We aim to play a prominent role in fulfilling the goals of the Digital India vision: Sandeep Bhargava, Managing Director, Asia Pacific Japan, Rackspace Technology

As Indian enterprises ramp up their acceleration to the cloud, Rackspace Technology, is eyeing significant opportunities in the country. Sandeep Bhargava, Managing Director, Asia Pacific Japan, Rackspace Technology, shares with us, the company’s outlook for India, and how his company plans to differentiate itself in the extremely competitive cloud computing market

Some edited excerpts:

In the fast-growing cloud ecosystem in India, what are some of the significant opportunities for Rackspace in India?
As Indian enterprises ramp up their acceleration to the cloud, multicloud adaption continues to be the preferred strategy for many companies for their operations to become more agile in order to conveniently scale up and down when required and avoid vendor lock-ins. As a leading end-to-end multicloud technology services company, Rackspace Technology can help design, build and operate our customers’ cloud environment that stretches across all major technology platforms, regardless of deployment models or technology stacks.

Making the transition to the cloud is not an easy process and customers would require a lot of assurances on smooth data migration processes and security. These concerns provide Rackspace Technology with invaluable opportunities to help customers get maximum value from their cloud investments and minimize risk factors while fast-tracking their digital transformation. We have the tools to help enterprises implement, integrate and deploy key applications on the optimal cloud platform, ensuring high security and compliance as the foundation of any implementation.
Furthermore, under the current economic climate, enterprises are coy about spending excessively to migrate to the cloud. This is another area of opportunity for Rackspace Technology as we provide a single view of their cost and usage levels for them to determine if their spending is generating the optimal return-on-investment while also keeping tabs on their operating expenses. Our objective in India is to play a prominent role in innovative projects to fulfill the goals of the Digital India vision.

What are some of the key drivers in your view for the rapid growth of cloud computing in India?
Agility is crucial for an enterprise to tackle immediate challenges of unexpected events and quickly adapt to the changes that these events trigger. It works as an enabler for companies to be more resilient and accomplish competitive gains. And the cloud is crucial to achieving this agility, which is evident in the growing number of companies migrating to the cloud. The advantages of the convenience of scale, real-time support for business requirements and the positive impact of the bottom line are all important factors in the uptake.

Data security is also an influential factor in cloud adoption. Most cyberattacks that occur today are financially motivated, resulting in a need for companies to be concerned about protecting their data across their network, infrastructure and applications and meet compliance-related requirements as per government regulations and industry standards.

So, security has emerged as a high priority area for companies with on-premises data centres, to ensure business does not get disrupted by breaches or even outages which leads them towards proven end-to-end data security driven cloud solutions.

Compared to other service providers, what are some of the key differentiators that Rackspace has?
With Rackspace Technology, you’re looking at service provider that puts a lot of emphasise on accelerating the value of the cloud through every phase of digital transformation. Our objective is to partner with our customers and be at hand to assist them through every step of their cloud journey, which include modernising applications, building new products and adopting innovative technologies.

From a security perspective, we implement access policy and encryption tools, key management automation and clearly defined security processes to help ensure our customers have the highest levels of data protection. With all their data in one place, customers can maintain the standards of encryption and auditability a lot better which is critical to protect their businesses and also meet key compliance requirements. We believe we are the best choice to help customers get to the cloud, innovate with new technologies and maximize their IT investments.

What kind of opportunities do you see in cloudifying legacy applications? Can you mention some specific examples?
We are undoubtedly moving into a new era of data-driven business models and AI advancements. This has prompted companies to take a fresh look at their technology systems as it becomes increasingly evident that the legacy systems that fuelled their growth in the past are now reaching a point of maturity. So, huge opportunities abound for legacy system modernization projects across diverse industries as enterprises begin to unlock data and intelligence held in their legacy systems and include them in their digital transformation plans.

Companies will need a lot of assistance in assessing the maturity of their legacy systems, building the right migration plan that provides the highest return on investment and putting in place ongoing modernization procedures that cover every part of their IT and business processes. We’re looking at opportunities to audit their existing environment’s metrics, itemizing and collecting key information about their workload and categorizing their workload in order of complexity to facilitate the right cloud platform choice for enterprises.

We are encouraged by the fact that companies are beginning to recognize technology as an asset that grows their business rather than seeing it as a cost required to run their business.

Rackspace recently built a cloud-based financial services platform for Clix Capital? Do you see a trend of more such deals happening in the future with respect to different domains in addition to BFSI?
In India, we have just started expanding our foothold this year. While we aim to be a trusted technology partner in India’s BFSI landscape, we already have a diverse customer portfolio from sectors such as education, healthcare, consumer goods, automotive, media and entertainment, retail, travel and hospitality. With Indian companies ramping up their customer acquisition and retention with cloud solutions and seeing positive growth as a result, we are working on and looking forward to more partnerships and collaborations with enterprises from all these sectors to guide them through the intricacies of cloud migration.

How do you see the future for Rackspace in India? What are some of the initiatives planned?
Rackspace Technology’s growing stature in India is exemplified by the confidence customers have in us to help them get maximum value from their cloud investments and minimize risk while accelerating their transformation. With cloud adoption becoming almost inevitable for enterprises in many sectors, our future in India is looking extremely promising as more and more businesses turn to us to guide them through the implementation and integration of leading applications, deploying these applications on the optimal cloud platform and ensuring security and compliance.

One of the most important initiatives that we’ve rolled out is the Rackspace Elastic Engineering (REE) solution. REE is a new approach to evolution in the modern cloud designed to provide customers with on-demand access to a team of highly skilled engineers, collectively called a Pod. These engineers are available to collaborate with organisations to shape successful outcomes such as planning and migrations to the Public Cloud, architecture design and deployment, and improved security and reliability for customer applications. Solutions such as REE will keep us ahead of the curve in the market and will enable us to provide a fantastic experience for our customers.

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