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Aditi Technologies:Betting Big on Cloud

Pradeep Rathinam, CEO

SiliconIndia B School Survey 2012“WHAT IF NOT IIM’s”

Supplement

The Smart Tech ie |16|J a n u a r y 2 0 1 2

cover st ry

“There are two galestorms coming ourway that will changehow technology in-

vestments are planned and executed.‘Cloud and consumerization of IT’will transform how customers think oftheir IT and service providers rebuildtheir business models. We are bettingthe company that this will happen inthe next three years. And we want tobe the #1 cloud service provider onplatform as a service.” The convictionand passion is palpable in the voice ofPradeep Rathinam, CEO at Aditi tech-nologies. Six months of manic activ-ity, triggered by the acquisition of

Cumulux, a full marathon and a 23city cloud technology roadshow withMicrosoft and his customers are ask-ing for more. He has good reasons tobet the fortunes of Aditi on the cloud. Aditi Technologies has always

been a contrarian in a fairly homoge-nous Indian IT services sector. Whenthe Indian IT services market waschasing Y2K deals, Aditi instead fo-cused on building the first ‘made inIndia’ product. Years later, when largescale commodity services like enter-prise application maintenance waspropelling unheard of growth, it choseto focus on niche high value skills likeuser experience, program manage-

ment and product development forISV. The focus on emerging technol-ogy and paradigms has played outvery differently for Aditi. It has re-mained in the mid-size bracket butclients regularly turn to them when anew paradigm emerge which requiresserious technology depth. Today, theworld’s largest ISV, largest insurancecompany, largest gaming company,largest information services provider,largest mobile carrier and secondlargest social network count them astheir R&D innovation partner. And theemergence of cloud provides the per-fect platform for an innovationblitzkrieg.

By Vimali Swamy

How an Innovator isCutting through theclutter with Cloud

Pradeep RathinamCEO, Aditi Technologies

The Smart Tech ie |16|J a n u a r y 2 0 1 2

cover st ry

“There are two galestorms coming ourway that will changehow technology in-

vestments are planned and executed.‘Cloud and consumerization of IT’will transform how customers think oftheir IT and service providers rebuildtheir business models. We are bettingthe company that this will happen inthe next three years. And we want tobe the #1 cloud service provider onplatform as a service.” The convictionand passion is palpable in the voice ofPradeep Rathinam, CEO at Aditi tech-nologies. Six months of manic activ-ity, triggered by the acquisition of

Cumulux, a full marathon and a 23city cloud technology roadshow withMicrosoft and his customers are ask-ing for more. He has good reasons tobet the fortunes of Aditi on the cloud. Aditi Technologies has always

been a contrarian in a fairly homoge-nous Indian IT services sector. Whenthe Indian IT services market waschasing Y2K deals, Aditi instead fo-cused on building the first ‘made inIndia’ product. Years later, when largescale commodity services like enter-prise application maintenance waspropelling unheard of growth, it choseto focus on niche high value skills likeuser experience, program manage-

ment and product development forISV. The focus on emerging technol-ogy and paradigms has played outvery differently for Aditi. It has re-mained in the mid-size bracket butclients regularly turn to them when anew paradigm emerge which requiresserious technology depth. Today, theworld’s largest ISV, largest insurancecompany, largest gaming company,largest information services provider,largest mobile carrier and secondlargest social network count them astheir R&D innovation partner. And theemergence of cloud provides the per-fect platform for an innovationblitzkrieg.

By Vimali Swamy

How an Innovator isCutting through theclutter with Cloud

Pradeep RathinamCEO, Aditi Technologies

Cloud services are still at a rela-tive infancy. Most companies havebeen considering cloud services andthe early movers have around 20 oddcloud implementations for customers.In contrast, Aditi has worked withover 67 clients and notched up an im-pressive 100 cloud engagements overthe past three years. Rathinam’s goalto be the #1 PaaS solution provider iswell under way. Fuelling this break-out are two key leverages: a close re-

lationship with Microsoft and addi-tion of Cumulux to the fold. Cumuluxis one of the top 3 Microsoft cloudservice company in the world and haswon the Microsoft cloud partner ofthe year.

