An exclusive interview with IT.Voice Mr.Prabhakar Jayakumar, Country Director, India – DigitalOcean.reveals his strategies for business in India .
Nisha Harshwal:-Can you please elaborate on the journey of DigitalOcean India?
Mr.Prabhakar Jayakumar:-DigitalOcean launched its first datacenter in India (12th datacenter globally) in Bangalore in June 2016. Over the past 20+ months, India has become DigitalOcean’s fastest growing international market. Globally, DigitalOcean has more than one million users and supports tens of thousands of engineering teams who rely on DigitalOcean to run their workloads.
As a company, we are focused on collaborating and contributing to developer communities around the world. In the same spirit, we have driven several activities ranging from workshops, hackathons, coding contests, webinars and conferences to engage with the developer community in India.
Our meetup chapters are operational across more than 10 cities in India and the local developer communities use this forum to share best practices and learn from subject matter experts on a wide array of technical topics, including but not limited to Cloud and Devops. Our signature Tide conference has become a platform for developers & startups to connect, network, and engage with influencers, mentors, and VCs in the tech ecosystem.
To engage with students, outside of the student-only hackathons and programming contests we also organize a “Product-a-thon” contest named Campus Champ. This contest is targeted at university students with a focus on identifying and recognizing the best student engineers across colleges in India. The contest saw enthusiastic participation from student teams across Universities in India.
Hatch is DigitalOcean’s global incubator program designed to support startups as they launch and scale. This includes access to DigitalOcean’s cloud for 12 months, free technical training, mentorship, priority support, and an opportunity to connect with other startups, accelerators, and investors. As part of Hatch, we have forged partnerships with key players in the ecosystem to support startups in their portfolios (including top-tier accelerators such as NUMA, incubators such as Nasscom 10K startups, VCs such as Accel, SAIF Partners and government-run initiatives such as the Startup India program).
Nisha Harshwal:-What is your present focus of operations in India?
Mr.Prabhakar Jayakumar:-DigitalOcean is 100% focused on what tools developers and engineering teams love to use. With millions of unique visitors every month and one of the most comprehensive libraries of open source resources in the industry, DO has invested heavily in building an active and engaged community of users.
Our solutions focus on high availability, storage, security, and networking and we are always iterating to improve our products so engineering teams can innovate faster. Our infrastructure is used by teams and companies building innovative, next generation businesses on the cloud, across multiple industries, including e-commerce, adtech, healthcare and financial services.
DigitalOcean is focused on doing the heavy-lifting on the infrastructure side, and our simple, performant, feature-rich cloud platform enables developers channelize their energies on building applications that solve real customer problems. Globally, companies like Gitlab, Cloudways, Task Rabbit and Docker use DO, while in India, DigitalOcean customers include high growth companies such as NoBroker, Oyo Rooms, Coverfox and Delhivery.
Nisha Harshwal:-What kind of strategy have you planned to position DigitalOcean product successfully in the market in future?
Mr.Prabhakar Jayakumar:-DigitalOcean is closing the massive gap between platform providers and the 30 million developers who want freedom from infrastructure headaches, so they can focus on writing code. DigitalOcean was founded to give developers a simple, elegant and secure platform to build, deploy and scale any application in the cloud.
When DigitalOcean launched in 2012, other cloud providers were neglecting the software developer. Prices were too high, the offerings were too complex to navigate, and the UI was unnecessarily complex. DigitalOcean creates simple and elegant solutions for software developers deploying and scaling theirapplications in the cloud at the best price-to-performance value. From inception through the entire product development process, we are obsessed with the user experience, which includes everything from the UI / UX to having a transparent pricing model.
Nisha Harshwal:-How is the Indian market responding to your products and offerings specially the B and C Class cities?
Mr.Prabhakar Jayakumar:-DigitalOcean gives developers better software and tools to launch and scale any application in the cloud. By offering the simplest platform, the most transparent pricing, and an elegant user interface, we reduce complexity, so developers can build great software – faster.
India is the fastest growing international market for DigitalOcean. Our value proposition of simplicity, transparent pricing and robust performance resonates with the Indian developer as much as it does for their counterparts in other parts of the globe.
Nisha Harshwal:-What is the prime focus of DigitalOcean today?
Mr.Prabhakar Jayakumar:-As a company that predominantly consists of software developers, we understand and empathize with the pain points of the developer community. When we launched in 2012, we found a market gap that had to be addressed. Developers wanted to be relieved of the burdens around infrastructure management and have the complexity of wrestling with complicated bills and unwieldy API’s removed from their development process. We focus on doing the heavy-lifting on the infrastructure side, letting developers channelize their energies on building applications that solve real customer problems.
We will continue to focus on building tools individual developers and engineering teams love to use and build the most active and engaged community possible. We have a number of important capabilities that will be launched in the months ahead that will further meet the high availability, data storage, security, and networking needs of our customers.
Nisha Harshwal:-What is your vision for next five years?
Mr.Prabhakar Jayakumar:-DigitalOcean’s peer group is not legacy cloud providers. It is an aggressive new breed of developer-focused software companies such as Twilio, GitHub and Stripe who are focused on reducing complexity and building great products that developers love to use and recommend to their peers.
