“We have expanded our global footprint with the recent launch of our operations in the United Kingdom, which is our fourth center in the international market after UAE, Indonesia, and Estonia. We also look forward to employing and empowering 1,000 employees by 2024, from the current employee strength of 250,” says Shubho Pramanik, Senior Vice President at Applied Cloud Computing (ACC), an emerging leader in the Cloudtech space. Shubho Pramanik , in an interaction with CIO AXIS, talks about future of Cloud Computing and how Applied Cloud Computing is gearing up to meet the requirements.
CIO AXIS: Who founded Applied Cloud Computing and what are the service offerings? Share a brief about your organization.
Mr. Shubho Pramanik Applied Cloud Computing (ACC) is an emerging leader in the Cloudtech space helping financial institutions, media, healthcare, manufacturing, and other industries in cloud adoption. Our offerings help drive digitalization, cloud services, and innovation for customers across industry verticals.
Founded in 2014, in Thane, Maharashtra, by Nilesh Satpute, ACC specializes in Digital or Technology Transformation, Cloud Computing, App modernization, Big Data & Analytics Cloud Security, and Product Development.
The organization is working at transforming business processes, rationalizing product portfolios, strategizing business assets, complying with regulations, managing risks, and maximizing customer satisfaction. The organization’s expert team members are dedicated to supporting customers to achieve their business goals by leveraging the agility of cloud solutions. ACC is an AWS Advanced Partner with Mobility Competency and was awarded by AWS as the best BFSI industry Consulting Partner for the year 2019.
ACC also has developed several products to its credit. These include Ottohm – Enterprise Video and OTT Platform, Atlas API – API Management and Development Platform, Atlas CLM – Cloud Life Cycle Management, Atlas HCM – HR Digital Onboarding and Employee Management, Atlas ITSM – Vendor Onboarding and Service Management and Smart Contracts – Contract Automation and Management.
CIO AXIS: App modernization is crucial for businesses today. What are its key considerations and benefits?
Mr. Shubho Pramanik: In today’s digital era, it is a real challenge for organizations to stay depending on monolithic legacy systems. For successful digital transformations, such legacy applications give rise to incompatibility leading to an increase in maintenance costs. New-age technologies such as cloud, AI and machine learning, IoT, and others cannot be integrated into legacy apps. It is crucial to modernize IT systems to ensure business and revenue growth. This involves application modernization, either by updating or creating new applications to integrate into the modern computing capabilities and align with the organization’s business objectives.
This can be done by modifying the platform infrastructure of the legacy software. The underlying code can be changed giving rise to new features and other functions. App modernization can also be achieved by moving the app in its entirety from legacy on-prem to the cloud. APIs can be added to extend legacy systems or SaaS applications can be adopted to replace legacy systems. New applications can be built using microservices.
One of the key benefits of app modernization is a significant increase in the productivity of employees as repetitive tasks get eliminated with automation where the legacy apps could have caused productivity issues.
Costs can be reduced with app modernization, since maintaining legacy applications are expensive and not economical for the organization.
It will help in the integration of modern technologies with the platforms and ensures the organization stays ahead of the curve. With several innovative features and user-friendly functionalities added, the customer experience can be enhanced as well.
Security can be strengthened as modern security and authentication techniques are compatible with modern applications.
Furthermore, with applications getting modernized, an improvement is seen in operational efficiencies and business performance.
CIO AXIS: How is Mobility the answer to improved business performance? Explain.
Mr. Shubho Pramanik: The enterprise mobility market is growing significantly with the increase in mobile users accessing the internet. It is highly advantageous for businesses to leverage enterprise mobility solutions to stay ahead on the digital front. Employees can work on their mobile devices, anytime anywhere with access to the organization’s data and resources, thereby saving time, getting more efficient, and increasing productivity over time. This also means less reliance on the physical office thereby reducing the infrastructure and operational costs.
The hassle-free content-sharing aspect of the solution enhances workplace collaboration across many devices and platforms delivering a better communication experience.
The required level of security and risk management is accomplished with the mobility solution along with security and mobile device management solutions. This ensures only authorized personnel access business assets thereby preventing a data breach.
Data can be collected across multiple data touchpoints on the mobile app leading to efficient data gathering.
Given the above benefits of enterprise mobility solutions, it is quite evident these will bring about large-scale improvement in business performance.
CIO AXIS: What is the future of Cloud Computing and how is Applied Cloud Computing gearing up to meet the requirements?
