns. By rethinking traditional support models and broadening horizons, software companies can break barriers and explore new possibilities and partnerships in a competitive landscape.
Modern cloud architectures enable the successful shift of complete end-to-end processes for an ISV by categorising and prioritising existing applications and workloads. An in-depth assessment of the current infrastructure and network systems helps determine the right cloud platforms to align with core business objectives and superior security requirements. By assessing and predicting future cloud consumptions well in advance, businesses can reduce IT costs, plan capacity and budget management and generate revenues consistently.
Driving agility and differentiation
A reliable cloud platform enabling the use of real-time data to enhance operational intelligence, makes ISVs more agile and better prepared for planned, strategic schedules, an empowering business edge that was earlier only limited to third-party software and on-premises solutions. By moving into the cloud, independent Indian software businesses can unlock capabilities needed to perform complex permutations, enable effective knowledge sharing at various levels and work across multiple parallel workloads within dynamic timelines.
Expert cloud solutions not only equip ISVs to achieve more for their customers with serverless application capabilities but also assist in onboarding new customers comprehensively with lower entry barriers and expanding into markets with easy deployment.
As the global economy recovers, the accelerated digital operational models implemented globally will see enhancements and further investment. Digital deployments and infrastructure are predicted to grow significantly, including Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), cloud and digital-native applications in India.
A robust, flexible and elastic cloud infrastructure will not only enable Indian software vendors to stay competitive, accelerate innovation, optimise capital costs and investments but also ensure enhanced time to deployment and frictionless partnerships. Therefore, ISVs in India have an incredible opportunity to realise significant cost and operational efficiencies while addressing core infrastructural, growth challenges, building a secure and mutually beneficial customer-centric ecosystem.