Crayon to Prioritize on Cloud Management, Optimization: Vikas Bhonsle

Vikas Bhonsle, CEO, Crayon Software, highlights over 40 percent growth in the last year with almost 150-200 percent growth in its services business. In an interaction with Amit Singh, he underlines cloud management and cloud optimization as the major focus areas with their plans to expand footprint in Kerala, Gujarat, MP, Delhi NCR, Bengaluru, and Mumbai.

What according to you are the top trends that will shape the channel and enterprise market in 2022?

You’ll see a lot of people building their own intellectual properties and aligning service around them. So, whether it is a small player, whether it is a global SI, I am seeing everybody come up with their own intellectual properties, their own IPS, and then they’re building services around them. If you really go and check about anybody in the market, they’re all ISVs because they’ve got some app, they’ve got some intellectual property and that’s what’s happening. So, one of the biggest trends that will happen in the market, you will see a massive change where people will not only be seen as being ISV, but they will all morph into MSPs of some sorts where they’ll be providing services around the play.

Can you also talk about few of the highlights of your achievements in terms of business growth and customer acquisition, or maybe new innovations in the last year?

We have seen unprecedented growth in the last 12 to 18 months, upwards of 40 percent what we’re doing across the businesses. Our services business of course is coming from a smaller base, it’s grown like almost 150 -200 percent, and so it’s been excellent.

We are now acquiring more customers than ever before, and we are requiring and working with more partners than ever before.

On the innovation side, when you look at the partner ecosystem, we have our own platform called Cloud IQN, where we’ve done several innovations in the platform.

We brought in BI capabilities, which has become more forward-looking platform in terms of what’s going to be the consumption, trends, on what areas of the business are you going to consume and given great statistics to our partners, who are able to do the devise strategies to move forward in the business.

Can you also talk about your India and global footprint and what exactly are your plans from enhancing geographical presence from a point of presence or a sales point perspective?

Crayon was started in Norway in 2002 then started our business in India started in 2015. From 2002, up to 2014, Crayon was largely concentrated in the European markets. We started to have two global aspirations after 2015. So, we started the business in UAE, Africa, India, we went to the US, Russia and so on and so forth.

So today, if you really look at our global footprint more than 80 percent of the world buying potential is covered by us. The only place we are not there by design is China, but in most other places, we are present from a global footprint and it’s a combination of organic growth and inorganic growth. Very recently, you might’ve heard that we acquired a company called Wright, and Wright has a very high user base in ANZ and in South Asia. With that, we’ve got footprint in the Australian market. So, it’s going to be a combination of organic and inorganic way.

When I look at the India footprint and we are there in all the metros and A-class cities. So, if you go to any top tier city in the country today, we have a direct presence but increasingly as we look at our business, there is a need to go to more towns and cities. We are increasing footprint in the state of Kerala, Gujarat, MP, NCR, Bengaluru, and Mumbai this year.

What are the skills and what are the certifications that you look at when you engage with the partner?

The most important criteria for us is not to figure out whether the partner is small, whether he has capabilities or does not have capabilities. What’s important for us is between me and my partner what is the segment of the market that we are addressing? Is there potential and together can we make a difference to that segment in the marketplace? We work with very, very large partners who have got all the services, capabilities.

So, for some partners, we’ll give them go-to- market, for some partners we give them entire services capabilities or multi- geography reach outside of India. For example, some of them, we will give our own resources.

It’s kind of layer, it’s multi-tier in our approach to the partners. As long as someone is very clear, that cloud is the space that we want work on, digital transformation technologies is what our customers would want to adopt and invest in. They are happy to work.

Can you also talk about a few of the latest initiatives that you have taken, or you are planning to take, to add value to pre-sales training or maybe post-sale services for your partners and customers? 

We do workshops and these are awareness workshops. We either do it with our partners or we do it with the partners’ customers.

Any quarter on an average, we do about 150 such workshops. These can be education for our partners on Citrix as a service, desktop as a service, on containers, on micro-services, on chat bot on anything and this awareness happens when we say it’s a partner on table, then we get partners and there are people and we run these education sessions for them on some of the hottest selling topics in the market today. Cloud, cloud migration or optimization, adoption of digital transformation technologies, AI, blockchain containers, all of that stuff, which is really happening in the marketplace.

We run customer round tables. The partner brings in 10, 15 or 20 customers and we get our team in and then discuss on some predefined topics.

We also do Surge days, which are typically events where we even write scripts for our partners.

Can you also talk about your plans for onboarding new brands or additional new business lines for the next 12 to 18 months? 

The next 12 to 18 months, you will see us focusing on build-on solutions and products, which are catering to both the providers and the users.

We are focusing on digitizing customer experience and user experience as well as on cloud management and cloud security space. We are going to enhance the tools for cloud optimization. These are going to happen for the next 12 to 18 months. Everything in the domain of cloud.

What is your outlook for the technology industry in 2022?

Extremely positive, I have always said technology is a great game changer. If you really look at smaller organizations, the SMBs or the start-up community, what’s happening today is tremendous.

Whichever statistics that you look at, the CAGR on cloud is unbelievable. So, cloud is going to be the next big thing in the marketplace, but it’s not only about the cloud, but edge computing is also going to be strong. There’s going to be storage at both ends of the computing spectrum, hybrid is still a way to go. There are a lot of data centers who are having an on-premise data center at the customer premise.

The same is with Data. Data analytics is going to be a massively big opportunity, in the days to come. So, it’s blockchain and it’s not only restricted to regulated industries like finance or healthcare.

And then of course, automation, RPA, as much as you’re trying to digitize the external one, there’s a lot of digitalization that needs to happen within your internal processes. So, RPA or automation of processes is also going to be a large, big thing.