Customers want intuitive solutions: DigitalOcean's Prabhakar Jayakumar

Developers should spend time in converting their ideas into life rather than doing heavy lifting on the infrastructure front, says Jayakumar

The cloud market is crowded with large technology companies such as Amazon, Accenture, and NetApp, taking the pride of place. How does DigitalOcean hope to compete in a market like that?

Right from the beginning, our objective has been to fill in the gaps in the cloud market by offering users intuitive and easy to use solutions. When it comes to data storage and security solutions, one of the key challenges that we identified with regard to existing cloud solutions is the complexity involved. Our understanding of cloud is that it has to be very intuitive which means that developers should spend more time in converting their ideas into life rather than doing heavy lifting on the infrastructure front.

Another challenge that we are committed to addressing is developers’ concerns around pricing. From a user perspective, clients want the best performance at a given price. For companies like us, it’s all about balancing reliable, easy to deploy solutions with a better price-performance bargain. A lot of the established and big cloud providers are also focused on enterprise solutions which means that they need to have a large workforce to deal with a particular problem. However, if you are talking to a start-up or a small player, they have limited resources and smaller teams. This is another area where we step in and offer complete infrastructure support and project management handling.  

What are the key trends unfolding in the cloud space?  

The move to adopt containers is a big trend in the cloud space. As a technology solution, containers help deploy software applications, move data and the entire networks quickly and reliably to a cloud-supported environment. 

For some time, organisations have been talking about adopting a multi-cloud strategy to work around a single-vendor lock-in challenge. It’s no longer an option; it has become a must-have approach for businesses to scale-up.  

Once businesses get into vendor lock-in, the entire migration exercise becomes a huge challenge. Containers help solve the problem of migrating from the physical environment to virtual. Earlier, people used to be sceptical about security while considering migrating to cloud. This is changing fast as they realised that a lot of these concerns were just myths. The new-age cloud solutions ensure that the organisations’ security-related issues are well taken care of.  Today, organisations are far more comfortable with their regular applications as well as critical application being hosted and moved on public cloud. 

You have been working closely with start-ups. Is there a perceptible shift towards cloud adoption?

There has been a sea change in the kind of companies that are being built mostly in the start-up space. A few years ago, it was all about building clones or what can be described as a me-too business model. Most start-ups in India were trying to replicate and build on the success of Silicon Valley companies. Many of these did not take off and only a handful succeeded. But today’s start-ups are more conscious and committed to solving local problems and are moving towards customised solutions and accordingly, their requirements of cloud-led solutions, too, are changing.  

Also, unlike the Silicon Valley companies, start-ups and other businesses in India look for additional infrastructure and services support and guidance as they move from physical infrastructure to cloud. Indian companies tend to look at some kind of handholding while migrating to cloud as compared to companies elsewhere.

You have a dedicated programme, Hatch, for start-ups to scale up, right?

We went through an accelerator programme which was beneficial and we wanted to pass on the mentoring and experience and that is how Hatch happened. With the aim of helping start-ups scale up to be able to compete globally, we not only give products to promising start-ups under the programme but also extend technology mentorship to them. Our teams closely examine smaller businesses’ network architecture, suggest them the best security practices and help them implement the solutions. We also help start-ups connect and pitch their business plans to venture capital firms. 

You are also focused on creating a strong developer community…

By 2025, the estimated number of developers globally will be 100 million. That’s as big an opportunity that we are looking to go after.