Becoming a Cloud Partner: Journey of Web Werks

In this very unique segment of DQ Channels, we have covered the journey of Web Werks India Pvt. Ltd. becoming a Cloud Partner from a traditional Channel Partner. Sachin Ramesh Waingankar VP and  Head Cloudshared 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?

Today organizations are migrating and strategizing their deployments on Cloud. We are customer focussed organization, our solutions are designed to satisfy customer needs. This propelled our move to venture into Cloud practise about 2 years back with dedicated sales, presales and support to complete the ecosystem. Building a proper ecosystem was important, as the journey towards Cloud could be new for many customers, thus hand-holding customers, solution designing, designing multi-location architectures as per his business needs or compliance requirements is important. Cloud computing is not just selling vcpu, ram or storage, it is much more than that.

What are the different Cloud services do you offer?

We offer a complete range of IAAS and PAAS offering for our customers like :

BareMetal Cloud: Physical Servers on Cloud for that specific application which requires physical cores

Public Cloud: Standard Pay As You Go Cloud Model.

Virtual Private Cloud: A complete virtual private environment over Cloud, allows flexibility to size VMs/Load Balancers/Firewalls as per your application's requirements.

Private Cloud: Enterprise Private Cloud for Dedicated Cloud setup to ensure dedicated performance and security, also avoid unknown neighbours.

Hybrid Cloud: A mix between private and public cloud to provide the best of both worlds, privacy/performance of private cloud and burst ability/scalability of the public cloud.

SAP Cloud: SAP audited and certified cloud environment to host SAP/SAP HANA infrastructure on Cloud (Public/Private/Hybrid).

Government Cloud: MEITY (Govt Of India) empanelled Cloud environment, periodically audited by STQC and certified by MEITY to deploy Government applications/workloads.

Storage-As-A-Service: To deliver cost-effective Object/File/Block storage over NVMe/SSD/Hybrid/SATA for performance and cost.

Backup & DR – deliver multi-site Backup & DR over Cloud to deliver Far DR or Near DR, as per your business criticality requirements.

PAAS – Full range of PaaS service including Database As A Service to delivering enterprise platforms on easy pay to use model.

Network-As-A-Service – Deliver a complete range of network services over cloud including virtual or physical appliances.

Security-As-A-Service – Deliver security services ranging from WAF/DDOS/VAPT/AUDITS to SIEM/PAM.

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

Change is the Essential Parameter for any successful business. This was important for our success as well. As an IIM-Alumni with a Product Management background and as a Business Head, I believe in simplifying complex products as an offering.  This was the first step, because a product which is easier to understand is easier to adopt and consume as well. I have come across customers complaining about complex cloud calculators provided by some of the competitors. So Simplifying offerings was my Mantra. I believe in augmenting capabilities of the team. So exhaustive trainings were organized for Channel Partners/Sales/Presales and Support to perform their duties with enhanced efficiency. Strategies were placed for Channel Partners and Direct Sales to experience faster growth. My past experience of running successful Cloud/IOT Portfolio was put to good use, As use-cases, experiences were shared, this saved our R&D time. New IT Infrastructure/Applications were placed to deliver additional services, which could cater to today’s market. All of these change were not possible without freedom, faith, support and trust from our CEO Nikhil Rathi. His thrust ensured teams adhere to Managements new call to change and the team supported us wholeheartedly.

Today, we have the capability to even deliver a Private Cloud with 5000+ Physical cores and 320 TB of RAM within 2 Racks. This especially makes sense for our customers delivering AI/ML solutions, which require High-density systems within the short area to lower communication latency between nodes.

Previously on Cloud Journey: AgilizTech

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

Able to deliver a solution, within a specific period is essential. Crayon Software is one of our important partners to deliver bare essential components so that we could build our solutions in a time-bound manner. The team led by Vikas and Laxmikant is very well versed in solutions, understand our criticality, need for speed. They are eager to cross boundaries to satisfy our hunger for newer solutions…

Comfort, Availability and Flexibility have been delivered consistently by Crayon team. This helps us to focus and grow more in our business area.

