Since the last few years, cloud computing has witnessed increased adoption and growth in India. While most cloud OEMs are either focused on the enterprises or startups, it misses out on catering to the mid-segment, i.e., SMBs.

There is a huge market gap in terms of the advantages that these companies could have taken out of cloud computing. This is primarily because of two reasons — one, these companies have been conservative about putting their data elsewhere and two, these companies assume that the cost of cloud computing would be far higher than the non-cloud computing hosting which they use. 

However, with the current pandemic, the scenario is changing, and cloud conversations are becoming a norm. Companies are realising that it is a crucial time to adopt cloud in its infrastructure. 

With a vision of providing cloud to companies regardless of their sizes, Bengaluru-based startup G7CR Technologies is utilising AI and machine learning to be one of the leading cloud-managed service providers in India. 

Analytics India Magazine got in touch with the founder of G7CR Technologies to understand how the startup is using emerging technologies to provide cloud services to small and medium-sized organisations. Founded in 2012 by Christopher Richard, is enabling businesses to adopt the power of the cloud, business process automation, and more.

How Is It Enabling SMBs With Cloud

According to Richard, right from helping a user to migrate into the cloud, optimising workloads, keeping securely on the cloud, ensuring that the deployments work on the cloud to re-architecting the infrastructure — all of these together form the cloud managed services at the company.

The startup helps companies leverage the cloud securely while ensuring that the customers can integrate this with their own applications and add the AI capabilities to whatever apps they are using currently in-house, without really needing to have the ML expertise.

While there are many cloud providers in the market, Richard pointed out that the biggest differentiator of G7CR is the technical strength. He said, “We basically ensure that our discussion with the customers is mostly around how we solve their technology problems and how we can provide the solutions, but it’s never about transacting with them. This has always been our biggest differentiator.”

While the startup has been doing well, when the pandemic broke, Richard stated that one of the first thoughts that came to mind was that in order to survive, the company needed to ensure that every business survives. 

To do this, G7CR offered the businesses to entirely move to cloud services at free of cost to ensure that the businesses were able to quickly move to the cloud and keep the productivity going and not have to basically think about budgets or approvals for the cost of service.

The Tech Behind It

The company works with the cloud-driven ML engines to deliver the models faster and more reliably using all their existing DevOps practices. Being a cloud-first company, everything that the company does is on the cloud platform.   

Most of the deployments in the cloud are automated, and the company uses Azure DevOps for the pipelines as primary stacks and use Terraform for infrastructure as code. In terms of the actual applications that are deployed in the cloud, the core tools that the startup is using are basically on the Azure stack. 

G7CR Technologies uses Azure ML, which is a Python-based service. They also use the ONNX platform, which is an open-source model format and run-time for ML, which enables it to move easily between the framework and the hardware platform of any choice. In terms of framework, the company uses TensorFlow and ScikitLearn. 

In terms of knowledge mining, the company is primarily using Azure Cognitive services, including cognitive search as a knowledge mining platform. Lastly, for AI and apps, the startup uses the bot services and cognitive services from the Microsoft Azure platform.

Future Roadmap

The startup has been quite aggressive in adding more technical resources, and are aiming to add at least 40-50 resources in the coming quarter. 

Apart from hiring, the company is also ambitious about continuing to grow at 100% year on year, and are looking for global expansion in the next five years. Besides receiving the UAE and UK office setups, the company is also exploring Canada as a North America destination. “We aspire to be the world’s number one cloud managed service provider,” said Richard on a concluding note.