DigitalOcean Explains How Cloud Computing Is A Force Multiplier For Small & Medium Businesses

The Cloud computing market is projected to reach $400+ Bn By 2020, according to tech analyst Gartner. With the flexibility of paying for only as much compute and storage space  they require, small businesses and developers are using the cloud to scale up. Public cloud doesn’t weigh companies down with the expenses of maintaining central servers and IT teams as the hardware and networks are maintained by the cloud services provider. In addition to that, public cloud storage saves time for businesses by providing the services immediately.

More importantly cloud has levelled the playing field between large multinational companies (MNC’s) which have the privilege of legacy software and extensive IT support and smaller companies. From data storage, file hosting and sharing, CRM (customer relationship management) and more, cloud-based SaaS (Software-as-a-service) applications have revolutionised the way small and medium enterprises do business. By reducing inefficiency, automating repetitive tasks and ensuring quicker time-to-market, cloud services are also helping SMBs compete with larger, more well-established players.

While there are many cloud companies enabling startups and businesses of all kinds today, New York-based DigitalOcean is slowly becoming the go-to-cloud for developers the world over.

We caught up with DigitalOceans’s senior executive team to understand various steps taken by DigitalOcean to build a robust community of developers and SMBs.

Inc42: Please take us through the journey of DigitalOcean in India

Jeff Giannetti, Chief Customer Officer: Here in India, it is a developer rich environment. There are millions and millions of developers in India and I think it’s part of the reason why DigitalOcean has grown so fast. India is a rich market for us and the value proposition of our offering resonates with the developer community. We hold regular events and over the course of having a regular presence in the marketplace, we have seen our growth in India increase dramatically. So we believe that’s now a model that we’re going to deploy globally and we’re going to continue to invest in that model here in India because it’s working beautifully.

Our goal is to continue to accelerate that growth and continue to expand the go-to-market team to include things like in-country account managers to focus on some of our largest customers and be sure that their experience with DigitalOcean continues to be exemplary and they continue to find the kind of service and relationship that they’ve come to expect from us.

Inc42: How is DigitalOcean enabling developers and small and medium businesses?

Barry Cooks, CTO: One of the big priorities for DigitalOcean is the developer and SMB communities, and we look at how we can enable them to be successful. These are people who are trying to get into the market not because they want to own a specific kind of technology but who have been trying to use technology to solve a problem.

So one of the things that DigitalOcean focuses on is how can we make consumption of that technology simple, affordable and easy-to-use. We do that by focussing on the developer community, and have introduced thousands of tutorials that we create ourselves and with others to empower them.

In the enterprise space, often, you will find people buying tools to calculate their costs because the cost complexity of actually using those cloud platforms is so high that they need software to help them understand how much they’re going to spend on their software. So one of the focusses for DigitalOcean has been simple pricing, simple product and great customer experience.

Inc42: What are the plans around moving upstack to serve the developer and SMB market?

Shiven Ramji, SVP-Product: We recently announced Managed Kubernetes Services and in February we launched a Managed Database Service. So these are the two new managed services that essentially take all the complexity of managing the Kubernetes cluster and databases. So we take all that complexity and we make it super easy for developers to just get going with their microservices in a Kubernetes environment or storing their data in databases.

And then later this year we have plans for an additional developer workflow automation, again with the idea that we really want the developers to focus on their application coding and logic and not worry about configuring infrastructural components in the cloud.

Inc42: How does DigitalOcean differentiate itself from other cloud providers using support as a lever?

Mohammed Coovadia – VP, Customer Success & Support: One of our core differentiators is how we approach our engagement with our customers and the community. Through our support organisation, we believe that we are inherently better than our competitors because we have a more personal relationship with our customers. We show our love to the developer community through our developer advocacy. We host our Hacktoberfest event, which we co-produce with GitHub and others and this is one of the largest hackathons in the world. Thus through all these initiatives, we believe that by bringing people into the community by asking them to contribute to open source projects we allow the community as well as DigitalOcean to grow.