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

Customers will adopt newer technologies, Question raised is “Are you the one delivering him solution”. Customers are facing change in way business are conducted/operated due to faster adoption of eCommerce, ICT, OTT, IoT solutions. Corona pandemic has been another important reason for driving this change. Old Customers who had not adopted Cloud platforms were forced to adopt Cloud platform as part of their business continuity strategy. New Customers who deployed a single location cloud solution, were forced to deploy a multi-location cloud solution to lower network latency and deliver a better experience. Web Werks Datacenters strength lies in delivering highest network connectivity through 160+ ISPs, 5 Internet Exchanges and Express connect to multiple Clouds across our Datacenters in Mumbai/Pune/Delhi. Thus Web Werks Cloud and COLO are able to deliver the lowest network latency and higher network connectivity option to customers. This enables customer Old/New to deploy Edge-based Computing solution or Hyperscale/Hypercompute deployment from a single datacenter.

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

Apart from delivering standard cloud solution from our DataCenter’s in India, USA & UAE. We are MEITY empanelled Cloud provider to deploy Govt Of India Workloads. We are SAP-certified Cloud provider to host SAP/SAP HANA infrastructure. Additionally, we are able to deliver complex solutions/ architectures across multi-locations through our Public/Private and Hybrid Cloud Models. Thus our bouquet of services is wider and deeper which spreads across all business verticals. We have 1000s of satisfied customers consuming our services. We have Manufacturing/Retail customer deploying SAP HANA on our SAP Cloud, OTT/ICT customer using our Multi-Location cloud to deliver his Edge compute, ISV/ Software Companies deploying their critical workloads or DevOps. So use cases varies, deployment architecture varies but Web Werks Cloud would support in your complete journey.

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

A journey without challenge is no fun and joy of overcoming a challenge is bigger. Few of the challenges faced were.

Proving our mettle: Even though Web Werks Datacenter is a formidable name in Datacenter world for the past two decades, but 2 years back as a Cloud Provider we were unheard of.  We had to prove our mettle, this helped us work hard and reach 1000s of customers faster BUT we will keep on proving, as it helps us to remain on toes …

Customer Expectations: Launching Multi-location security and performance-oriented cloud in a short span. Customers started experimenting with newer architectures and expectation to deliver increased, as we proved our craftsmanship in every deliverable.

Customer Satisfaction: Attending and responding to customer feedbacks helps in increasing the efficiency of your high points and improve your low points. So customer satisfaction is very important for all of us at Web Werks. This is a forever challenge which should not be left loose.

What is your overall growth being a cloud partner?

We have been growing at a faster pace than expected by many industry veterans, Our USP to understand customer pain-points and deliver complex solutions has garnered us more customers.  Launching VDI-as-a-service during COVID pandemic to ease our customers' pain to operate business has been very well appreciated. Migrating on-premise setup to cloud, during COVID lockdown helped many customers to get their businesses online immediately. We have all ears for customers to understand and appreciate their pain and praise equally. Thus you would find us delivering solutions to Govt departments or deliver complex ICT.

What are your future goals?

Enhance our AI/ML Product Portfolio, So that customers could derive bigger benefit associating with us. Enabling Multi-Cloud, Web Werks Datacenters are enabled with ExpressRoute/DirectConnect option to all major Cloud providers (AWS/Azure/Google/Oracle) This would be leveraged by Web Werks Cloud so that customer can have seamless experience operating multiple clouds from Web Werks Cloud with lowest network latency and multiple connectivity options. This move would take us a step closer towards Open Cloud Architecture which would allow customers to move between multiple clouds seamless without changing their application codes or security architectures on a SINGLE CLICK. I don’t believe tying customers in non-standard API layers, which makes them difficult or impossible to cross boundaries.

We are a customer-focused organization, We are listening and we have made our future plans in line with customer and industry demands.