BlazeClan Technologies taking home the AWS Country Partner of the Year in Singapore
Blazeclan Technologies is gearing up for a year of growth across Southeast Asia, driven by increased enterprise demand for public cloud.
The specialist Amazon Web Services (AWS) partner - with presence across Singapore and Malaysia - is responding to expected market growth of 17.5 per cent in 2019, and the increased deployment of cloud-first strategies.
“We’re focused on large enterprise customers and helping them with cloud enabled transformation,” said Varoon Rajani, co-founder and CEO of Blazeclan Technologies. “We see an increased interest from enterprise customers across Southeast Asia for public cloud.
“This provides significant opportunities for us to help our customers with cloud led digital transformation on a larger scale. We’re also seeing lots of market opportunity in analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) and we will be investing our time in these areas.”
According to Rajani achieving such aspirations will require focusing on four core areas, spanning large-scale migrations; data lake and analytics; application modernisation and managed services.
“We are heavily focused on AWS but we see certain customers asking for an alternate or a second cloud for their applications,” Rajani added. “Therefore, we have invested in building our Microsoft Azure capabilities to help these customers.”
Founded in 2010, Blazeclan operates as Premier AWS Consulting partner, with added presence in France, Belgium, US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, alongside Gold partner status across Microsoft Azure.
“The most important attribute that a technology provider must possess is listening to the customer and being agile in responding to the customer’s needs,” explained Rajani, when speaking exclusively to Channel Asia.
“Technology is changing rapidly and the expectations of the end consumers are changing rapidly as well, we need to keep pace with these changing expectations and deliver.”
With almost a decade of public cloud experience, Blazeclan has built strong in-market capabilities across such platforms, backed up by a managed services practice.
“These factors are unique for a born in the cloud, new age system integrator,” Rajani said. “We are always learning new technologies and implementing them for our customers.
“We look out for technologies in areas adjacent to our offerings which is beneficial to our customers and us either in terms of automation, ease of use or cost.
“We have added more partners in security, automation and governance which complement our core focus on public cloud implementation and cloud led transformation.”
Customer credentials
In assessing the ASEAN market, Rajani said top priorities for most large enterprises centre around customer retention and increasing revenue per customer.
“Almost all industries are facing disruptions from technology enabled start-ups and enterprises want to prevent their turf,” he observed. “Their key investments are in improving the end consumer experience, who want seamless experience between the physical and digital worlds.
“Technology is the key in improving customer experience in this increasingly digital world. It is technology that will drive business, and technology is moving beyond having an internal set of business applications.”
For example, Rajani said that many enterprise organisations are adding a new CTO role, primary tasked with creating improved technology for end-users.
“Having a role defined for consumer facing technology is a significant investment for any business, moving beyond the CIO role,” Rajani added. “Having seamless interactions between physical and digital worlds for any business means that they need to have technology which is agile, on demand and scalable.
“We believe in cloud led and cloud enabled transformation, and we see strong resonance of this with our customers as well.”
For the Singapore-based Rajani - who is also founder and CEO of software-as-a-service (SaaS) big data platform Cloudlytics - enterprise customers across Southeast Asia have started adapting public cloud at scale, with the segment standing tall as a leading area of investment.
“Apart from cloud initiatives customers are investing heavily on analytics, automation, security and digital initiatives and platforms,” Rajani explained. “Most enterprises want to become digital native and each one of them is moving at their own pace depending on the potential disruption in their industry and their own organisational priorities.”
On the flip side, Rajani said key challenges for businesses in the coming years is to "do away with the legacy technologies and investing in the future", to avoid being disrupted by more "nimble and tech enabled start-ups".
“But cloud is also impacting the channel as well,” Rajani cautioned. “Channel is being impacted by the SaaS and cloud marketplace. Customers have a way to buy directly from the online marketplace and software vendors, bypassing the channel.
“This provides both challenges and opportunities. Challenges for businesses focused on the channel business in terms of reduced margins and revenues, but opportunities for partners who do value-added services or professional services to focus on improving customer engagement and delivering quality solutions for customers.”
In looking ahead, Rajani cited “talent acquisition and skill building” as the leading challenge for Blazeclan in 2019 and beyond, mirroring common roadblocks impacting cloud specialists across the region.
“Vendors also need to enable technology providers to build their own skill sets as well as enable access to an ecosystem where skillsets is made available in abundance,” Rajani added.
