Becoming a Cloud Partner: Journey of Agaram Technologies

In this very unique segment of DQ Channels, we have covered the journey of Agaram Technologies  becoming a Cloud Partner from a traditional Channel Partner. Mukunth Venkatesan Founder, Director and CEO 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?

Agaram Technologies is an independent software product vendor in the laboratory informatics area. We work predominantly with regulated industries like pharmaceuticals, life sciences industries. We started getting requests from our customers whether our application can be run with the cloud as backend infrastructure since 2018. We work with leading biopharmaceuticals who are leaders in their field includes pioneers in COVID 19 vaccine from USA & Europe. Due to our architecture at that point and time, we were able to lift-and-shift the application to make it cloud-enabled with minimal changes.

What are the different Cloud services do you offer?

Since 2020 we are offering our applications as dedicated hosting service for our customers. Some of our solutions need proper connectivity with the end customer’s on-premise network.

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

We have been learning a lot over the last couple of years, on how we can move towards the cloud. We have set up training on the cloud for our team and have used the Azure infra for all our research and test activities for the past 2 years. We introduced new technology and techniques to adapt to the cloud environment. We have been working on our cloud strategy to make our applications come closer to the cloud-native environment and achieve global scalability.

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

Crayon has been the right partner ever since we started interacting with the pre-sales, sales and technical people in guiding us. We have had clear technical insights from Crayon team about what are the options that we have from Azure and what are the pros and cons of different approaches. This has helped us in going in the right direction.

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

Majority of our new customers have started their new projects directly on the cloud. We see this request coming from a major portion of our new customers. Old customers haven’t made many changes, but we expect this to happen due to the pandemic situation.

Previously on Cloud Journey: Mismo Systems

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

Right now we have about 5 customers on the cloud. All are in the pharmaceutical and biopharmaceuticals space.

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

First and foremost is the knowledge about how cloud technologies. We started with simple cloud servers (VPS) and then moved to IBM, AWS and Azure. We have faced challenges with even Microsoft SQL Server, as the cloud services available are not 100% similar to the on-premise version. We had to either change our system or choose the right service.

Integrating with customer existing on-premise infrastructure was also a major challenge. We have overcome all these challenges by using the right solution from Azure and also made some changes on our application side.

What is your overall growth being a cloud partner?

During the pandemic doing an on-premise project was a big challenge, our customers agreed to move to the cloud. We would have achieved about 25% growth being a cloud partner.

What are your future goals?

Our goal for 2021 is to move towards cloud-native solutions and make our applications available as SaaS subscription services for our global customers.