Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ali Din, SVP & CMO of dinCloud (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What category of customers are going after? Large enterprises, mid-sized, small businesses? Where is the business focused?

Ali Din: To be candid, we have tried a lot of different sizes and target markets. In the early years, we pivoted quite a bit. At this point, our sweet spot is what I would call the lower mid-market. That’s companies that typically have 200 to 500 employees. We continue to do business with organisations that are smaller and then we also do quite a bit of business with very large organisations that have tens of thousands of users or have a global footprint as well.

Our go-to market approach is, we actually go through the channel. We built partnerships with Ingram Micro. We also have been working with Tech Data. We also work with the world’s largest reseller CDW, which is based out of Illinois. Those are just a couple of examples of channel partners but we go through a channel ecosystem where they have that close relationship with the end customer and we help enable that by providing the cloud service.

Sramana Mitra: Can you take a typical representative customer of yours and walk us through how that customer uses your suite of offerings?

Ali Din: A typical customer may be 200 employees and not a very small business but a business that’s been growing. The challenge that they have is that they have some infrastructure. They have, at least, one or a couple of people who have a specialization around technology, but they don’t have all the skill sets and resources to be able to manage a full IT infrastructure especially if that business wants to continue to grow. That seems to be the best fit for us because when they move over to the cloud and they migrate their infrastructure into our data centre, they’re getting servers, desktops, and applications hosted.

What it lets them do is they can run their software without worrying about the resilience or stability of the system. They can also have more security around the infrastructure because, obviously, a smaller business can’t fully invest in the same type of infrastructure because we have some much more at stake. We put a lot of layers of security into the approach, but it also gives them the ability to avoid the hassles that they have to deal with in terms of connectivity.

A lot of senior people have to VPN in and use a private tunnel to connect to their network when they’re not in the office and check on the financial statement or some kind of proprietary system that they’re using in-house. With our solution, since it’s running in a virtual data centre, they can access it without necessarily needing the VPN because once they get into the virtual desktop, it’s already on their virtual network. That helps from a productivity standpoint. It helps them reach the best resources regardless of where they’re located around the globe.

They’ll also use us for application management in other ways. We have one recent example where they literally issued five different laptops to certain people in their company because that person had to run five different applications and each application was very unique. They had five different laptops depending on what they needed to do at that moment. When we virtualized their applications and their desktop workspace, now they’re down to one device. They have a good high productivity device that they can use.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ali Din, SVP & CMO of dinCloud
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