Mr. Shubho Pramanik: Enterprises, large, small, and medium are adopting cloud services more today as they are available on demand and the infrastructure costs are considerably reduced. The global cloud computing market value is estimated at US$1,614.1 billion by 2030 from the estimated US$380.25 billion in 2021, according to Precedence Research. There will be an increase in the use of multi-cloud and integrated cloud environments in the years to come. Distributed cloud infrastructure, where organizations can store and process their data in several data centers which may be physically located at different remote locations will facilitate edge computing and make use of the network edge in the future. Two-tier applications will be replaced by new multi-tier cloud architecture, where a middleware application is also used in the latter.
This enables each component or tier to be individually developed, tested, executed, and even reused. Next-generation cloud computing will certainly have a positive impact on economic growth.With data-intensive and latency-sensitive applications demanding better performance, it is crucial for service providers to adapt to the evolving standards quickly. A new marketplace will need to be developed for resources at the network edge to meet the innovative services of tomorrow.
Safety measures will get further improved as they will be integrated with AI and machine learning in the cloud. IoT, a cloud-enabling platform will be on the rise. The serverless architecture will grow even further as it helps in scaling faster and is leveraged by organizations for the pay-as-you-use model. Containers that offer a greater level of consistency will be increasingly used as it offers a quicker path to improve cloud computing applications.
Cloud will further shape the future of business models by delivering several advantages.
ACC has already moved its focus to repeatable solutions and productized IPs by leveraging cloud computing that will benefit end customers for go-to-market in a much shorterperiod leading to an increase in revenues for customers. More importance will be placed on hiring Cloud Application Developers who have a sound understanding of cloud systems, in terms of how to deploy them efficiently and security while ensuring there is very little downtime. The Application Workload Placement decisions will continue to shift to end-users as we are more concerned about the speed, quality, and reception of the new customer-facing services. The private cloud will have its moment of truth where it will have a key role to play in the IT infrastructure of the organization. VMware will realize vCHS (VCloud Hybrid Service) is critical to its future and we are already focusing on that at ACC. vCHS built on VMWare enables organizations to leverage skills, tools, networking and security models across both on-prem and off-prem environments. As hybrid solutions gain more attention from the customer, vCHS will play an important role in integrating private and public clouds.
CIO AXIS: What is the role of digitalization in businesses and do share some successful digitalization projects of your organization?
Mr. Shubho Pramanik: Digitalization helps businesses to improve operational efficiency, enable automation, and reduce human errors, data can be analyzed for further use in accurate decision-making and enhancing customer experience. Business models can be transformed with business continuity established. Digital technologies have a positive impact on innovation too, along with opportunities for newer revenue streams.
Some of ACC’s successful digitalization projects are, developing an Investor App for India’s leading Asset Management Company, App Modernization for an Indian Stockbroker firm, Training Virtual Automation Portal for an American Video Game Company, CIO Dashboard for an Indian fantasy sports company, building an App for one of the Government departments and building an API Hub and EBS for one of the large business houses in India.
CIO AXIS: How are cloud-native solutions leveraged for digital transformation and IT modernization? Share your views.
Mr. Shubho Pramanik: Cloud-native services have become crucial for driving digital transformation and expanding the potential of business operations. They support businesses by increasing the agility and speed of innovation as applications are built directly on the cloud, eliminating infrastructure barriers,and thereby saving time as well as cost. Apps can be built independently and deployed individually without impacting other aspects. Cloud-native technologies such as containers and Kubernetes enable the building of differentiating products and services at a quicker pace while ensuring security and reliability. The cloud-native solutions also help the DevOps teams to build next-gen microservices-based applications. Security can be built into the application from the start, rather than done as an afterthought. Being auto-scalable,ongoing business needs can be handled automatically.
Cloud-native helps in supporting AI/ML goals in terms of scalability, elasticity, and performance. AI can also bring several benefits to optimize the maintenance of cloud-native architecture. To succeed with Big Data, it is important to leverage a cloud-native platform. Cloud-native analytics leverages cloud computing fully. Running in a container-based architecturehelps organizations to reduce hardware costs and human resources to manage it in addition to supporting them in effectively scaling their businesses.
CIO AXIS: Please share future growth plans of Applied Cloud Computing.
Mr. Shubho Pramanik: We have expanded our global footprint with the recent launch of our operations in the United Kingdom, which is our fourth center in the international market after UAE, Indonesia, and Estonia. We also look forward to employing and empowering 1,000 employees by2024, from the current employee strength of 250.
We will have our business focus across BFSI, Media, Gaming, and Healthcare verticals in the coming years. Our goal is to shift 50% of our business from services to Product IPs. Currently, our YoY growth is 100% and we aim to achieve revenue growth of Rs. 100 crore in the next couple of years.