Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ravi Reddy, CEO of Sunera Technologies (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You shouldn’t be selling through as a technology platform. It sounds like you have a set of disjointed stuff and you’re basically doing custom solutions in various areas that are quite diverse from IT, marketing, to supply chain. I’m trying to understand the organising principle of the company.

Ravi Reddy: The organising principle of the company is to help customers with digital strategy.

Sramana Mitra: You’re basically running a consulting and custom software company.

Ravi Reddy: We are trying to transform over the last 18 months from a pure consulting company to a platform company.

Sramana Mitra: The observation that I have—this may actually be helpful in the transition—is that some number of use cases that are synergistic use cases need to be productised as opposed to being done as custom software solutions. I don’t have the analysis on what is the total available market size on each of these product opportunities. There are probably several tens of millions of dollars worth of TAM attached to each of these productisation opportunities.

Either you are going to do that productisation yourself or some other company that focuses on a particular vertical or domain will. That’s the direction of the cloud computing industry. There is a lot of vertical cloud work flow development going on. There are small companies all over the place that are focusing on a specific niche and automating the work flow for that particular niche. There are these big horizontal stuff like Salesforce.com. Vertical cloud basically is my observation.

I’ve talked to a bunch of people who are specifically working on vertical cloud with that as their positioning. It just strikes me that with what you’ve described in this conversation as your use cases, from a trend point of view, all that needs to be productised. It’s the general conclusion that I draw from this discussion and other related discussions. Do you agree with that?

Ravi Reddy: I completely agree with that. That’s why we have spun off two companies. One is called Ebutor. It’s funded by Suneratech. It’s a vertical supply chain product and is doing very well in terms of acquisitions of customers. We are acquiring, at least, four to five customers per month. In digital marketing, we completely spun that business off as a company called Meltag.

Coming back to what Sunera will continue to focus is IT. Like you rightly said, we moved away from services to an IT platform company. If you go to suneratech.com, you will see that we focus on only three platforms. CloudTestr is our leading platform. A large part of our customer acquisition is through CloudTestr. The rest of the solutions are actually a long tail in terms of cross-sell and up-sell. CloudTestr is what I would call the new logo driver. 

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ravi Reddy, CEO of Sunera Technologies
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