Established in 2016, Jaipur based RackNap has seen 100 per cent YoY growth since its commercial launch. RackNap has customers in mature cloud markets like the US, the UK, Australia, UAE and also in other emerging cloud markets like India, Indonesia, Chile, Brazil. RackNap is a cloud brokerage platform enabling billing and provisioning automation for Cloud Solution Providers (CSPs), hosters, data centres, telcos and subscription service providers. RackNap helps these service providers to increase their revenues and decrease their operational costs with automation, thereby running a profitable business.
Bouquet of cloud services
The company offers a bouquet of cloud services and support like Microsoft Azure, Office 365, Dynamics 365, AWS LightSail, IBM Cloud, Acronis Cloud Backup, etc. It also supports delivery of traditional web services like domains, web hosting, VPS, dedicated servers, SSL certificates, etc.
“Today, we see automation at the forefront of running an efficient business, and this need for automation and cloud services presents a big opportunity to us. We want to tap this essential need/opportunity to help service providers in delivery of cloud services as per their needs. IoT is fast picking pace and we have a roadmap to integrate IoT based services with RackNap, so that can automate delivery and management of those services,” informs Guruprit Ahuja, CEO, RackNap.
The company started its journey with a solution for cloud service providers to help them deliver cloud services with automation for billing and provisioning, and managing their business operations from a single panel. Earlier, CSPs had manual processes for provisioning and managing billing of cloud services. “This used to consume a lot of time and resources and CSPs were also lagging to meet the demand in time for cloud services. After adopting RackNap, there is no need for manual processing and work of multiple personnel is done with automation. This has helped them to drastically reduce dependency on human resources, operational costs and deliver almost 10X more services in the same time,” he says.
Focused strategy
Today, it is integrated with major technologies that are in high demand like Azure cloud, Office 365, Amazon Web Services (AWS), IBM Cloud, Acronis, etc. Cloud services are becoming commoditised and there are relatively mid to low margins with them. However, the company feels with the lack of skilled manpower to offer Cloud Managed Services, it sees good profitability in this business. “With RackNap being an own IP, there is potential for good profitability too. Also, we have more demand for integrating some more in-demand technologies with RackNap and that would surely help increasing the customer base and the profitability,” Ahuja adds.
From the customer’s need and base, each one of them has unique needs and challenges such as resistance to change, fear that new technologies could take away their jobs, security concerns and offshoring work. In spite of these teething problems, RackNap team has worked towards alleviating their concerns by re-emphasising the fact that technology is an enabler for business change. “We had to demonstrate with evidences (such as case studies, video testimonials, etc) as to how the deployment of RackNap for others is very successful and how they can also benefit from the same,” he remarks.
It is essential that customers have the confidence that they are working with a set of thorough professionals who are highly-skilled in what they are doing, points out Ahuja, adding, “Our team has a variety of certifications from Microsoft, AWS, Redhat, etc and over 40 per cent of our team is certified in these technical domains. We have internal KPIs for our teams to ensure that they do additional work/get trained in other domains too. We cross-deploy resources in other teams to ensure that they get a good sense of what goes on in other teams.”
Future road map
In the future, the company has plans to integrate many more technologies into RackNap. “In our immediate road map, we are working on integrating Google cloud platform, G-suite, Dropsuite, Zabbix. This will make RackNap a very robust and more useful platform for CSPs, MSPs and other service providers. We have plans to venture into the IoT segment and we strongly believe there is huge potential for this segment, considering that the world will be a fully ‘connected’ place in the near future,” concludes Ahuja.
