Becoming a Cloud Partner: Journey of MothersonSumi INfotech & Designs Ltd.

In this unique segment of DQ Channels, we have covered the entire Cloud journey of MothersonSumi INfotech & Designs Ltd. (MIND)- from a legacy/traditional systems integrator to a Next-gen Cloud Partner of Choice. Rajesh Thakur, Chief Executive Officer, shared the MIND’s vision to deliver technology-led transformation to help businesses realize opportunities and growth with its cloud-first strategy.

When and how did you move to Cloud Business?

MothersonSumi INfotech & Designs Limited (MIND) is a global technology company that offers a consulting-led approach with an integrated portfolio of industry-leading solutions that encompass the entire enterprise value chain. We are bringing all our expertise together with rigour to realize transformative opportunities through data and analytics, IoT, Cloud, automation and other technologies. Together with over 200 enterprise customers in 47+ global locations, we are accelerating their revenue growth and transforming their approach to compete in the fourth industrial revolution.

Today enterprises need to compete at scale and speed faster than ever before. That means understanding customer needs, keeping up with the latest data security mechanisms, the need for high levels of availability & resilience in systems. To capture all of these in a meaningful way and seize the opportunity in the current business environment enterprises need to focus on Cloud.

Today Cloud has emerged as mainstream for enterprises of any size, geography, or vertical. It is helping drive innovations at a fast pace, reducing the cost of failures, and is assisting enterprises in focusing more on business.

What are the different Cloud services do you offer?

With 20 years of experience in managing data centers, the first cloud service we offered was Managed Services. Over the last 2 years, we have moved to next-generation managed services. As a Managed Services Provider (MSP), we invest in continuous skill development adoption thereby helping our customers enhance their IT operations. We have also strengthened our cloud-native application development, application modernization, Database freedom, DevOps, SOC, Machine Learning and IoT practices.

Today we offer scalable, flexible, and secure cloud solutions for ever-increasing business needs to help enterprises stay at the forefront. We focus more on the business outcomes and help our customers navigate digital transformation and adopt a cloud-first strategy with MINDs holistic offerings.

I believe that a cloud adoption journey cannot be successful without strong governance and automation. This is where we have built our relationships with various product partners across the globe in addition to our in-house capabilities. Today, an enterprise cloud solution is incomplete without a hybrid offering.

Previously on Cloud Journey: Pi Data Centers

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

MIND employees at every level have readily accepted cloud. Our Cloud CoE (Center of Excellence) has helped our employees grow and we have enabled upskilling across teams. Moreover, our USP is the wide range of Cloud Native services we offer, which results from the close collaboration between our Cloud COE and other functional CoEs.

We are transforming various in-house applications based on monolithic or on-premise architecture into more open and cloud-native, multi-cloud architecture. Cloud adoption in the manufacturing industry, especially the automotive industry, was slower, except in a telematics setup. However, the trend is changing, and the automotive sector is increasingly adopting the cloud. We have also enhanced our security portfolio to provide enterprise-level security across public cloud environments.

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

Crayon is one of our essential partners in providing OEM solutions and they have come out as primary contact for various third party offerings on the cloud. Crayon has also worked with us in various go to market strategies for these OEMs.

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

Pitching cloud to a new customer for a new workload is what we have found to be relatively easy as cloud helps in reduced time to market and reduced cost of experimentation. On the other hand, migrating an already running application has a risk of breaking some functionality. This is where we have created a strong assessment and migration team comprising infra and application solution architects. This team formation has helped overcome migration risks to a great extent and migrate workloads with minimum or no downtime. DevSecOps further made the release process easier, giving higher confidence to our customers.

Many of our customers have taken the hybrid solution approach to support their application needs at the edge, while at the same time using the cloud for DR, archival, experimentation and scalability requirements.

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

We’ve started our Cloud journey just three years back and within such a short span we have gained customers’ trust from across the industry verticals. We have added more than 100 logos from different verticals including manufacturing, education, public sector, non-profit organizations, independent software vendors, e-commerce, retail, service industry, logistics, automobile and many more.

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

Finding skilled resources, creating the right team, and making our presence felt in a market already crowded with cloud managed services providers, were the key challenges we faced during our first year. With strong management support and development teams, we overcame the first two challenges quite faster than we thought. Subsequently, along with the focus on sales, we prioritized building the practice, audited technical competencies and made our other CoEs cloud-ready. This approach worked well, and currently, cloud practice is one of the fastest-growing practice in our organization.

What is your overall growth being a Cloud Partner?

We experienced a startup-like work environment while working with an enterprise. From day 1, the entire team has worked as if it is an independent business unit, and we used to call ourselves as “born in cloud” team. We started our journey primarily with AWS, and we are expanding rapidly on Azure, GCP and VMware cloud offerings. All these CSPs have been a great support throughout our cloud journey, and we are deepening our relationships with them each day.

The setback due to the COVID-19 pandemic is imminent. Hence the cloud technology adoption is expected to increase in sectors where the WFH initiative is helping to sustain enterprise business functions.

What are your future goals?

We are part of a globally strong conglomerate Motherson, so our first focus areas are the ones that synergies with our group business i.e. Manufacturing, Automotive and Healthcare. Additionally, by virtue of competencies, we have a strong presence in a couple of other verticals. We will continue to deliver beyond customer expectations while ensuring business growth and change.

This year we are also increasing our cloud presence as Cloud Partner in global markets and will soon be coming up with our own solutions/intellectual property on the public cloud via their marketplaces.

See our last Cloud partner's journey here.