Innovation, agility, diversity, and the ability to stay ahead of the curve are the traits required to excel in the hyper-competitive world. A successful business is the outcome of a group of individuals working together in an organized way. It must work not only towards achieving business goals, but also should work towards societal and environmental development, and serve the customer needs through a differentiated offering that solves their business problem uniquely.
One such leading company providing exceptional client service is Cloud4C. It is world’s first Tier-4 cloud company with presence in 20 countries across the world serving Fortune 500 global multinationals.
The company was founded with the purpose of serving the unmet needs of businesses, especially in the Tier-2 countries globally. They face challenges such as limited (or) no cloud players in their country, inability to experiment with new technologies, and lack of people with skill sets. Cloud4C fills this very gap by providing world class cloud technologies in underprivileged Tier-2 countries through cloud managed services, cloud architecting, cloud consulting to help businesses embrace cloud.
They do this by working along with new businesses. Their subject matter experts work along with the clients to understand their current applications and guide them on their migration by showcasing the benefits, architecting the solution, migrating the infrastructure, and then managing the cloud infrastructure backed by industry best service level agreements, thereby bringing best of breed global technologies to local businesses in Tier-2 countries.
The overall portfolio that the businesses would benefit by leveraging Cloud4C include public cloud, private cloud, community cloud (banking, ERP), disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS), managed security services, and Cloud Managed Services.
Through their Cloud Managed Services portfolio, the company helps businesses consult, architect, and deploy their critical applications on a cloud of their choice – be it AWS, Azure, Cloud4C or Google Cloud. This is a major differentiator, as the company’s Certified Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) from their AWS/Azure/Google/Cloud4C Centers of Excellence (COEs) work alongside the customers to embrace cloud technology in the most appropriate manner.
Facing Problems with Out-of-the-Box Solutions
The sole purpose of any technology offering is to aid the businesses in bringing in operational efficiencies. Their objective is to help them achieve more with less, optimize resources, aid business growth, gain competitive advantage besides helping serve their customers better.
Similarly, Cloud4C helps global businesses achieve speed to market through quick deployment of cloud infrastructure, achieve scalability on demand to address the growing business needs and seasonality. They de-scale infrastructure on-demand to optimize infrastructure usage. The company ensures seamless availability of applications through the world’s best end-to-end SLA (application to infrastructure) backed by highest uptime guarantee (99.995%) translating to near zero downtime.
The company’s banking community cloud has been leveraged by over 16 Indian payment banks to ensure speed-to-market (their cloud technology helped them launch their banking services 8 months ahead of their planned schedule), deployed virtually no capex due to their opex and pay-as-you-use model, helping them invest as they expanded their branches thus helping them do more with less. In fact, they provided them the bank-in-a-box (banking community cloud) with 25 critical applications including core banking, ATM, POS etc combined with 40+ security controls to comply with Reserve Bank of India (RBI) guidelines, thus the bank just had to walk-in with a business plan and walk-out with a cloud solution and launch the bank. They built a technology that made life easy for banks. Likewise, their ERP community cloud today powers 500 global enterprises through the ERP community cloud.
A Client-Centric Cloud Service Provider
Cloud4C is the world’s only 4Copy cloud service provider with built-in high availability, disaster recovery, and back up. The company provides a variety of features and services to the clients including:
- 4 Copy Cloud: It provides 2 Copy Sync in Primary Zone, Async Copy for DR at Zone-2 & Snapshot based backup Zone-3.
- Instant Deployment: The company allows clients to choose from multiple VM configurations and create their cloud instance in minutes.
- Load Balancing: It assists in creating/terminating VM’s, horizontal/vertical scaling, customizing capacity, add-ons load balancers, support, billing, and more.
- Security: Cloud4C provides enhanced features like OTP, multi-factor authentication, role based access control, virtual firewall, HIDS, DDOS, SIEM, SOC, WAF, and VA&PT.
- Real Time Monitoring: It provides more than 175 applications including Server, OS, DB, latency/network routing, Middleware services with 3500+ parameters.
- Flexible Pricing: The company has a flexible pricing policy. Clients can leverage from their hourly pay per use model or reserve for light, medium and heavy usage on prepaid model.
Noteworthy Achievements
The company has achieved numerous landmarks throughout its illustrious journey. Although Cloud4C is a cloud services company, they are the first in the world to have rolled out a banking and ERP community cloud offering. Their services filled the market gap – addressing the unmet needs of customers. This apart, their offering helped banks embrace cloud technology as it was compliant with RBI guidelines and offered all applications and infrastructure on a pay-as-you-use model.
Views about the Cloud Computing Industry
The company feels that cloud computing revenues have grown from U$5bn in 2008 to U$180bn in 2017, that’s whopping 30x growth in just about ten years. The industry is estimated to surpass U$400bn by 2020. India too recorded revenues of U$1.8bn in 2017 and is poised to cross U$4bn by 2020, while one of the world’s leading research and advisory company estimates that India will clock U$2.6bn in 2018.
With the advent of major global players such as AWS, MS Azure, Indian businesses have embraced public cloud in a big way – mostly for non-core applications. Few small businesses have experimented by moving their workloads onto public cloud. Mission critical businesses, financial services companies, and large enterprises, however, are adopting a middle path by leveraging private cloud for critical applications and public cloud for non-critical.
The company feels that with 50 million small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and large enterprises, cloud penetration is merely in single digits, leaving a world of opportunity for all players including themselves, AWS, Azure, Google and others. It is the company’s belief that by 2023 at least 80% to 90% of all Indian businesses would have embraced cloud in one form or the other – be it SaaS, IaaS, or PaaS.
Lastly, with the Indian Data Privacy soon likely to take shape, the company expects to witness rapid deployment (local hosting) of all global applications within India.
Future Plans of Cloud4C
Marching ahead towards the future, the company aims to be present in 40 countries by March 2020. By this time, they intend to be present across all major regions – Americas, Africas, Europe, Middle East, APAC covering all planned Tier-2 countries.
Words of Advice for Up-and-Coming Entrepreneurs
Sridhar states that entrepreneurship requires persistence, perseverance, ability to innovate, ability to take risks, ability to cope with repeated failures and yet swing back with renewed energy every time one is faced with adversity. Faith in one’s belief system and appetite for risk taking are keys to success and continued journey as an entrepreneur.
He advices young entrepreneurs to build a robust and differentiated service/product offering, a passionate and dedicated team, to focus on customer needs, pain-points, and surrounding one’s research and development (R&D) efforts at developing unique offerings. He advices them to foster alliances to grow businesses at the most appropriate time.
“Lastly, come what may – do not compromise your value system – if you lose values, you shall be left with none – Can you image a body without a soul.” says Sridhar. He adds, “Honesty, integrity are pillars to sustain an entrepreneur in the long run and ensure their success, this has been my life’s learning”.
About the Founder/CEO
Sridhar Pinnapureddy is the Founder and CEO of Cloud4C. He is a first generation entrepreneur and innovator. He has spearheaded over 200 innovations including most energy efficient Tier-4 datacenters, DR as a service, 4Copy Cloud, Banking Community Cloud (Bank in a Box), and many more.
He spends most of his spare time in understanding innovative technologies and how they are affecting our lives and various industries. Sridhar has been honored with several awards including Visionary Leader of the Indian Industry, TV5 Business Leader Award, Best Entrepreneur of the Year (ATA), CEO of the Year Award (World Quality Congress), Rajiv Gandhi Shiromani by Global Economic Council (GEC), and many more.
