AWS’ Partner Minjar Bets Big On Upcoming India-based AWS Infrastructure Region

New Delhi, August 27: Bangalore-based Minjar Cloud Solutions is one of the fastest growing Amazon Web Services (AWS) partners from India.

Ever since the company joined the AWS Partner Network (APN) four years ago, it has been doubling its team and customers. With Amazon deciding to set up its local region in India next year, Minjar is gearing up to grow its expertise in the SMBs and mid-market space.

In a short span of four years, Minjar has close to 100 customers located in India, Singapore and US. As the company is looking beyond SMB customers, the company is building core IP in creating self-services solutions for the SMBs.

Speaking exclusive to the ChannelTimes, Vijay Rayapati, ‎CEO, Minjar Cloud Solutions, said, “We primarily started building cloud solutions for the mid-market and slowly moved to enterprises. Today, we are among the top 30 premier partners for Amazon in the world.”

AWS has a fast growing Indian partner ecosystem and they are located across all major cities of India. AWS channel/alliance team works hard to educate and enable the partner ecosystem, as well as conduct go-to-market activities with them. The partner ecosystem is growing successfully using AWS to serve both local and overseas customers. Minjar has grown very quickly and is now providing services to many customers around the world.

As an AWS Premier Consulting Partner, Minjar provides cloud and big data consulting services including readiness assessment, implementation and migration of on-premise workloads as well as core enterprise business applications to AWS, cloud management and support services.

With over 600+ deployments for over 100 customers across 10 different countries, Minjar has helped several large enterprises, ISVs and start-ups to productively embrace AWS. Working with AWS, the company is experiencing 100 percent growth in revenues year-on-year and within four years of its inception, the company has grown from a 4-member founding team to the current 100 AWS certified architects and engineers.

It finds training and certifications, offered as part of the AWS Partner Network, highly beneficial, and it ensures all their employees are certified on the platform by incorporating trainings as part of their induction program.

Minjar’s in-house intelligent cloud management platform Botmetric provides Cost Management Analytics, Comprehensive Infrastructure Audit and DevOps Automation for AWS Cloud.

Minjar vs tradtional IT services companies

“Customers do ask why would they work when there are bigger companies. I think there are 2-3 fundamental differences. Cloud is a lot about technologies. It is not just about selling servers, storage and getting 100 servers for customers. Our strong capabilities are to develop big data applications and business solutions using the cloud technology. We have also written a book around Big Data tilted ‘Learning Big Data With Amazon Elastic MapReduce’. We are a technology oriented company and proud of our strong technology DNA. We believe in fast delivery of business value to the customers using cloud as a platform. The difference we bring to the table is that we have some of our core IP in this area. We have our own platform Botmetric. It helps our customers to have better availability, services and better SLAs while running the applications. Since we are a very small company we also have the agility and we grow very fast with our customers. Traditionally, IT service companies have been doing projects using multi year delivery schedules, while our approach has been to do it in few months to quickly test out things to validate business assumptions. By using cloud for business, you can experiment more often as cost of failure is low and cloud can help it sustain if there is significant adoption or growth” he added.

Cloud adoption in SMBs

Undoubtedly, SMBs are the first to move to the cloud. Today, most of the tech companies start with cloud as a default option. They come to us saying how they can use and scale it better. The large enterprises are using cloud for solving specific application problems.

Out of our portfolio, datacenter migration and managed services have the large adoption and we want to grow our BI and big data services. One of the challenges while tapping large customers is that large companies in India do not want their data to be located outside India. As Amazon announced to launch it in India, we expect it will drive the consumption. We will be highly focused on the large customers.

Role of AWS in the growth of Minjar

Sharing its partnership, Rayapati said, “Our experience is amazing with Amazon. We started as a small company but with the Amazon partners network program team we have grown phenomenally. The program helped us in pitching to the large enterprise customers jointly and growing our base outside India. As a company, we are growing very fast. My sense is, we are still scratching the surface as IT is a fairly huge industry and cloud is fundamentally shifting it. We think it will take another 3-5 years for cloud to become mainstream for all businesses. Today, for startups Cloud is the default option.”

Expansion Plans

As Minjar is looking to expand its bandwidth to large companies, it has started adding seasoned IT services people from Cisco, Micorland, GE and Cognizant. It is building functional expertise to solve CRM and email and collaborations services. It will be adding 40 more headcount and improving and delivery efficiency capabilities. This AWS channel partner has set a vision to become $100 million cloud services company in the next five years.