An entrepreneur's delight

Mausam Kalra's lushtrip is just one example of how cloud is helping innovative entrepreneurs see their dream venture take off

When Mausam Kalra relocated from Canada to India two years ago, he had a spring in his stride. Markets were upbeat, e-commerce was being touted as the next big thing and Kalra knew now was his chance. “I had been in Canada for 11 years, where I had gone to do my masters in computer science. Soon, I was working there and was the vice president a big IT company there,” he reminisces.

In touch with what was happening in IT all over the world, thanks to his company’s network in 17 countries, Kalra already knew how to take off his venture Frillmedia, which he started last year. “I also looked at the market and saw that 70-80 per cent of transactions were in the travel sector. Why, the biggest e-commerce site in India is IRCTC,” says Kalra. And travel, it was, with lushtrip.com – a website catering more to local deals and customised packages – everything from an annual general meeting by a company and other corporate-related events, to your localised holiday packages.

The entrepreneur can’t thank cloud technology enough making his dream venture possible. “I spent a fraction of money as investment on lushtrip, thanks to cloud. For, everything from the mail and the website is hosted on a cloud,” he reveals, and goes on to do a simple cost analysis. “I think of my previous company, which has 150 servers and we were the second-highest consumer of bandwidth. Such an infrastructure cost nothing less than $8,000-10,000. Moreover, for every 20-25 servers, we needed an admin to maintain them, take backups, protect them for viruses, install firewalls and so on. That kind of capital investment is needed even before you generate revenue,” Kalra says.

But not for lushtrip. Here, Kalra didn’t have to make any such investment and has no back-end system that is not critical to the system. Although the payment gateway is kept away from virtualisation to negate any security threats. Not only does cloud take care of day-to-day working of the business, but also helps the company scale up effortlessly, since there is little that it has to do about expanding or working on more IT infrastructure. Kalra is planning more such ventures online and for him the answer is simple – cloud computing.