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BLAZECLAN TECHNOLOGIES: CLOUD COMPUTING ADOPTION IN INDIA Professor Easwar Krishna Iyer and Dr. Jayanthi Ranjan wrote this case solely to provide material for class discussion. The authors do not intend to illustrate either effective or ineffective handling of a managerial situation. The authors may have disguised certain names and other identifying information to protect confidentiality. This publication may not be transmitted, photocopied, digitized or otherwise reproduced in any form or by any means without the permission of the copyright holder. Reproduction of this material is not covered under authorization by any reproduction rights organization. To order copies or request permission to reproduce materials, contact Ivey Publishing, Ivey Business School, Western University, London, Ontario, Canada, N6G 0N1; (t) 519.661.3208; (e) cases@ivey.ca; www.iveycases.com. Copyright © 2015, Richard Ivey School of Business Foundation Version: 2015-01-30

In July 2013, the biggest dilemma facing Gurmeet Singh, who headed the Marketing and Inside Sales Department of the nascent firm BlazeClan Technologies (BlazeClan), which was situated in Pune, India, was slow cloud adoption in the Indian market. This tardiness resulted in longer and slower sales cycles for the company, which provided strategic cloud roadmap consulting for various industries. Singh was confused about the total lack of understanding of cloud offerings in the Indian market despite an all-out effort by his company. The market was familiar with buying computers but showed resistance to the idea of buying “computing.” While the rest of the world was migrating towards services, Singh was bemused by the local cloud market’s inertia. BlazeClan invested a lot of marketing dollars in educating its potential customer segment in India by doing customer events, webinars, social media campaigns and talking at important industry forums. Yet, the momentum that was badly needed to push cloud adoption to the next level was not building up. Singh knew he had to do something drastic for his company prospects to look positive but wasn’t really sure how to go about achieving the desired results. BLAZECLAN TECHNOLOGIES: BACKGROUND BlazeClan Technologies was founded by Singh, Varoon Rajani, Veeraj Thaploo and Supratik Ghatak in 2010 (see Exhibit 1). Three of them had known each other from their engineering days and two of them — Ghatak and Thaploo — worked together in the United Kingdom. All four were fascinated by the current cloud computing euphoria. After all, cloud was the buzz word in 2010 with the nascent technology literally topping the Gartner hype cycle only a year earlier. Focusing on cloud computing, BlazeClan offered consulting, migration, bespoke application development and services for enterprises of all sizes and had operations in Singapore, India, the United States and Canada. Its customer base included large enterprises in the sectors of engineering, banking financial services and insurance, information technology (IT) and health care. It was also one of the largest advanced consulting partners for Amazon Web Services (AWS), the leader in cloud computing services. BlazeClan’s financial numbers had steadily been building since its inception1 (see Exhibit 2). 1 Robin Waters, “The Cloud Computing Stratosphere (Infographic),” April 6. 2011, www.virtualization.com/2011/04/06/the- cloud-computing-stratosphere-infographic/, accessed December 31, 2014.

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Initially, the four founders had the idea of developing an online training platform (BriSkGap.com), which would be available over the Internet to start-ups and large organizations alike to help them streamline their internal training. The team had the strategy and the technology skills required but were short of the capital investments needed to set up the infrastructure. They came across the AWS platform, which offered computing power as a service.2 BlazeClan developed the product and integrated a learning management system, a video conferencing system and online coding tutorials.3 AWS offered computing power, storage and networking as a utility, the way Google offered email services on the Internet. It charged for the amount of technology consumed by the hour and helped companies to set up their tech infrastructure in hours rather than weeks or months as had been the case. BlazeClan understood the value proposition that it could bring by playing the role of an intermediary between AWS, the utility vendor, and the client who needed a solution that was free of capital expenditure, had a minimal set-up time, was elastic and had low operations expenditure and variable computing load. Singh and his friends decided to build customized cloud solutions for their clients using AWS as their backend. Taking their cue from AWS’s pricing strategy, BlazeClan offered the market a pay-as-you-go cloud service. The company tested its platform to make sure that it supported scalability and flexibility since a large number of clients would be using it simultaneously. At an individual level, no single user could conjure up the same degree of scalability or flexibility using traditional platforms. It was here that the AWS plus cloud offering became relevant. BlazeClan quickly tasted success and saw enquiries coming in for its cloud expertise. It started consulting and implementation for its customers on AWS Cloud. Slowly, the Indian cloud market experienced a rise in cloud computing adoption, and many start-up firms started coming to the market to offer an assortment of cloud solutions. Clients did not want to invest huge amounts of money and time in buying and setting up their technology infrastructure, hence they preferred cloud, where they could go for large-scale deployments without any upfront investment. BlazeClan’s first customer was someone who wanted an online trading platform, which it created in cloud space; the customer was happy with this choice. OVERVIEW OF THE EMERGENCE OF THE CLOUD COMPUTING MARKET What the Internet did to data access in the 1990s, cloud computing did to data processing and storage at the turn of the millennium — it democratized availability. Until the arrival of cloud, acquisition, processing and storage of data required a significant capital outlay. The scene changed when markets were able to buy computing instead of computers. Cloud offerings broke the capital expenditures (CAPEX) requirement barrier and levelled the playing field between developed and emerging economies.4 A multi-tiered market evolved, in which players at many levels mixed and matched offerings ranging from infrastructure to platform, applications, software and storage.5

2 “Amazon Services,” www.aws.amazon.com/, accessed December 31, 2014. 3 Venkatesh Ganesh, “Cashing on the Cloud,” August 30, 2013, www.thehindubusinessline.com/features/weekend- life/cashing-in-on-the-cloud/article5075421.ece, accessed December 31, 2014. 4 “Cloud Computing and Its Levelling Impact between Developed and Emerging Economies,” International Journal of Computer Communications & Networks [IJCCN] 3.3, August 2013. p.13-24 5 “The Cloud Computing Stratosphere,” www.pinterest.com/pin/495958977685012219/, accessed December 31, 2014.

This document is authorized for use only by Deniz SARIASLAN (denizsariaslann@gmail.com). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact customerservice@harvardbusiness.org or 800-988-0886 for additional copies.

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