By Deb Dutta, General Manager, Asia-Pacific and Japan, Datastax
According to the Redseer Ground Zero 6.0 report, India’s digital economy is expected to reach a USD 1 trillion valuation by 2030, fueled by rapid internet penetration growth, high-speed access, ubiquitous online commerce and digital content consumption initiated by the Government and the Private sectors.. The same report also attributes this growth to accelerated tech adoption in the B2B and B2C spaces, with technology firms in e-commerce, health services, Food and Beverages (F&B), mobility and utilities taking large slices of the pie.
The Redseer Ground Zero report also notes that e-commerce has tripled, accelerated by smartphones and consumer-focused mobile commerce platforms. For businesses to continue to flourish in this era, adapting quickly and delivering user-friendly, secured, real-time applications with next-generation features that leaves users with lasting experiences are is a prerequisite for delighting customers. The London School of Economics and Political Sciences estimates that 90 percent of Indian startups will fail within the first 5 years, as Indian customers have high standards for online transactions, spoilt for choice and are highly price-sensitive; making customer retention tricky for all providers.
With customer expectations changing continuously, startups are faced with the twin challenge of innovating at scale to drive customer loyalty on omnichannel platforms, while keeping digital investments optimized with clearly defined SLAs. These SLAs must enable internal technology teams to focus on aligning the technology with the business drivers rather than spending their time building the technology.
Stepping Up To the Cloud
Startups understand the business advantage of operating from the cloud. Today’s cloud environment is vastly different; secure, scalable and stable, providing benefits, from ease of development, favorable unit economics owing to critical mass. All of this enables the Indian startups of today to ramp their application stack faster. Cloud databases, especially those that can be delivered ‘As a Service’ have become an unalienable addition to modern-day applications. Distributed, horizontally scalable NoSQL databases that can scale and meet performance on-demand while staying affordable are instrumental in helping an enterprise gain a competitive edge in the marketplace through data insights.
Winners and losers in a progressively digitally transformed planet are being decided by an organization’s ability to harness and mobilise data in real-time, and act in anticipation of the needs of customers with the right performance, user interface and experience. With the cloud, businesses can quickly build smart, scalable applications according to needs.
Cloud technology have helped startups reduce operational costs while providing additional technological resources for small and medium-sized startups. For example, an open source multi-cloud application architecture can be deployed in a “serverless” model, without having to provision for the peak and can scale up and down on demand. This reduces costs and compresses time to readiness to a fraction of traditional infrastructure. Concurrently, modern cloud-native development also results in faster time-to-market and delivers better quality, reliable applications, wrapped in a tighter feedback loop, for better and more frequent improvements.
Businesses need the ability to cut the clutter and manage applications that grow sophisticated by the day. They also need to make it simple for their development teams to build applications with accelerated path to production. Exposing data infrastructure via secure, modern, scalable APIs abstracts the complexities and shortcomings of information silos, and enables application developers to focus on writing business services leveraging federated data repositories instead of having to learn the intricacies of query language.
The right NoSQL backend should be ready to support any data model and therefore integrate with diverse business cases – Customer 360 platforms, Fraud detection, Internet of Things applications and devices, e-commerce platforms, gaming, financial services, or even supply chain and logistics applications.
With a unified and federated data platform, an organization is free to begin another cycle of elevating its applications to the next level. In the event of a disaster or human error, the business can rest assured that its cloud backup system eliminates the risk of data loss without having to manage the complexity or the cost of instituting such systems.
Indian startups might only have a 10 percent chance of success after five years, so make those choices, including the decision to invest in the right technology, very carefully.
As the saying goes … Success does leave clues!