PaaS pioneers“Emerging technology is core part ofour DNA. Our customers have theirpreferred set of vendors who helpthem ‘run the business’. We focus onhelping our clients ‘change the busi-ness’. We see cloud technologies,specifically platform as a service,change the way businesses will run,”says Vineet Arora – the Chief Archi-tect turned Managing director of thecompany. For context, most cloud im-plementations today are limited tousing cloud as an infrastructure (IaaS)or implementing SaaS products likesalesforce.com. Aditi is betting onthe nascent cloud technology conceptof Platform as a service. Their plat-form of choice — Microsoft Azure. PaaS combines an application

platform with managed cloud infra-structure services. Platforms likeAzure provides an application plat-form for multi tenet cloud environ-ment and spans development, runtimeand management tools and services.Along with Azure, Google app engine(GAE), Force.com., Tibco andCordys, the PaaS space is evolvingrapidly and only a few vendors havedeveloped a services strategy to im-plement Microsoft PaaS. This iswhere Aditi has a considerable firstmover advantage. And the SI playersmight have missed a trick. “For our ISV clients, the cloud,

especially Platform as a Service isemerging as the biggest time to mar-ket accelerator. It is no longer a ques-tion of trying out a proof of concept.It is more of why aren’t we launchingit yet? ” explains Pradeep. One of itsmost recent customers, world’slargest personal finance ISV signedup Aditi to develop a PaaS driven so-

lution to open up its platform to part-ners and extend market reach. ERPvendors are aggressively embracingPaaS to build light weight SaaS ver-sions of their products to unlock mar-kets at lower price points. And beingat the forefront of 65 such clientshave helped Aditi define verticalPaaS solutions, tailored for specificworkloads that are moving to cloud. “Cumulux and Aditi have demon-

strated credibility and excellence inbuilding solutions on Windows Azurefor Microsoft’s ISV and Enterprisecustomers,” said Jenni Flinders, VicePresident for the U.S. Partner Groupat Microsoft. “Cumulux is a valuablepartner for Windows Azure in theecosystem and having them combinewith the scale and depth of Aditi willgive our customers a tremendous op-portunity.” Microsoft is throwing itsweight behind partners like Aditi towin the platform battle in the field.

Cloud OpportunitiesThis year, as more companies aremoving from recession to recovery,ISVs who have stalled new develop-ment and enterprises that had focusedon cost cutting are finding the lure ofcloud irresistible. A survey of over100 CIOs revealed that by 2015, 40percent of respondents plan to spendat least five percent of the their ITbudget on cloud and 21 percent expectto spend close to 10 percent of theirIT budget on this new technologytrend. The cloud was the silver bulletto the CIO’s razor sharp focus on effi-ciency.“We are seeing five core cate-

gories of applications and productsmoving to PaaS. It is still an evolvingmarketplace and our ability to under-stand it and build solutions beforeanyone else in the world will deter-mine our long term success,” addsJohn Schindler – VP of cloud servicesat Aditi. Take the case of

“Restaurant.com”, an online group

buying and rating business for restau-rants. The biggest challenge for thesite: scalability and spiky traffic. Dur-ing weekends, the number of con-sumer using the site used to increaseexponentially. This would in turn trig-ger massive computation spikes in theback end to keep up with the process-ing requests. Customer wait timeswould increase, sometimes culminat-ing in outages and subsequent revenueloss. Here is where the solution frame-

works of Aditi and the WindowsAzure platform come in. Says AdnanAdamji, CIO of Restaurant.com,“Aditi has been invaluable in helpingRestaurant.com implement our cloud-based solution. Their extensive tech-nical depth on Microsoft Azure hasbeen extremely crucial to our suc-cess.”Such testimonials are rare to come

by in the world of cloud services.Most companies are figuring out theplace to start and an ideal solutionprofile. As the markets mature andservice providers get more experienceunder their belts, the implementationconcerns will reduce. As for now,Rathinam and his team are makingsure that the company stays ahead ofthe curve.

