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ThinkCloud - RCV Innovations' year long journey in the cloud

It all started of with a simple idea of making cloud relevant to Business in India. We felt creating trained manpower is the first step. we had a goal of training 1000 people in 1000 days in cloud technologies.

We hired Sai Narayan and Giri Pantla to market the training programs and VMware.  Within a Month, with help of Vinod(vmware) and Avik(vmware). We landed into our first VMware Deal of (Rs. 2,00,000/-). It was an IBM account - a subcontract to us by Venkat of Abacus-a local IBM dealer.

With the right credentials and revenue, We became Enterprise Partners of VMware with in one month of our start. Ragesh(Our VMware Partner Business Manager) said, We were the fastest to reach that designation in the partner community. We landed into several VMware PoCs(VDI etc) and deployment deals later in the year...


We started of with a 2 day cloud computing boot camps. In a true cloud style, we used SaaS-SlideRocket(later acquired by VMware) for our first Brochure/Poster. We had a 2 International students(africa/middle-east) who walked into our office seeing the poster. Our first income was Rs10,000/- (~$200).

We then got a sub-contract from a US financial powerhouse  for a VMware/UCS transition  in Canada. This gave us a breather to start hiring a team.

Along the way back I met my buddies Brad and Paul, who saw the potential to start a SaaS innovation team with us.

They routed SaaS project headed by Dorothy. With Active guidance from Paul, We started ramping up the team.

My Brother-in-law lent his COO - Sriram(Sri was VP at 130 people IT services firm) to the Project and My long time friend from C-DAC days Venky(KV) helped to Recruit Jyoti(Quality Mgr-Ex-Adobe - our Head of Quality) and Priya(Dev Mgr-Ex-Adobe - runs New Technology Innovations) and Lots of mentors from Bhaskar, Ramana(CEO Ganana), Rajkarpe, Jaipal Reddy(ACL) to Ravi Reddy (my maternal Uncle) helped in things to focus on.

My past experience at Sify in taking greenfield Cloud platforms(HMC, Storage as a Service and Infrastructure as a Service) to production helped me keeping the balance and focus on execution.  

In the last one year, we have learned a thing or two about SaaS Platform development.

C o r e T e c h n o l o g y  I n n o v a ti i o n  route is a little longer. 

We needed to be pragmatic(Sri's View) and work less capable but faster to market approaches.  An example of one such tactic is to Use ReST module in Drupal(Satya's idea) rather than developing the ReST services from ground up connect to Alfresco/MS-SQL/CouchDB. 
This helped us in winning customer confidence with a working application while we continued to innovate in Java based ReST services. We moved the Al-fresco connectivity to Java on VMWare vFabric.

vFabric is an interesting animal, It is a high-performance, secure by default, supported open source Application Infrastructure Platform. 

We had to go through significant learning in bringing up vFabric, Run PHP/Drupal/Java Code and optimize it to our needs.

Testing/Validation specially Functional and load testing using SAHI pro(built by couple IITians from Banaglore) played a significant role in the success. 

We are using Hosted JIRA for Bug tracking. Jyothi's Awesome customizations on JIRA streamlined our development, unit testing, integration testing, regression, deployment, uat and bug fixing process. 

Dorothy and Team were focussed 100% on Business functionality, Paul played the Client Advisory role.

Dorothy's Approach was simple and effective

Dorothy lead PoC's and demo's in new clients aggressively....

- Team got us the customer feedback..

- Rich and Sri converted that into requirements and...

- Starting producing the functionality. 

This way it was easier to get to a working product faster with less pain.

Now we are continuing the innovations with a New SaaS Platform.

Our India Cloud initiatives:

Anitha is working on Healthought - A SaaS platform for improving healthcare quality and NABH compliance(National Accreditation Board Health care providers and hospitals) in India.

We are doing IT as a Service Pilot with Ricom Technologies - Thin clients and View

We are actively bidding for a SaaS platform development project from Market leader in Indian Education sector.

A revamped Cloud computing syllabus and an impending VMware Authorization for Training(VATC-just signed the Master services agreement), We hope to continue our journey to make making cloud relevant to Business in India. 

Comments

Kirti Singh said…
Hi,

Its indeed a good going.

Best of luck for future.

Kirti
9:18 PM
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