Exclusive Interview: Amit Gupta, CEO, Rapyder

In an exclusive interview with DQ Channels, Amit Gupta, CEO, Rapyder shared how they have helped drive digital transformation across various sectors with AWS, some customer success stories and recent customer wins and trends in cloud adoption in the coming months.

Can you give us an overview of the journey of Rapyder?

I was working with another company that started in 2004 which was building FinTech products and doing staffing for some large companies. In 2014, my CTO and I were building a FinTech product, which was being built completely on AWS. During that time, as early adopters of AWS, we were reached by AWS for consulting partnership. The timing was not right, because we were focusing on converting FinTech products and trying to figure out how do we make them successful. But what happened by late 2016 was that I lost steam with the FinTech product, and decided to exit that venture, while my partner decided to run the product solo.

We were building a product on the cloud and three-four of us decided to start Rapyder. When we started Rapyder, the two focus areas were - to assess whether AWS is the right tech company for us to build on, and the second was to see whether we can sell; as the founding team came from an engineering background. With the hesitancy of being a failed entrepreneur from my earlier experience, I attended AWS re: Invent in 2017 to see what AWS was all about. That event was attended by approximately 45,000 people and had around 300-plus sessions. These sessions were held in parallel for the period of four-five days and a lot of new services were being launched. As part of my experience there, I could clearly see the buzz, the partners, and the overall customer participation and it was quite evident that AWS will potentially play a very dominant role in the public cloud. This is what impressed us to put our energy behind our new venture. That is how Rapyder got started.

That re:Invent trip gave me a lot of confidence to pursue and build around AWS’s professional services. We started in 2017 and in 2018 itself, we were nominated as AWS Rising Partner of the Year, which further solidified our belief in what we were building. If I fast forward from there to now, it has been 4 – 5 five years, and we have gone from 6 to over 160 people, and have worked with 400 plus customers, and last month, we were also awarded as AWS Consulting Partner of the Year.

 How was the business during the pandemic? How did AWS help you as a vendor? How did you serve your customers during the pandemic?

In February - March of 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic, we were in business for only two and a half years, and we were still in the process of building the business. In this context, the first thing that we did was we brought the management team together to take stock of the situation and created contingency plans, both for the wellbeing of our teams and families. Additionally, to ensure business continuity, we started working with the customers to see if they needed any extra support in terms of cost reductions and whether they wanted some flexibility on the payments and credits. In terms of AWS, the first three months were focused on sustenance and ensuring that we can keep the customers that we have, despite individual challenges that customers were facing.

But as things progressed, it was very clear that there is going to be a strong tailwind which the pandemic is going to add to cloud adoption, and that digital transformation will not be an option, but it will become a necessity.

Talking about the support that we got from AWS, the first kind of support was about being able to access the AWS network and extend help to any of our COVID impacted employees. There was a support group which was created by AWS which was working around the clock and helping all the Amazon employees as well as partners. I think that was the biggest help that any technology player could have provided to partners like us, just because of the reach that companies like AWS can create, due to the size that they operate at. So, I think that was one of the biggest helps that we saw, apart from various other initiatives that were taken as the business built up as well. But I think the biggest impact for us was access to the AWS network, to be able to support our team members where COVID impact was being experienced.

Digital transformation has become a necessity for enterprises. So how has your cloud computing technology helped enterprises in their digital transformation journey?

The value proposition of the cloud has become very clear, not just to enterprises but clear across segments. Three or four years ago, there was a lot of effort which had to be spent by technology players like AWS as well as partners to educate customers on the cloud value proposition. Today, the value proposition is clear. In the last two years, the speed with which things have changed, businesses are looking at problems and ideas that they can use technology to solve. They want to ideate fast, they want to fail fast, and they want to scale fast. They don't want to carry technical debt anymore, and all these problems can be solved by the cloud.

