Exclusive Interaction - Anandhi Krishnan, COO, Xencia Tech Solutions

Xencia is headquartered in Bangalore with offices and delivery centres in Chennai, Singapore and USA, is a Born-in-Cloud Company and helps organisations embrace public cloud seamlessly. Xencia has successfully delivered over 300 projects across more than 130 customers till date. The cloud partner had migrated and modernised over 150 legacy applications to cloud. Anandhi Krishnan, Chief Operating Officer of Xencia Technology Solutions shares about the cloud trends during this pandemic.

In this global pandemic, when this lockdown was announced, what were the key transformations happening with both end-customers in adopting cloud?

Initially, when the lockdown happened the customers were looking for secure remote login solutions and a high quality collaboration solution that would help reduce the issue of not having any face to face contact with their employees or their customers. All the customers became very cost conscious and stalled all the future growth initiatives and were also focused on reducing extra frills in their costs. After the initial 3 months of lockdown the customers realised that this remote working is here to stay and then they started looking at moving their Datacenters to Cloud for improved performance, security, ease of access and scalability.

For traditional channel partners, they have their clients newly moving on cloud. With your organisation, already serving cloud, what was new during the pandemic lockdown?

The customers were looking for secure remote work solutions, good collaboration tools that are secure and also planned to move other workload On Premise to Cloud.

With the new normal, with physical meetings had come almost to zero, how the new mode of online sales and online support will work for the channel organisations?

Xencia provides implementation and 24X7 remote support services to our customers. This model was adopted by Xencia even before COVID-19. Therefore there has been no impact on delivery. Sales we are having challenges as people are not picking up calls. It is quite difficult to get meetings with prospects. This was the problem in the 1st 3 months of COVID. Now customers have also realized that COVID will have a longer impact on people coming to work. Therefore the sales challenges have also come down considerably.

What are the top three challenges any channel partner organisation might have faced during the lockdown? Is there an innovation, you, as an organization, had managed to overcome the tough time.

Top 3 Challenges

1. Customer payments were delayed as they were facing a cash crunch due to lock down

2. It was difficult to reach our to new customers as there was no budget and they were not responding to calls or mails for new initiatives

3. Keep the employee morale motivated

These challenges were overcome by the following

1. Negotiated a delayed payment for customers with our distributors

2. Perseverant reach out to existing and new customers and response started to improve

3. Bi weekly employee connect with activities, games, Yoga etc. helped us keep the employee morale. No reduction in employees.

What are your key focus areas?

Some of the top focus of our organisation are improving organisational agility and efficiency with a well-architect cloud adoption, migrating business-critical workloads to cloud seamlessly and enhancing IT infrastructure availability and performance and modernising legacy applications to make them digital-ready.

As told to B Swaminathan