Becoming a Cloud Partner: Journey of Pi Data Centers

In this very unique segment of DQ Channels, we have covered the journey of  Pi Data Centers as a born into the Cloud company. Bhaskar Vadlamani, Chief Operating Officer, Pi Data Centers 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?

Right from the beginning, we were planning to offer Cloud services being a Datacenter player.  Running Datacenter and having a large Datacenter infrastructure available, it was an obvious choice to move to Cloud as Cloud adoption is increasing across the geographies.

What are the different Cloud services do you offer?

We offer pretty much all the different possible offerings in the cloud space.  E.g., Public cloud, private cloud, Hybrid cloud, and Community cloud.  In the cloud space, again different sub-offerings like Disaster recovery, storage as a service, VDI, CDN, etc.

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

As I said above, being a Datacenter player, it became very easy to offer cloud services to our customers.  All we had to do is to induct competency consisting of Compute, storage, networking, database, etc.

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

Crayon is a big distributor of software like Microsoft, RedHat, etc.  With their help, we built a flexible business model for our customers especially on software licenses using the SPLA model.  Besides being an enterprise partner to Cryon, we get to know the latest technology innovations and access to trainings that help us to take these niche offerings to our customers much ahead.

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

Cloud is becoming a de-facto choice for every enterprise.  However, each of them is taking different strategies when they taking up their cloud journey.  Some of them take a big-bang approach and some of them take a phase manner approach.  Also, some customers adopt a complete Public cloud model and some enterprises take a hybrid cloud approach.  This all depends on their existing IT landscape, legacy applications dependency, and also the business objectives driving the specific strategy.

Previously on Cloud Journey: Esconet Technologies

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

We have hundreds of customers adopting cloud through our Cloud offering across India and overseas.  BFSI, Government, IT/ITES, Manufacturing, Retail, and Education are some of the large verticals that our customers belong to.

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

Cloud is becoming a key instrument in Digitization strategy.  And hence there are many opportunities and hence they come with different challenges.  Some examples are:

• Ensuring infrastructure security and compliance.
• Controlling the cloud costs.
• The psychological barriers like – will the cloud be more secure than my internal data center? Can my cloud provider maintain my uptime standards? Will their technical support address my problems quickly?
• Connecting legacy systems with cloud applications.
• Managing cloud implementation challenges.

What is your overall growth being a cloud partner?

We are growing at a decent growth of 30% year-on-year adding new customers.

What are your future goals?

One of the key visions is to help India in its digital transformation by providing Datacenter and Cloud solutions to both enterprise and Govt customers.   Besides the large enterprises, we also want to ensure that our offerings and solutions help the up-coming and growing non-urban population in the country and thus helping in the true-digital transformation of the country.