Becoming a Cloud Partner: Journey of Esconet Technologies

In this very unique segment of DQ Channels, we have covered the journey of Esconet Technologies Pvt. Ltd. as a born into the Cloud company. Santosh Agrawal, Director, Esconet Technologies 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?

Esconet started its cloud business in 2010 with a micro-scale private cloud setup. We were trying to explain SMB customers the benefits and value proposition of the cloud. The hyper-scale CSPs were not born yet. After a few years when AWS started selling in India we partnered with them and today we are partners with Microsoft Azure as well. The Esconet cloud which was started in 2010 grew initially at a slow pace and now it has matured into a fully functional public cloud service branded as Zeacloud.

What are the different Cloud services do you offer?

We offer Public Cloud a pay as you go hourly rate card, fixed-price managed private cloud resources for Virtual Servers, Backup-as-a-Service, DR-as-a-Service, Desktop-as-a-Service, Web Application Firewalls, CDN etc. We also do Managed Cloud for our customers on Azure and AWS.

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

The technical team of Esconet had been hands-on on the virtualization technologies. They had already created secured private clouds for many of our customers in Government, PSU, Defense, Enterprise and SMB verticals it was very natural for them to ramp up its own cloud services and provide excellent customer support on top of it.

We had to gear up for 24x7 support services. Our new office premises in Okhla helped us in enabling the same and we have a setup of 24x7 Operations Centre in this premises.

Yes, the sales team had to be trained as cloud sales require a different mindset and a different kind of pitch to the customers. Trainings from Azure and AWS also helped us in this journey.

Previously on Cloud Journey: GVB Geomatics

How does Crayon Software help you to grow your business and customers?

Crayon helps us as not only as an aggregator of services for a single point of invoicing but also helps us in pre-sales and validating architected solution as and when required. At times we need PoC credits for acquisition of new customer accounts which is facilitated by Crayon.

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

Every customer, be it old or new, has understood the value proposition of cloud today especially after the national lockdown during the pandemic. Otherwise, also we aggressively educate our customers through our marketing efforts, explaining the benefits of cloud wherein they would be able to focus more on their core business and leave the complexity of running their IT to us.

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

We have almost 80+ customers today onboard on to different cloud platforms. These are from various verticals such as Manufacturing, IT/ITeS, Retail, Legal Services. We also operate through reseller channels also.

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

The biggest challenge initially was to form a trust relationship with customers for trusting their valuable data on any cloud platform. Also, a bigger challenge with SMB customers is ROI comparison. With the mass adoption of cloud and the marketing noise, the apprehensions are shedding slowly.

The second internal challenge was to change the mindset of internal sales teams. The teams were used to closing big numbers by selling hardware and software whereas the comparable cloud sales ticket would be smaller on a monthly ticket. But slowly the team has also realized the power of annuity business.

What is your overall growth being a cloud partner?

Initially, 10 years back the growth was very slow but over the last couple of years, we are seeing significant growth in cloud business across all services and platforms to the tune of 35-50% YoY.

What are your future goals?

We would like to be referred to as the Gold Standard in Managed Cloud Services and expand our cloud base Globally.