Becoming a Cloud Partner: Journey of Compusoft Advisors

In this very unique segment of DQ Channels, we have covered the journey of  Compusoft Advisors India Pvt. Ltd. becoming a Cloud Partner from a traditional Channel Partner.  Devesh Aggarwal, Director and CEO, Compusoft Advisors shared his entire journey about how his organisation has moved to the cloud business, challenges, growth, and future vision.

When and how did you move to Cloud Business?

Compusoft Advisors has been a Microsoft partner with gold competency in CRM, cloud CRM, cloud productivity, and dynamics nav.

Before the cloud, we were running in dedicated on-premises environments, requiring long-term capital investments and an array of software license commitments and never-ending hardware refresh contracts.

Earlier we used to provide an only on-premise solution. We first moved CRM to cloud in 2011 by hosting on-premise CRM in a data center and selling subscriptions for the same

When we moved to the cloud, we were able to give our customers more flexibility and empowerment for unlimited possibilities for innovation. Our core purpose of moving to the cloud is to provide organizations the agility to speed innovation and save costs by quickly scaling their infrastructure up and down.

We were one of the first partners for Microsoft to start a cloud practice and started with BPOS, which later became office 365.  In the year 2011 along with offering office 365, we have started migrating applications and infrastructure to the Azure platform.

Previously on Cloud Journey: Shivaami Cloud Services

What are the different Cloud services do you offer?

Working with one of the leading cloud service providers like Microsoft. Today's cloud practices span across IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS.

Our total cloud offering includes Cloud Hosting, Cloud Migration, and Implementation, Cloud Storage, Backup and DR (Data Recovery) on Cloud, VM's on Cloud, Cloud Security (EMS), Microsoft Azure, Tally on Azure, SAP on Azure, Dynamics 365, Microsoft 365, Office 365.

What sort of changes have you done to move to the cloud within the organization in terms of Team, skill set, infrastructure, and others?

We started offering our solutions in the SaaS model. We created a secure infrastructure on-premise provided secure access to the Solutions to all our customers. As customers grew, we needed scalability, which was better available on the public cloud.

We got our team trained on various public clouds to set up secure environments. We first moved our software solutions and followed it with other workloads like files, accounting Systems. We made sure the infra is highly available, easily accessible, and scalable.

During the lockdown, we got an opportunity to even enhance our skills around Azure managed services and launched a new team specially for supporting Azure deployments across workloads. Our application teams increased their readiness around a new cloud-based low code no code platform by Microsoft called as Power Platform. This helped us deploy small but business-critical use cases fast and with minimum disruption.

How your old and new customers adopting the new technology and moving to the cloud?

With our strong strategy, we started onboarding our existing customers first. We successfully managed to overcome the initial resistance and predictable concerns like security by embarking on delivering a series of Proofs of Value and Proofs of Concept tailored to address these very concerns.

In addition, we became very active in conducting workshops and seminars to ensure that the cloud messaging and understanding of the value derived from transitioning to the cloud is delivered to each and every customer.

The pandemic has resulted in huge transformations to the cloud. The “work from home” evolving culture has opened up more opportunities for cloud migrations and the entire process of Digital Transformation is accelerated by many folds.

A lot of customers have started moving to the cloud for temporary storage, backups, file services, or virtual desktops.

Our esteemed customers are realizing the gravity of the situation and are readily adapting to the newer technologies in the interest of sustaining their own business in the long run.

With new customers, it is easier as the discussion itself starts with a business continuity strategy with the cloud.

How many customers you have, who are taking Cloud solutions, and what are their different verticals?

We have many customers who are from different verticals like BFSI, Manufacturing, Logistics, etc. Almost 80% of our customer base across India has moved to a cloud-based platform or application as required.

What are the different challenges did you face in this journey? 

Being a new-age IT solution provider we love to solve the problems of our clients and we accept it as a challenge and making sure that with the cloud solution provided our clients gets benefitted the most.

But for us, it has not been much of a new challenge as customers were already slowly and steadily migrating from on-premises to the cloud for the last few years. And the covid-19 pandemic has brought them to embrace this new reality more rapidly.

We are happy that companies have realized the need for cloud adoption as the cloud is reliable, highly available, fault-tolerant, scalable, cost-effective and we feel happy to help them in their transformation journey.

What is your overall growth being a cloud partner?

As a cloud partner, we have grown our services offerings by offering packaged services around cloud solutions offered by Microsoft. This has directly affected our profitability so we could invest in upskilling our teams to better serve customers.

The Pandemic has also made worldwide customers acknowledge that deployments of enterprise solutions and managing the same can happen remotely and we may not need people on-site always. This has negated the fact we are not present in a few geographies within India or even outside India. Political and Geographical Boundaries are slowly vanishing for cloud-based deployments & services.

What are your future goals?

Since over past 22 years of working closely with Microsoft as our Cloud Partner and with the expertise of developing and hosting our own IP and packaged services solutions on Microsoft AppSource and Azure Marketplace, we have become one of the preferred Technology Solution Provider among the industries like Manufacturing, BFSI, Logistics and SCM, Real Estate, ITeS, etc.

Our goal for the future is to adopt new-age technologies and concentrate on Cloud-based application & platform Services across geographies and deploy & manage complex solutions for our customers to increase their productivity and give them better return on investments.