Cloud has still bigger potential than what is being projected: G7 CR Technologies

Cloud has a pivotal role in digital transformation. There is a growing need to manage huge volumes of data, and making them readily available to the public through digital cloud services.

G7CR Technologies is a cloud computing services, global information technology and consulting company, focusing especially on SMB’s ( Small Medium Enterprises) and MSMEs (Micro, Small & Medium Enterprises) and providing cloud support and consultation to them across India and abroad and given its cloud services to over 800 SMBs & MSMEs in last 5 years from various industry verticals such as Banking, Insurance, Manufacturing, Healthcare, PSUs, Education, Retail and IT.

We talked to Dr. Christopher Richard, MD & Chief Cloud Architect, G7 CR Technologies India Pvt Ltd, about their offerings and situation of cloud adoption in India. Excerpts:

DQ: What is the growth of Cloud technology amongst SMBs and MSMEs in India?

Dr. Richard: Cloud adoption has been rapidly growing in India and will continue to be so, but India still remains to be the country with massive untapped potential in cloud adoption.

The increase in the buying potential of customers adding on to the huge number of businesses i.e., both SMBs and SMEs along with startups is only showing us what we missed in the process of getting everyone on board with the cloud journey.

Also, the reason behind most of the enterprises and startups already being on cloud today is the great focus and efforts from two big cloud OEMs. While Microsoft had their attention on enterprises, AWS focused on startups. But in between these two, the lost pie in the market is the SMB/SME space.

Though the cloud adoption is growing in this space as well, there is still much bigger potential than what is being projected currently. Hence, what we can expect in the next 2-3years is that the enterprise as well as the startup space will reach a saturation point where the growth is just organic but no longer hyper.

But then, this will ensure that OEMs look at alternative options thus contributing to the exponential growth in terms of cloud adoption from SMB/Es.

One more greatest change that we have been witnessing in the recent years is the growth in maturity of customers. Their knowledge and the desire to make the right technology related decisions and choices with respect to choosing a partner who can drive immense value for their organizations is impeccable.

This is such a positive change as compared to previous years where customers moved to cloud that provided free credits and depended on the cloud OEM for their technology decisions.

Currently, I can definitely say that it has been really inspiring for us to work with the customers who have their own mind and willing to drive their own technology visions and solutions.

DQ: Please explain the role of cloud in SMBs and MSMEs in India.

Dr. Richard: For the SMBs and MSMEs, the biggest challenges the leadership face have always been too much to do with very few competent hands to do it.

Cloud becomes a great facilitator to these challenges and plays the role of a business accelerator with its rapid and quick on demand provisioning and scaling.

Depending on the size of the SMBMSME, today there is a hugechoice of ready to use automation available as SAAS offering for just a couple of dollars. This not only helps in speeding up the business but also ensures vast savings in cost, time,and improvement in efficiency.

For the larger SMBs who may want their own custom solutions, the cloud PAAS or IAAS comes readily available, ensuring the rapid, secure, and low-cost infrastructure, with absolutely no need for an infra team.

With the current pandemic, SMBs have realized the benefits of cloud in helping them even move their desktops to the cloud and make them accessible securely from anywhere and again, just for a few dollars per month.

DQ: How the market is evolving again?

Dr. Richard: The cloud market has been growing rapidly and is only adding more and more business joining the ever-growing cloud consumer list. As per Gartner, over 60% of business owners will be using cloud for hosting by 2022. I am certain this will eventually turn out to be a bigger percentage based on the adaption and current trends visible.

With this pace of adaption, what cloud will evolve too will be a commodity and a necessity and with what we see in recent times, which is again, a greatly needed evolution, is the knowledge of the customer growing and his needs being aired more often than earlier for open standards across cloud providers so that he can have the choice to move with ease between providers.

As I mentioned over an year ago, the industry is evolving and will continue to evolve on similarities to the evolvements we have seen in the past in the telecom sector and you will see consumers being more demanding and making choices of technology architecture based more on the ability to switch between clouds at will and with ease and with a click of a button.

This in itself will be the clouds greatest evolution, where vendors will need to standardize offerings to facilitate this ever-growing need.

DQ: Please mention few expected trends in cloud computing space in 2021.

Dr. Richard: Pandemic has definitely awakened the complete business IT leadership all over the globe. While we are speaking about digital transformations with respect to our server infrastructure, we did take a back space with our desktops.

But during the pandemic, most of our opportunities lied in helping out people and their organizations move to work from home and convert their traditional physical devices into VDI hosted on cloud.

As for us, we have moved, stabilized, and have in use over 20000+ desktops just in past 6 months and we definitely see a growth in 2021 as well. If I can use a Chinese calendar and say something about 2021, I will surely declare it as an “Year of the digital desktop transformation”.

Though there were many business apps that allow us to have video meets and drive some amount of digital visibility and automation, moving our whole desktop to cloud with “Bring Your Own Device” culture is what the future holds for us and drives consumption in years to come.

DQ: What are the future plans of G7 CR?

Dr. Richard: We continue to focus on helping our customers use their data and convert it into wealth. And for this to happen, we have already setup BI|ML and analytics enabled teams.

We also have our core focus on expanding our cutting-edge cloud support IP (G7 CR Plus) and the world’s first ever cloud specific CRM (G7 CR Black and White) to use the data we have to become much more intelligent and thus help our customers not only to solve their tech issues and problems on cloud, but also reduce as much as their spend and help them become cost efficient as well.

As far as global expansion plans are going on, we have already started our operations in MEA region with our setup in UAE and we will also soon be moving to UK and North America regions.