For sophisticated managers who understand the concept of mobility and are willing to reap the benefits of cloud computing, there is an increasing number of young, vibrant companies offering to help them make the transition. One such bunch of fresh faces is BlazeClan Technologies.

The name BlazeClan may sound like an inner-city rap group from New York, but the only thing these guys are rapping about is the cloud. BlazeClan serves businesses of all shapes and sizes, and boasts of ready-to-deploy solutions and frameworks which the company says helps their clients quickly adapt to cloud computing in a predictable manner. The company says it has established an international clientele spanning Asia, Europe and North America.

BlazeClan was founded by four friends, much like the story of other startup companies. Gurmeet Singh, Varoon Rajani and Veeraj Thaploo had known each other since their engineering days. Thaploo and Ghatak worked together in the UK and the four came together to startup venture that wants to ride on the current cloud computing euphoria.

Singh, who heads the marketing and inside sales is an electronics engineer with an MBA from Great Lakes Institute of Management, Chennai. All the others are computer engineers and bring in what management gurus call the various aspects of running a business.

Beginnings

So, how did this idea come about? “In 2010, we had an idea of developing an online training platform, which would be available over the Internet to startups and large organisations alike to help them streamline their internal trainings. We had the idea and the technology skills required but we certainly didn’t have the capital investments required to setup the infrastructure,” says Rajani. It is then that the company came across Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform that offered computing power as a service. Amazon offers technology, like Google offers email services on the Internet and charges for the amount of technology consumed and helps companies to set up their tech infrastructure in hours rather than weeks as was the case earlier. We were totally blown away and decided to build the platform on AWS, says Rajini.

With this, BlazeClan started developing the product and integrated a Learning Management System (LMS), a video conferencing system and online coding tutorials. All this was offered as a pay-as-you-go service, an approach the company adapted from AWS. “We tested the platform to ensure that it would support a large number of users who we anticipated would be using the platform simultaneously. It worked like a charm for huge loads of traffic,” says a satisfied Rajani.

Their venture interestingly coincided with the rise of cloud computing. So, instead of investing huge amounts of money and time in buying and setting up the IT Infrastructure, they could do large scale deployments without spending upfront. In 2011, a friend contacted BlazeClan and had this idea of building an online trading platform but faced constraints with regard to limited capital. “He was impressed by what he saw and immediately asked us to help him with AWS for his platform and he eventually became our first customer on cloud computing,” says Rajani.

Success Story

Since then BlazeClan has helped around 15 companies ranging from two-people startups to multi-billion dollar Nasdaq-listed corporations to adopt cloud computing. In India, the company has done a project for a large life and general insurance company to move their digital marketing assets to the cloud. Similarly, in the US, the company helped a customer to migrate a large-scale download infrastructure supporting 13 million annual downloads of their software after their acquisition of the product. “The challenge here was not just in the number of downloads to be supported but the timeline we had for executing the migration,” says Rajani. Further, the company has two other software product offerings called Cloudlytics.com and BriSkGap.com. Cloudlytics.com is a big data analytics tool available as a service. It analyses log files of our customer’s storage and content distribution networks and gives them detailed analysis of access requests from their online assets. It is in beta stage. BriSkGap.com is an online learning platform available as a service. It manages different learning management systems, video conferencing systems and coding environments for training purposes in large organisations.

“These products give us a predictable, month-on-month recurring revenue which is very important in managing our cash flows,” explains Rajani. The company plans to develop more products and expand its Intellectual Property base in addition to setting up channels in North America and APAC and have a sales team in North America.

So, what about funding plans? We plan to raise money six months down the line to expand our sales team and invest more in development of more solutions and products, averred Rajani.

For every company that adopts cloud technology, there are others who are not convinced about what it can do for their business. There are issues with security (what happens when data is leaked or sold to unauthorised entities), ownership (does it make sense to keep paying monthly when a business can claim depreciation benefits over the lifespan of an equipment), service agreements (in case of who is to be blamed in case something goes wrong) and other questions that still dogs companies in champion its cause. While adoption is growing we realise that not everyone would be able to start using cloud computing on their own, they would need help to ensure that when they use it in the right way, sums up Rajani.

venkatesh.ganesh@thehindu.co.in

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