Defending the leadAs in any rapidly growing and lucra-tive market, defending the lead can bethe tougher challenge. The competi-tion is getting intense but Aditi is con-fident that 70 percent of its newbusiness would be cloud driven whileat the same time 50 percent of its ex-

isting customers are expected to mi-grate in the next two years.

To retain the lead, the company isputting all its innovation and invest-ment focus on scaling the cloud busi-ness. Some innovations include: 1. Implementing a strict ‘cloud

first’ policy for customer solutions.Every customer, new or old, is of-fered a cloud based architecture firstand only after that, a traditionalmodel is proposed. 2. Building out a cloud delivery

framework, driven by frameworksand best practices abstracted fromover 100 cloud engagements. 3. Ensuring every single devel-

oper in the company is trained to de-liver on cloud opportunities.

Cloud Ninjas“We make an unusual effort to recruitand retain the best talent available inany market. Aditi’s pace in PaaScouldn’t have been sustained just onour IP alone, the true heroes of thestory have been the ‘Cloud Ninjas’who have been constantly innovatingand ensuring delivery of their projectfor each of our customers,” elabo-rates Arora. To make up the ranks ofthe Ninjas, Aditi follows a simplestrategy - recruit one of the top threePaaS architects in each region theyoperate in (they are proud to have arecruitment ratio of 1 out of 114 ap-plicants at all levels). Employees areencouraged to get into cloud codingduels and overnight hackathons witheach others and winners are inductedinto the ‘cloud hall of fame’. LEAD (Learning Engagement

and Development), the employeelearning division of Aditi, methodi-cally ensures that every single devel-oper is hooked on to cloud throughonline treasure hunts, mock customerrole plays and cloud trivia quizzes.For Aditi, Cloud needs to be in theDNA and nothing less would suffice.

Practicing the sermonIn a demonstration of its confidenceon cloud based technologies, Aditi ismoving their entire internal ITecosystem and to cloud. “The reasonis simple”, explains Rathinam, we tellour customers to believe in the cloud.Who could be better placed than us toshow what they can do with thecloud.” Aditi chose to build its solu-tion using Microsoft virtualization

SaaS Enablement forProducts and Pla�orms

Traffic Surge for Digital Computa�onal Scale Applica�onAggrega�on

DeviceConvergence

Move ISV and Enter-prises’ hosted product,pla orms orapplica!ons to PaaS

Help marke!ng, socialand commerce sitesmanages surge in traf-fic and throughput

Extend processingusage beyond capacityto handle massivecomputa!onal surge

Help enterprisesconnect workflowsacross applica!onsAND domains throughhybrid cloud.

Enabling mul!-channelsolu!ons withoutlimita!ons of pla orm,loca!on or device.

We make an unusualeffort to recruit andretain the best talentavailable in anymarket. Aditi’s pacein PaaS couldn’t havebeen sustained just onour IP alone, the trueheroes of the storyhave been the ‘CloudNinjas’– Vineet, MD - Delivery

Cloud andconsumerization ofIT’ will transform howcustomers think oftheir IT and serviceproviders rebuild theirbusiness models. Weare betting thecompany that this willhappen in the next 3years. And we want tobe the #1 cloudservice provider onplatform as a service

- Pradeep RathinamCEO, Aditi Technologies

Scenarios for Cloud adoption

The Smart Tech ie |19|J a n u a r y 2 0 1 2The Smart Tech ie |18|J a n u a r y 2 0 1 2

Cloud services are still at a rela-tive infancy. Most companies havebeen considering cloud services andthe early movers have around 20 oddcloud implementations for customers.In contrast, Aditi has worked withover 67 clients and notched up an im-pressive 100 cloud engagements overthe past three years. Rathinam’s goalto be the #1 PaaS solution provider iswell under way. Fuelling this break-out are two key leverages: a close re-

lationship with Microsoft and addi-tion of Cumulux to the fold. Cumuluxis one of the top 3 Microsoft cloudservice company in the world and haswon the Microsoft cloud partner ofthe year.

