Siva S (Powerup)
Powerupcloud Technologies has unveiled plans to expand multi-cloud capabilities in 2020, as the born-in-the-cloud specialist chases advanced specialisation and competency levels.
Central to such ambitions will be added expertise on Amazon Web Services (AWS) through four new competencies, a doubling of the provider’s Microsoft Azure business and an elevation to Premier Partner status with Google Cloud.
“At Powerup, we are proud of our true multi-cloud capabilities with proven large-scale projects across the three leading public cloud platforms,” said Siva S, founder and CEO of Powerup. “Our strategy has always centred around becoming a technology leader in the public cloud space and our focus on the three large public cloud platforms will continue.
“While AWS and Azure are leading the public cloud race, we are curious to see the way things are shaping at Google Cloud.
"In my opinion, I anticipate increased cloud adoption this year because each of the three public cloud providers have key strengths and unique offerings.”
Founded in 2015, Powerup goes to market as an enterprise-level cloud specialist housing expertise in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and data analytics, alongside business intelligence, digital transformation and chatbots. The business also focuses on managed services, cloud migration and consulting, with presence spanning India, Singapore, United Arab Emirates and the USA.
Housing more than 180 employees, Powerup was acquired by Larsen & Toubro Infotech (LTI) in October 2019, a global technology consulting firm headquartered in India. According to Siva, speaking at the time of the transaction, LTI makes the “perfect home” for next phase of growth of Powerup.
“Our expertise across major public cloud platforms offers us an enormous opportunity to grow, learn, iterate and build well-engineered technology solutions for enterprises,” he said.
In 2019, Powerup also achieved several key competencies with AWS, including enhanced Cloud Migration status through the technology giant.
“This competency validates our capabilities to work with large enterprise customers in their cloud transformation journey and help migrate massive workloads to the cloud,” added Siva, when speaking to Channel Asia.
According to Siva, Powerup’s understanding of each specific cloud platform is enhanced further by intellectual property in the form of CloudEnsure.io, an autonomous cloud governance platform.
The offering tracks cloud security and best practice violations in real-time, while auto-remediating vulnerabilities in a non-intrusive manner to enforce governing principles, while enhancing cloud security posture management in the process.
“A successful technology provider should build world-class IPs in the space they operate,” Siva said. “Building enterprise products helps develop unmatched expertise. I foresee that the current model of 'human skill-based' technology service is not going to give the edge over companies who bring in IP to solve a customer problem."
Market metrics
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the escalating coronavirus crisis is already impacting IT markets as buyers, partners and vendors adjust to a new set of assumptions and a new global economic reality.
Based on first quarter data indicators, IDC expects to see a significant slowdown in spending on hardware in particular during the first half of 2020 with software and services spending also affected as the crisis reverberates through all sectors of the economy, including supply chains, trade and business planning.
By the end of 2020, in a pessimistic scenario, IT spending could grow by one per cent compared to the original forecast of more than four per cent growth, with such forecasts more likely to trend down than up in the next few weeks.
“The situation is extremely fluid,” observed Stephen Minton, vice president of IDC. “Our monthly data and surveys are clearly pointing in one direction, but it's still early to understand the full impact of the coronavirus crisis across all sectors of the economy.
“We are using scenario models to illustrate that forecasts have a wider range than usual, and the downside risks in those models seem to be increasing every day. But the duration of the crisis remains a big unknown and will go a long way in determining overall market growth for the year as a whole.”
Despite this, demand for cloud continues to increase amid a rise in remote working. Speaking as head of cloud across Asia Pacific at Powerup, Arun Britto said enterprise cloud migration is forecast to become the most most in-demand service during the next 12 months.
In addition to increased adoption of data lake and enterprise resource planning (ERP) functionality through cloud, Britto expects serverless and containerisation to also feature heavily on enterprise agenda items during the next 12 months.
“We continue to focus on moving our customers towards complete automation of cloud environments,” he said. “This involves deep architectural level discussions and redesigning exercises that allows businesses to adopt futuristic serverless or container-based models.
“Powerup recently delivered an infrastructure-as-code transformation project for a large logistics unicorn in Asia Pacific, helping them move away from manual, console-based access to cloud resources."
Delving deeper, customers are also embracing open-source platforms, especially databases, with almost 20 per cent of the enterprise transformation projects carried out by Powerup currently falling under the provider’s ‘Database Freedom' program.
“We continuously see the trend wherein enterprise customers struggle with the pace of cloud adoption,” Britto added. “In my opinion, the problem lies in the cloud adoption strategy phase. Enterprise customers and cloud consulting partners often rush into the cloud migration phase without spending appropriate effort in understanding their on-premise systems thoroughly.
“It is highly recommended to engage a 'full-service cloud partner' such as Powerup to help customers in both devising the cloud adoption strategy and executing the migration at a rapid pace. This is instead of having a 'consulting-only' partner to drive the cloud adoption strategy part."
