Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ravi Reddy, CEO of Sunera Technologies (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Basically, as per the structure of your company that you described, you’re actually going in the right direction. If you want to run a custom solution services company, that’s different. If you’re trying to productise and run more of a product-centric company, you’re going to need to focus. Otherwise, positioning a product becomes very difficult across three different functional areas. That’s just not possible.

Ravi Reddy: Absolutely, I agree with you. I think your advice is quite helpful here. In the last 18 months, we’re seeing good adoption with CloudTestr. Our dominant market is customers who are hybrid versus on-cloud. Those are our target customers.

Today, there are 8,000 EBS customers, about 5,000 PeopleSoft customers, 3,000 Siebel and JD Edwards customers, and 11,000 SAP customers. These are the customers who are adopting new cloud applications. You probably know this better than I do. They don’t have digital quotient within their organisations today. They don’t know what technology stack is used under the cloud platform that they just bought. Sales team makes salesforce.com decisions. The HR team makes HR cloud decisions, and the IT guys are sitting there owning this application after the decision is made.

Sramana Mitra: That is the business in itself, right? Testing of cloud infrastructure is a business in itself. Your supply chain digitization business is a business in itself. Each of these are separate businesses. It answers my question on where you see the industry’s trend.

The opportunities are in identifying these work flows in different domains, whether it’s horizontal domains or vertical domains. Domain experts in those domains can create niche software companies, which I think are going to be very interesting companies. Some of them are going to be big, but some of them are probably going to be small to mid-sized companies, and that’s fine.

Ravi Reddy: That’s exactly what we did. We spun off the supply chain and marketing business. Suneratech, as an organisation, our business is IT. There’s always a conflict. When you go to IT, he doesn’t like us to go to the line of businesses. E-butor and Meltag have been consciously separated with the intention of, “Go directly to the line of businesses. You have nothing to do with IT.” As you rightly said, Suneratech as an organisation, our growth is driven by these cloud-based platforms and solving IT problems.

Stamina Mitra: Thank you very much for your time.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ravi Reddy, CEO of Sunera Technologies
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