PaaS pioneers“Emerging technology is core part ofour DNA. Our customers have theirpreferred set of vendors who helpthem ‘run the business’. We focus onhelping our clients ‘change the busi-ness’. We see cloud technologies,specifically platform as a service,change the way businesses will run,”says Vineet Arora – the Chief Archi-tect turned Managing director of thecompany. For context, most cloud im-plementations today are limited tousing cloud as an infrastructure (IaaS)or implementing SaaS products likesalesforce.com. Aditi is betting onthe nascent cloud technology conceptof Platform as a service. Their plat-form of choice — Microsoft Azure. PaaS combines an application

platform with managed cloud infra-structure services. Platforms likeAzure provides an application plat-form for multi tenet cloud environ-ment and spans development, runtimeand management tools and services.Along with Azure, Google app engine(GAE), Force.com., Tibco andCordys, the PaaS space is evolvingrapidly and only a few vendors havedeveloped a services strategy to im-plement Microsoft PaaS. This iswhere Aditi has a considerable firstmover advantage. And the SI playersmight have missed a trick. “For our ISV clients, the cloud,

especially Platform as a Service isemerging as the biggest time to mar-ket accelerator. It is no longer a ques-tion of trying out a proof of concept.It is more of why aren’t we launchingit yet? ” explains Pradeep. One of itsmost recent customers, world’slargest personal finance ISV signedup Aditi to develop a PaaS driven so-

lution to open up its platform to part-ners and extend market reach. ERPvendors are aggressively embracingPaaS to build light weight SaaS ver-sions of their products to unlock mar-kets at lower price points. And beingat the forefront of 65 such clientshave helped Aditi define verticalPaaS solutions, tailored for specificworkloads that are moving to cloud. “Cumulux and Aditi have demon-

strated credibility and excellence inbuilding solutions on Windows Azurefor Microsoft’s ISV and Enterprisecustomers,” said Jenni Flinders, VicePresident for the U.S. Partner Groupat Microsoft. “Cumulux is a valuablepartner for Windows Azure in theecosystem and having them combinewith the scale and depth of Aditi willgive our customers a tremendous op-portunity.” Microsoft is throwing itsweight behind partners like Aditi towin the platform battle in the field.

Cloud OpportunitiesThis year, as more companies aremoving from recession to recovery,ISVs who have stalled new develop-ment and enterprises that had focusedon cost cutting are finding the lure ofcloud irresistible. A survey of over100 CIOs revealed that by 2015, 40percent of respondents plan to spendat least five percent of the their ITbudget on cloud and 21 percent expectto spend close to 10 percent of theirIT budget on this new technologytrend. The cloud was the silver bulletto the CIO’s razor sharp focus on effi-ciency.“We are seeing five core cate-

gories of applications and productsmoving to PaaS. It is still an evolvingmarketplace and our ability to under-stand it and build solutions beforeanyone else in the world will deter-mine our long term success,” addsJohn Schindler – VP of cloud servicesat Aditi. Take the case of

“Restaurant.com”, an online group

buying and rating business for restau-rants. The biggest challenge for thesite: scalability and spiky traffic. Dur-ing weekends, the number of con-sumer using the site used to increaseexponentially. This would in turn trig-ger massive computation spikes in theback end to keep up with the process-ing requests. Customer wait timeswould increase, sometimes culminat-ing in outages and subsequent revenueloss. Here is where the solution frame-

works of Aditi and the WindowsAzure platform come in. Says AdnanAdamji, CIO of Restaurant.com,“Aditi has been invaluable in helpingRestaurant.com implement our cloud-based solution. Their extensive tech-nical depth on Microsoft Azure hasbeen extremely crucial to our suc-cess.”Such testimonials are rare to come

by in the world of cloud services.Most companies are figuring out theplace to start and an ideal solutionprofile. As the markets mature andservice providers get more experienceunder their belts, the implementationconcerns will reduce. As for now,Rathinam and his team are makingsure that the company stays ahead ofthe curve.

