 "Cloud, Cloud Services, Cloud Computing")
Last week, Ola’s Bhavish Aggarwal caused a stir when he announced the launch of a new cloud service named Krutrim Cloud, along with an offer to launch a full year-worth of free cloud usage for select customers.
The move comes after Aggarwal criticised Microsoft-owned LinkedIn for removing his post on pronoun illness, calling out the platform for imposing political ideology.
While Aggarwal’s announcement gained traction on social media, his free offer to join the Krutrim Cloud comes with a catch. It is available to developers currently using Microsoft’s cloud computing platform Azure, as long as these professionals don’t go back to Azure again.
Enterprises rely on third party cloud service providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), among others to cater to their needs for servers, storage, databases, and analytics, over the internet or the cloud.
These service providers enable companies to save up on their information technology (IT) costs by eliminating expenses such as purchase of hardware and software along with the management of an onsite data centre. It saves on other costs such as those involving IT experts for managing the infrastructure.
Simply put, a business can focus on running its own operations rather than devoting substantial resources to handling its IT infrastructure.
New business, new challenges
Ola has decided to move its entire workload out of Azure to its own Krutrim Cloud within a week’s time. Aggarwal admits that it’s a challenge, but he is confident that his team will pull it off.
Others, too, believe it a challenge to shift to a new cloud service within a week’s time.
“Migrations take weeks, if not months, and such a large migration cannot happen within a week unless preparations have been underway for months. My sense is that Ola will ‘start’ moving away from Azure in bits and pieces from the coming week and in fact, they would not be able to move everything away,” said Pawan Prabhat, co-founder, Shorthills AI, an enterprise-focused generative AI company.
Aggarwal’s offer to join Krutim Cloud for free may seem lucrative on the surface, but founders feel the cloud service business is beyond just freebies.
“It is a business based on reliability (of services). Other companies such as AWS, GCP and Azure too offer free incentives to join them. But to move to another service provider becomes expensive since it requires many engineers to focus on shifting your cloud infrastructure,” a founder at an Indian crypto firm said, adding that his company cannot afford a downtime while shifting the infrastructure to another provider since crypto is a ‘24x7 business’.
Prabhat from Shorthills AI said as a company, they are in favour of using cloud services from established players as the latter are secure, easily scalable and frees up bandwidth for the core business of a company.
B2B and ‘sales first’
Unlike Aggarwal’s previous ventures such as cab aggregation, AI chatbot Krutrim and Ola Scooters, a cloud business categorises itself as a business-to-business (B2B) product, rather than a business-to-customer (B2C) product.
It implies that his latest announcement around the cloud service is unlike the rest of most of his popular bets in cabs and electric vehicle (EV) manufacturing.
“The decision making in a B2B product and a B2C product is very different. B2B products need stability in pricing since you’re essentially handling an entire vertical (IT) for a business. It is more about selling it to people than technology itself,” a senior executive of an IT company said.
The person elucidated that for something like a Krutrim Cloud to succeed in the Indian market, Aggarwal will need to pitch a compelling reason for customers to migrate to Ola’s homegrown service.
“Either it has to be that same service at a far lower cost, which is what he seems to be going after. Else, for the same cost with existing service providers, he will need to provide a significantly better service,” the IT executive added.
Optimism and scepticism
Despite the complexity involved in the cloud business ranging from tech to sales, founders and company executives Business Standard spoke to said that they believe in Aggarwal’s vision.
As a tech entrepreneur, the 38-year old has diversified from cab aggregation to EV manufacturing and AI services.
“If anyone can pull it (cloud) off, maybe he can do it since we have seen him do so many things in the past,” the executive quoted above said. Others, however, express scepticism at Aggarwal’s moves.
“Bhavish Aggarwal has created an amazing company, a solid competitor to Uber in India and scaled it to a national level; that is highly commendable and deserves respect. However, most reports say that Krutrim has fallen short of expectations both at a chatbot level (for example, reportedly could not answer who the PM of India is) and also at a developer and cloud level,” said Jaspreet Bindra, an AI expert at Tech Whisper.
Amid both optimism and scepticism among industry peers, it remains to be seen how the Ola founder navigates through cloud services.
