In the post-pandemic era, the adoption of next-gen technologies like cloud has fuelled as organizations are now moving quickly towards building robust IT infra. The adoption of cloud-based services has enabled organizations to thrive in the digital world and gain resilience. Such advanced technologies push organizations’ growth trajectory. In India, companies are at different stages of cloud adoption to fend off the challenges arising due to pandemic. Fulcrum Digital is helping such companies to make the right approach for cloud adoption and accelerating their digital transformation journey. Rajeev Ranjan, Editor, Digital Terminal recently held an exclusive interaction with Rajesh Sinha, Chairman and Founder, Fulcrum Digital. Rajesh spoke about the increasing tendency of Indian enterprises for cloud adoption, their offerings and future plans. Read below the excerpts:
Rajeev: How do you see the adoption of cloud-based technologies among Indian enterprises in post COVID-19 world?
Rajesh: Indian companies are viewing IT more strategically in their organisations and it has now become an important part of business continuity plans as they branch further into investing in digitisation and look for secure alternatives for their workloads. There is a surge when it comes to adoption of cloud-based services over the last 18-20 months. As a result of all functions rapidly transitioning to the digital world due to the pandemic, businesses of all sizes fast-tracked their decisions to adopt tools such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)-powered Cloud. According to Flexera 2021 State of the Cloud Report, 90 percent of enterprises expect cloud usage to exceed prior plans due to COVID-19
As businesses prepare to thrive in the era of hybrid workplaces, there is increased focus on gaining agility, flexibility, and resilience, reliance on cloud platforms and infrastructure. All of these point to the fact that Software as a Service (SaaS) will act as an inflection point in any organisation’s growth trajectory. Although most companies in India have adopted cloud in some stage, the current pandemic situation has now enabled organizations to rely on infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solutions to expedite development and deployment of business applications.
Rajeev: How is the adoption being accelerated across the major sectors? Which are the top three major verticals which are fuelling the adoption of Cloud services?
Rajesh: India has always been a front-runner when it comes to modernising IT services. Some of the sectors where we’ve observed significant growth in cloud adoption include banking and financial services, education, retail and food & beverage. The latest research from Gartner Inc points out that end-user spending on public cloud services in India will total $4.4 billion in 2021, according to the latest forecast from Gartner, Inc.
At the same time, what is also encouraging to note is that India’s union and state governments are playing a critical role in promoting cloud adoption. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman in her budget speech earlier this year provisioned for a policy to enable the private sector to build data centre parks. The union government’s Cloud Vision for India 2022 aims to establish India as a global hub for cloud computing, content hosting and delivery, as also data communication systems and services. India has the potential to be a cloud-first nation, but we must get the building blocks right, i.e., talent, favourable policies, innovation capabilities, data strategy and government adoption.
Rajeev: Please tell us about key offerings for organizations that help them in staying ahead in the digital race.
Rajesh: To give you brief about our key offerings, I am listing this as below:
FulcrumOne:
Our flagship offering, FulcrumOne, helps organisations across sectors in accelerating their digital transformation journey. FulcrumOne is an industry-first platform, built on services-based principles. Its architecture consists of an interoperable set of services that can be brought together to create apps and workflows based on the specific client need and context. The platform can be utilised as plug and play, where either a business can buy the platform or it can be customised and integrated with its existing system. It’s reusable, super-fast and transformational. We have reported tangible results – for instance, reduction of development time from 12 sprints to 9 sprints - by deploying FulcrumOne across a number of functions for our clients.
CulinarySuite:
The food, beverages, nutrition, and hospitality industries are not only fastest-growing but also ones that need to rapidly adapt to trends based on customer needs. Keeping this in mind, we have developed Culinary Suite. This powerful tool has been meticulously developed incorporating foodservice management principles and best practices for Schools and Universities, Hospitals, Restaurants, Hospitality, Business, and Industry Food sectors. CulinarySuite offers a range of cloud-based solutions that cover every aspect of the food services business. Successfully integrating CulinarySuite for companies has shown benefits such as enabling applications to be developed faster, reduction in complaints and simpler monitoring of processes.
Kaleidoscope:
With over 21 years in the education sector, our HE technology specialists have helped guide HE institutions across the UK, US and Middle East towards operational excellence and industry innovations. Kaleidoscope is the front door to the future of education, providing seamless information access to various stakeholders. It also provides efficient document management systems, seamless collaboration, and Single Sign-On, amongst other varied features. It was born out of the need to streamline and augment systems in a manner that makes the process seamless for students, teachers, and other faculty members through a unified experience.
SupplyDay
SupplyDay is a platform that helps organizations automate and streamline their suppliers, contractors, vendors’ on-boarding and prequalification process. This platform streamlines all manual Prequal workflows and establishes a rule-based engine, allowing them to easily rate and manage processes with each vendor/supplier/contractor.
Rajeev: What are your business goals by the end of 2021?
Rajesh: As part of our growth strategy, this year we transitioned to a ‘Pods’ structure to grow in India. Pods are independent strategic business units that are aligned to core industry verticals. We have started working on this through global leadership expansion, hiring and scaling in new geographies to drive the next phase of growth.
We are positive about closing 2021 with $60 million in revenue and are optimistic about reaching $100 million by 2023. We are working on a strategy to achieve equal revenue from our products and services businesses by 2023. Inorganic growth is a critical element of our plan. We will consider acquisitions of tech-led start-ups and established companies that complement our offerings.
Our business outlook for 2021 remains positive and we expect to close the year with $60 million in revenue. This will mean a 50% increase in revenue over the previous year and overall a 40% CAGR growth in last 3-4 years.