Defending the leadAs in any rapidly growing and lucra-tive market, defending the lead can bethe tougher challenge. The competi-tion is getting intense but Aditi is con-fident that 70 percent of its newbusiness would be cloud driven whileat the same time 50 percent of its ex-

isting customers are expected to mi-grate in the next two years.

To retain the lead, the company isputting all its innovation and invest-ment focus on scaling the cloud busi-ness. Some innovations include: 1. Implementing a strict ‘cloud

first’ policy for customer solutions.Every customer, new or old, is of-fered a cloud based architecture firstand only after that, a traditionalmodel is proposed. 2. Building out a cloud delivery

framework, driven by frameworksand best practices abstracted fromover 100 cloud engagements. 3. Ensuring every single devel-

oper in the company is trained to de-liver on cloud opportunities.

Cloud Ninjas“We make an unusual effort to recruitand retain the best talent available inany market. Aditi’s pace in PaaScouldn’t have been sustained just onour IP alone, the true heroes of thestory have been the ‘Cloud Ninjas’who have been constantly innovatingand ensuring delivery of their projectfor each of our customers,” elabo-rates Arora. To make up the ranks ofthe Ninjas, Aditi follows a simplestrategy - recruit one of the top threePaaS architects in each region theyoperate in (they are proud to have arecruitment ratio of 1 out of 114 ap-plicants at all levels). Employees areencouraged to get into cloud codingduels and overnight hackathons witheach others and winners are inductedinto the ‘cloud hall of fame’. LEAD (Learning Engagement

and Development), the employeelearning division of Aditi, methodi-cally ensures that every single devel-oper is hooked on to cloud throughonline treasure hunts, mock customerrole plays and cloud trivia quizzes.For Aditi, Cloud needs to be in theDNA and nothing less would suffice.

Practicing the sermonIn a demonstration of its confidenceon cloud based technologies, Aditi ismoving their entire internal ITecosystem and to cloud. “The reasonis simple”, explains Rathinam, we tellour customers to believe in the cloud.Who could be better placed than us toshow what they can do with thecloud.” Aditi chose to build its solu-tion using Microsoft virtualization

SaaS Enablement forProducts and Pla�orms

Traffic Surge for Digital Computa�onal Scale Applica�onAggrega�on

DeviceConvergence

Move ISV and Enter-prises’ hosted product,pla orms orapplica!ons to PaaS

Help marke!ng, socialand commerce sitesmanages surge in traf-fic and throughput

Extend processingusage beyond capacityto handle massivecomputa!onal surge

Help enterprisesconnect workflowsacross applica!onsAND domains throughhybrid cloud.

Enabling mul!-channelsolu!ons withoutlimita!ons of pla orm,loca!on or device.

We make an unusualeffort to recruit andretain the best talentavailable in anymarket. Aditi’s pacein PaaS couldn’t havebeen sustained just onour IP alone, the trueheroes of the storyhave been the ‘CloudNinjas’– Vineet, MD - Delivery

Cloud andconsumerization ofIT’ will transform howcustomers think oftheir IT and serviceproviders rebuild theirbusiness models. Weare betting thecompany that this willhappen in the next 3years. And we want tobe the #1 cloudservice provider onplatform as a service

- Pradeep RathinamCEO, Aditi Technologies

Scenarios for Cloud adoption

The Smart Tech ie |19|J a n u a r y 2 0 1 2The Smart Tech ie |18|J a n u a r y 2 0 1 2

