Becoming a Cloud Partner: Journey of Mismo Systems

In this very unique segment of DQ Channels, we have covered the journey of Mismo Systems becoming a Cloud Partner from a traditional Channel Partner. Vineet Arora, Founder, Mismo System 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?

We are born into cloud partners. After working in all facets of IT services for 15 years, we started this business to enable organizations of all sizes to use IT as an enabler for their business and not a cost center. We have the vision to provide solutions that are in the best interest of our customers. Customers should get value from the investments they make, be it in terms of quality of services or the return from the solutions they are investing in.

What are the different Cloud services do you offer?

We have been focused and only provide services and solutions on Public Clouds. All our offerings are managed by default, be it Microsoft 365 or Azure Hosting or AWS or Backup. We are Gold partners on Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365. We are AWS consulting partners (Select Qualified) and have started building practice for Google Compute Platform (GCP). We are solution providers and not resellers. More than 70% of our revenue is from services. We are experts in migration from on-premises to the cloud. We are fortunate to get opportunities and have doing migrations all the time.  Be it migration from on-premises Exchange servers (on any other messaging system) to Microsoft 365 or from Google Workspace (former G Suite) or from One Microsoft 365 tenant to another (in the acquisition or merger scenario), we have a proven and successful track record.

We have done many lifts and shift migrations for applications and databases from on-premises to Microsoft Azure or AWS. We follow a standard approach in every project which includes detailed planning and design to ensure that project is a success. We are experts when it comes to migration and it’s also our passion!

We are lucky to have customers hosting with us their B2C applications which are customer-facing, ERP systems including Navision and SAP. We have helped many customers to achieve DR for their on-premises business-critical systems using DR as a Service (DRaaS) with minimal cost and extremely low RPO & RTO and migrate/consolidate their file servers to the cloud.

Covid-19 has hit some industries very badly, we got some opportunities to help customers and ensure business continuity. We worked very hard and did some big deployments of Desktops as a Service using Windows Virtual Desktop (Azure) and AWS workspaces.

All of our customers are managed by us. We provide managed services on Azure, AWS, and Microsoft 365. We believe in proactive management and monitoring. All of our offerings by default include monthly reporting, periodic restore drills, cost optimization, capacity management, and regular reviews.

We are building our capabilities in more efficient cloud offerings including serverless, containers, and DevOps, and will soon be offering these to our customers. We already have customers on App services and Database as a Service.

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 are born into cloud partners. The business is run by leadership with core technology people. We are experts on cloud technologies; however, we differentiate with our knowledge & wide experience of IT in general, data center, networks, IT services and we can easily get into the shoe of our customers to understand their needs. This makes us provide solutions that are in the best interest of our customers and we can think of a bigger picture rather than just cloud.

Previously on Cloud Journey: Birlasoft

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

We have worked with only a few partners in the last 5 years because of our focus. We found Crayon to be the most professional of them all. We are obsessed with our customer's needs and providing the best services. That is why it is super important for us to carefully choose our partners. We have an ideal partner in Crayon because they have similar values as we have.

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

We are seeing a shift in customer thinking and their approach. When we started, mostly, we had to explain to customers why they should move to the cloud, what in as security. Now, customers are coming to us and are ready to migrate. Obviously, some of this push has come from the unfortunate pandemic.

We are also seeing the demands of serverless more and more. More and more businesses now understand that power of the cloud is best realized with PaaS and serverless architectures.

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

We have worked with 100+ customers. We have 70+ active and managed cloud customers from different verticals - finance, retail, travel, engineering, FMCG, and more. We have a few customers outside India as well where we deliver pure services (migrations, management, projects services). We have customers in Canada, the US, UK, AUS, and Japan.

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

Well, all the challenges that a new business face! We are lucky enough to pass through them and have steady growth. Being technically ready, was an advantage for us. The major challenge we face is cost competition rather than value competition. We hope other partners will focus on providing value rather than cutting costs and customers will appreciate this. We don’t want to overcharge; however, we need to keep the required margins and have a healthy business. A healthy service provider will always give good services to customers. So, in the end, it's a win-win for all.

What is your overall growth being a cloud partner?

We have grown from 1 customer in 2016 to 100+ customers in 2020. We thank our customers for their trust in us and the Mismo Systems team for the efforts they put in every day to keep providing the level of services we are committed to. We have grown 60% YoY in terms of revenue in the last 5 years.

What are your future goals?

We want to expand our offerings in terms of services offered by Public Clouds that we already work upon including Azure and AWS. We want to start offering solutions and services on GCP. We have already started work on these. We are preparing for adding solutions covering DevOps, Serverless computing, Kubernetes, and Containers. We will look at AI, ML, IoT, etc. post that.

We will soon be starting work on product development. We will be developing some products that will further support our business and our customers.

We want to be a leading Technology Solution Provider to businesses in India and abroad with a focus on cloud technologies. A trusted advisor who delivers solutions that are in the best interest of their customers.