2021 is going to be the ‘Year of digital desktop transformation’: Dr. Christopher Richard, G7 CR Technologies

Kindly brief us about G7 CR Technologies India and tell us where does it stand currently? 

G7 CR Technologies entered the cloud industry as a cloud service provider and reseller for Microsoft in mid-2016 with a clear vision to be the value link between customers and the cloud OEM. In short span from then to now, the brand has grown to be the most respected deep-tech cloud service provider in the country, have been the proud winner of Microsoft India country partner of the year for the last two consecutive years along with a 100 per cent year-over-year growth in cloud revenues and is all set to exceed over 250 crores this year. G7 CR seems to head towards becoming the most dominating cloud player in the country.

Please tell us where India stands with respect to adoption of cloud and how do you perceive the cloud industry in India in the next 2-3 years? Also, please share how the cloud market has changed in the past recent years? 

While in India, cloud adoption has been growing and will continue to grow, India remains to be the country with vast untapped potential in cloud adoption. The ever-growing buying potential of the consumers, the size of the country, and the huge number of SMB\E businesses and start-ups only tells us that we have not really looked at or focused our efforts on getting everyone on board with the cloud success story. While the enterprises and most startups today are already on cloud, the reason is that the great focus was given to these two segments from the two big cloud OEMs. While AWS focused on the start-ups, Microsoft entered with their attention on the enterprises. The lost pie in the market has been the SMB\SME adoption, again has been growing, but has much bigger potential than what the boardrooms of these major OEMs are projecting. What we do see in the next 2-3 years is the enterprises and startups reaching a saturation point for hyper growth on cloud and will only have organic growth and this will ensure that the cloud players look at alternative segments and this will in turn see an exponential adoption of cloud from the small and medium business market segments. One of the greatest changes we see in the recent years has been the growth in the maturity of the customer, the knowledge on cloud, and his desire to not only move to cloud but also make the right technology choices as well as the partner choice that can drive value for their organization. This is a big change as compared to the earlier years.

Could you take us through some of the challenges faced by G7 CR Technologies India, especially when the lockdown was imposed and how did the company deal with them?

For G7 CR, the cloud division being born in the cloud, was always equipped to work from anywhere. And hence, there were only little to no challenges in the transition to work from home. Yes, some of the hardships faced were by our people who did not have the necessary infrastructure or privacy and space to work from home but we were able to help solve the chair, table and UPS problems by providing the same from the company.

What are some of the cloud computing trends to watch out for in 2021?

I will definitely say that the pandemic awakened the whole business IT leadership to a realisation. While we may talk about digital transformation for our server infrastructure, we made a huge mistake in ignoring our desktops in this vision. Most of our opportunities during the pandemic to help people work from home has been to convert the traditional physical desktop\laptop into VDI hosted on the cloud. We have personally moved, stabilised, and have in use over 20000+ desktops in the past six months, and we see this growing further in 2021. If we used a Chinese calendar, I would like to declare 2021 as the year that is going to be the “Year of the digital desktop transformation”. While the business apps that allow you to have video meets and greets and drive some amount of business automation and digital visibility, moving your whole desktop to the cloud for a few dollars and moving company strategy to BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) will be what further grows the cloud and drives consumption in 2021 and may be years to come.

Please share with us the future roadmap of G7 CR Technologies India for 2021 with respect to the adoption of cutting-edge technologies.

We continue to focus on helping our customers covert their data into wealth and for this, we have setup BI|ML and analytics enabled teams. In addition to this, we have our core focus on expanding our cutting-edge cloud support IP (G7 CR Plus) and the world’s first cloud specific CRM (G7CR Black and White) to use the data we have to become more intelligent and help customers not only to automatically solve tech problems on the cloud, but also reduce their spend and make them cost efficient.

What are your future plans with respect to the company’s growth in the next three years?

INR 1,000+ crores is a certainty in cloud revenues in the next three years in India. Apart from global expansion that is already happening currently in MEA with our setup in UAE, we will be moving next to the UK and North America.