The Smart Tech ie |21|J a n u a r y 2 0 1 2The Smart Tech ie |20|J a n u a r y 2 0 1 2

We invest in early to early-growthcompanies that can grow into cat-egory leaders globally. We have

companies based out of Silicon Valley, Indiaand New York, spanning in different sectors,ranging from enterprise software, internet,mobile, digital media, to business and con-sumer services, agricultural logistics, andwater management. Lots of innovation op-portunities exist in every sphere of life,across the globe. We are living in a very rap-idly evolving dynamic world, blessed withseveral emerging technology mega trends.And the best thing in being a start-up in sucha world is that start-ups are best suited toleverage the technology inflection points andcome up with disruptive innovations that canchange the world for the good, big compa-nies often lack the agility. One such major trend is around data

generation and management. Amount ofdata is exploding, mostly unstructured, lead-ing to huge challenges in storing, managing,retrieving, and making meaning out of thatdata. And that is opening up innovative op-portunities across data stack, from storageinfrastructure to data analytics. Then there is cloud adoption, which is

increasing at a tremendous rate, because ofthe benefits related to flexibility, reducedtime to market, on demand scalability, andmanageability. Associated with the benefitsare also the challenges around security, andcontrol. All these are necessitating re-think-ing and re-architecting of enterprise IT andapplications.Social media is growing at a never fore-

seen pace. It is getting omnipresent, as muchin businesses as among consumers. Everybusiness today is looking to leverage socialmedia internally as well as externally to in-crease productivity, engage with audience,enhance brand awareness, service cus-tomers, and respond in real time. Plethora of

start-up opportunities are emerging out ofsocial. Mobility is another such fast changing

paradigm. Smartphones and tablets are lead-ing to transformational user experience andengagement. There are also increasing chal-lenges around managing and supportingmultitude of device types and platforms.There has not been a better time to start com-panies around mobility, whether consumeroriented or targeting business customers.Intersections of above technology trends

are giving rise to even more interesting op-portunities. Offline-online integration is agreat example of the confluence of socialand mobile, that’s changing commerce in abig way, accelerating the changes in waysconsumers discover, browse and transactmerchandises, in offline stores as well as on-line world. Similarly, cloud based technolo-gies, combined with data analytics have thepotential to bring in disruptive changes in in-dustries like the health-care, specifically intelemedicine, drug discovery, or personal-ized medicine. In the emerging markets, en-trepreneurs are leveraging cloud andmobility to bring in transparencies and effi-ciencies even in sectors as basic as agricul-ture. My advice to entrepreneurs is that, do

what you are most passionate about, and goafter solving big problems. Your team isprobably even more important than youridea, the ideas will morph and evolve, butpeople mostly will not. So build an excellentfounding team, with complementary expert-ise, great camaraderie, and steadfast com-mitment to build a great company.

Intersections of Several New AgeTechnologies will be the Future

Nexus Venture Partners is an investorin early growth stage companies acrosssectors in U.S. and India. The firm'sinvestment size ranges up to $10 millionin early-growth stage companies.

By Jishnu BhattacharjeeThe author is Principal, Nexus Venture PartnersVC TALK

and cloud technologies on a Hyper-Vplatform. This move had ensured a 40percent reduction in costs while con-solidating physical servers by 60 per-cent.This sort of complete transition to

a new technology is unprecedented.The transition was so successful thatMicrosoft published a case study onit as a reference for future customers.

Future: Sink or Swim forIndian IT services players The advent of cloud computing isgoing to be an inflection point in In-dian IT services. Traditional serviceslike application and infrastructuremanagement, which accounts for 30 -60 percent of revenue for most play-ers slowly, cease to exist. The comingyears are going to decide who the

game changers are and who the also-ran. Only a few breakthrough playersare going to gain the benefits of thisinflection point. As clouds gather in the horizon,

we are intently watching the transfor-mation that Indian IT services land-scape will undergo. And, we willdefinitely keep an eye on this break-through cloud company