Based on various research reports available - cloud adoption is pegged at a CAGR of anywhere from 18% to 22% for the next five-seven years, which itself is a testament to opportunity in this space. Our intent is to help businesses undergo this transformation at scale. At Rapyder, we have continuously been investing in solutions and people. We have built a highly trained certified team of AWS experts, who are very keen on understanding challenges being faced by businesses around cloud adoption and providing them solutions appropriately. We work with a clear vision to help businesses achieve in terms of leveraging technologies, which are best suited for them. In addition, as we have also worked with more than 400 customers and have developed more than 700 use cases over the last four-and-a-half years, this extensive experience has enabled operational efficiencies across our service lines. The key service lines that we help customers on today spread across cloud migration, security audits, DevOps automation, app modernization, cloud cost optimization, and next generation of managed services. To summarize, I can say that our skills, solutions, services, and customer obsession is what is helping customers successfully complete their digital transformation journey.

We have also seen a lot of enterprises that are adopting and moving to the cloud. So where do you see the maximum traction coming from? What are the sectors you see evolving due to cloud technologies? And how?

Business-wise, there are two broad areas where we’ll see the maximum impact – 1) companies that provide digital services versus companies that offer traditional services; the service delivery model has to change, and 2) companies who are able to create better customer engagement models on their platforms are the kind of companies that will see the better scale.

If we have to look at specific verticals, I would say there are three-four verticals that will see a maximum impact. First, FinTech because they are clearly trying to solve the last-mile service delivery. For example, neo banking, insurance tech, stockbroking, are scaled from a FinTech standpoint. The second is health-tech; healthcare has been a very traditional model but the pandemic has taught us that health solutions can be provided digitally and I think we are going to see some interesting innovations and scale there. EdTech is another exciting vertical. We also see lot of e-commerce having scale, like businesses such as Amazon, Flipkart. But due to very specialized models like Licious, Fresh to Home, Farm to Fork, organic models will scale as well. Lastly, governments will play a very important role in health-tech and education because of the digital delivery of both these verticals, and as these parts of the infrastructure are the primary responsibilities of the government. As the competition will increase within these industries, the businesses which are able to create a better customer engagement will scale faster than the others.

From Rapyder’s perspective, we have seen maximum growth coming from FinTechs; apart from that, we have seen a lot of automation work for software industry companies that are trying to either follow a B2B model or are ISVs. These are the areas where we work very closely with them and see how their solutions can be scaled or deployed faster to customers.

You had mentioned that Rapyder recently won the AWS Consulting Partner of the Year award. So how has this partnership with AWS helped you to gain big-ticket size customers?

During our journey over the last four and a half years, we have worked very closely with AWS and adopted a lot of Amazon Leadership Principles and experienced them as well. Three major Amazon Leadership Principles that are top-of-mind for me are customer obsession, thinking big and raising the bar. Internally, we have also adopted some of these principles. During Q4 of 2020, Rapyder started becoming extremely comfortable with the business model and took an initiative called “Discover 23”. We requested AWS to share insights of their business roadmap, which included priorities for new long-term growth so that we could align our priorities over the next three to five years. We wrote a business plan and spent about three months on this; and once it was finalized, we brought a lot of changes in the business model and GTM strategy. In fact, we went ahead and replicated the AWS structure in terms of how they are structured to address market segments. Based on our “Mission 23”, we began to move away from a regional structure, and we brought in a segment-focused structure to focus on startup, SMB and enterprise. Existent team members who are performing well in the company were promoted to three levels because a lot of new roles opened as part of this change. This change brought a lot of collaboration with AWS account teams as our goals and success got tied with each other and it automatically led to joint motions or joint reviews along with AWS’s account and partner teams. Periodic cadence meetings with them became a way of working for us.

Our sales teams take targets on new logos and new service lines, and our solution architects take targets around creating competencies, delivery excellence, and so on. These initiatives automatically helped us look at bigger ticket sizes because of the confidence that we started gaining based on our last few years of work, as well as the business transformation changes that were happening within Rapyder.

What do you think will be the trends in cloud computing in the post-pandemic world?

