Becoming a Cloud Partner: Journey of UBX Cloud

In this very unique segment of DQ Channels, we have covered the journey of  UBX Cloud becoming a Cloud Partner from a traditional Channel Partner. Steve Panovski, President, UBX 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?

Since day one. UBX incorporated in 2008 with a mission of bringing the customer to their data and not the other way around. Prior to incorporation we individually had a heavy specialization in automation and, virtualization. As independent consultants and have worked in data centers and ISPs since 1996. We have been providing cloud services well before the market started to demand it.

What are the different Cloud services do you offer?

UBX offers 4 pillars and paths to the cloud. Desktop as a service managed infrastructure as a service, Veeam powered backup and disaster recovery as a service. All of our services include FREE engineering and co-management services for our clients to leverage as a value add.

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

UBX has adopted an expand the view and reach of our services. We have expanded our global cloud offering and broke ground in the India market nearly 3 years ago. We have hired and made business decisions with an India first mentality and view on data sovereignty.

Previously on Cloud Journey: Comprompt Solutions LLP

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

Crayon has provided UBX with invaluable guidance and personalized service especially in respect to the Indian way of doing business. With Crayon it is more than marketing and product assistance but helping in the ways a true friend helps. When COVID hit we had some cash flow uncertainties. It took a single phone call to Crayon and extend our terms. Since April we have pushed over 2 CR in paid licensing and software and we will continue to do business with firms that are respectable and that share our core values.

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

Our direct customers come with a cloud-first approach. Our indirect customers, mainly driven by our Managed Service Provider network, need more hand-holding as they transition from on-premise infrastructure. It comes not without its challenges but the good news is that UBX has a unique background as we have been providing this exact service globally for over 12 years.

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

We are seeing significant interest from healthcare and financial verticals mainly because of the very strict uptime and disaster recovery requirements that the market is asking of them.

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

Some of our direct enterprise clients had a very hard time moving away from owned hardware and software. There is something about walking into a room in the office and being able to touch their data. Thankfully this mentality is changing and as a result, we have clients actually embracing the data protection and high availability that cloud providers such as UBX bring.

What is your overall growth being a cloud partner?

The growth has been tremendous, over 100% YOY for 3 years. We have a lot of interest in the Indian market because our services include L2/L3 engineering and support and we have priced more than 70% the cost of the public cloud in India. That translate to massive savings for Indian companies who now have an opportunity to move to a better cloud.

What are your future goals?

The future is very bright for India and UBX is building out additional points of presence throughout the country. We plan to add enough capacity to serve 50,000+ VDI desktops and manage over 25 PB of production data in PAN India.

We look forward to continuing attracting more top infrastructure and network engineers along the way. We offer our staff members excellent pay and we are located in Tier 2 Indian cities that are close to the family village. This offers a better quality of living all while maintaining the high salaries of tier 1 cities. I like to say “more panam and less traffic at UBX” to our South Indian team.