In terms of the adoption of cloud computing, there are various trends that are emerging because of the speed of innovation that all businesses are undergoing as well. One is that hyperscalers like AWS are coming up with a lot of new features to help the businesses. The pace of innovation at AWS has been consistently going up over the last four or five years. When we look at the trends, naturally, cloud adoption and the associated services will go up significantly and that’s a reflection of the growth that Rapyder is seeing year on year, as well.

We also believe that customers apart from migrating to the cloud will start looking at analytics, machine learning and IoT solutions, which can create business impact for businesses. I think the hybrid model of working is something that is going to stay. The way we work will change in the post-pandemic world… there is a lot of work which is getting done out of our homes, so the adoption of virtual desktops is something that we will see happening significantly, and desktop-as-a-service will become more secure and enterprises will start becoming more comfortable using it. There will be widespread use of artificial intelligence as a lot of demand is picking up in terms of modelling, artificial intelligence, and so on. Also, customers will start adopting serverless computing with more ease and the adoption of services such as AWS Lambda, Amazon EKS, and Amazon ECS will continuously go up.

One area where businesses will have to start giving a lot of focus as more and more workloads move into the cloud will be cloud governance and savings; these have to become a priority because of the pay-per-use model. If enterprises do not keep a close eye on it, the costs will spike. Cloud governance and savings will hence be of high interest and priority for them. We’ll also see that cloud telephony adoption will go up; as more and more hybrid model adoption happens, it will automatically lead to cloud telephony adoption. There are plenty of use cases across mission-critical industries like airlines, banks or FinTechs, which are adopting some flavour of these already. To summarize, the growth of the cloud computing market is an undeniable trend and I think this is just the beginning; we are still scratching the surface. Partners like us will evolve as well based on growing customer demand and the launch of new services from companies like AWS.

What kind of different partner programs and training programs do you usually get from AWS to transfer those solutions to your end customers?

From a tier standpoint, we are currently an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, where along with two competencies, five partner programs, we have over 100 certified engineers and more than 100 launches. The AWS Partner programs are very well structured - there are typically two-three kinds of buckets, one of these is more in terms of competency and skill development and there are a lot of training-related programs that we can run. In fact, to share some experience we had requested AWS training teams to help us suggest a learning path for the sales team, and we jointly created the training because of the sheer amount of content that is available to the partners. Apart from that whatever investments partners are making in training, certifications, etc., there are programs that can help us subsidize or take care of all those. For example, one is around learning – training, learning and certification. The effort has to be put in by the partners, but there are a lot of incentives built in for partners to cross-adjust the cost which is picked up by partners there. The second is in terms of customer GTM; based on the partner tier (whether you're a select or advanced or premium tier partner) and based on the competencies), there are a lot of innovative programs that AWS defines every year whether it is Windows on EC2, or it is SAP or a large migration, we get access to all the programs to help customers ease the financial commitments that they need to make while they're taking the cloud transformation journey.

What will be your roadmap for the next 12 to 18 months?

Our next 10-12 months are tied to our ‘Mission 23’ plan. There are two primary goals that we have taken as a company. One is how do we create a 17x growth for Rapyder as part of our ‘Mission 23’ statement, and the second is to become the best place to work, and there are multiple internal transformative steps that we have initiated.

So if you look at it, being an AWS-only partner, we actually changed our business year. Till 2019, we were operating our business on a financial year basis, from April-March and we have changed this to replicate the AWS approach of following January-December. Additionally, if we look at talent acquisition over the last 12 months, I think we have added more than 80 new ‘Rapydeers’ across various functions within Rapyder.

One of the other initiatives that we have taken which will start showing us results as we move forward is that we have created a “Center of Excellence” team whose only charter will be to create customer value creation for sales acceleration, and automation for delivery acceleration. These are some of the big changes that we are bringing in. We will have a continued focus at the segment level; for example, our start-up customer acquisition teams are going to grow, and our SMB customer acquisition and enterprise customer acquisition teams are going to grow. We are going to start allocating more marketing budget to create brand awareness as well. These are the focus areas where we'll be spending time, effort, and energy over the next 18 to 36 months.