Headquartered in New York City, DigitalOcean provides cloud infrastructure and platform-as-a-service solutions. With data centers worldwide, DigitalOcean offers developers cloud services that help to deploy and scale applications that run simultaneously on multiple computers. Jeffrey Giannetti, Chief Customer Officer at DigitalOcean and Prabhakar Jayakumar, Country Director, India have shared their views about their USP, Channel Partners, team, Date Centers and go-to-market strategy.
Jeffrey Giannetti, depicts DigitalOcean as a public cloud company focused on the next generation developer. DigitalOcean is providing simple price competitive solutions for infrastructure-as-a-service as developers build the next generation applications, with the USP of simplicity, community, service and predictable pricing.
Jeffrey remarks, “66% of our business is outside the United States. Two thirds of our business is outside North America and largely following access to the community is where we find our customers. Now we are focused primarily on developers, and small web agencies. We are now expanding and building a go to market to pursue SMEs and have recently built a solution partner program, where we are recruiting resellers who come in and will make DigitalOcean available to their clients, or it will run or their service will run on top of Ä«DigitalOcean infrastructure.”
India market strategy
DigitalOcean marks its presence with 12 data centers across the world and a small team in each data center. Prabhakar Jayakumar, Country Director, India opens up his mind about its products and services, community service, open source and India Business.
Prabhakar asserts, “The other cloud providers focus on the enterprise and create vendor lock-ins with a push for additional DevOps processes. We as a company, keep the developers at the core of what we are trying to do. We continue to create our products and services mirrored around simplicity, community service and open source, which makes life a lot easier. Our focus is that our solution should be so intuitive that developers should emphasize on converting their ideas into actual business applications, and leave all the infrastructure heavy lifting to an infrastructure provider like us. So our key differentiation is to focus on the developers, while everybody else is focused on the enterprise segment.”
With a little over three years’ experience in India, DigitalOcean’s channel growth has been organic. The community what they have built, the tutorials, the local community chapters, have been great. It helps the developers to learn not just about their brand, but also learn about technology, and open tools.
Prabhakar says, “In fact, the community is one of the biggest drivers of new users into the platform. We used the traditional channel to grow our awareness in the market. We are now building an outbound sales team as well as a solution Partner Program, For the channel partner ecosystem, we are setting them up with tools and services that enable them to go and sell DigitalOcean into the market. When we are going and building an outbound sales team or solution Partner Program, it effectively enabled us to create a channel partner ecosystem. We are able to tap into the existing portals as well as the portals they would sign up. We are enabling them with tools and required services that they can go and sell DigitalOcean into.”
Partner Strategy
On the company's Partner Strategy, Jeffrey comments, “Just within the last few months here in India, we have added a customer success manager. We have a position open for systems engineer, who will provide technical support to the sales team or to the go to market team. We just recently hired a channel manager here in India. Also recruiting additional partners, who will have some type of business running on top of DigitalOcean and then resell DigitalOcean to their clients. For the first time, we have a requisition open for a sales resource that will recruit new small business customers to DigitalOcean. So there still will be the organic channel that we have used historically, and creating that affinity and relationship with developers. We are also building more of a traditional go to market motion with sales people and resellers as well.”
“We have now kick-started the reseller partner model in India. Since last three years we have a program called HATCH. Today, we tie up with accelerators, incubators, venture capital firms, not just in the country, but globally. All the startups that are aligned to these kinds of organizations, we enable a bunch of benefits for them through the HATCH program. We give them a year's worth of DigitalOcean Cloud Credits, and these are the startups that are still in the bootstrap mode, potentially, or in series A stage. In terms of just the partner ecosystem for HATCH we have impacted more than 700 startups in the country through the HATCH program.”, shares Prabhakar.
Security
Prabhakar confirms, "The basic building blocks that you would want to think about when you look at security are firewalls. In our case, you have a lot more granular control, as a system administrator, to know which ports are enabling for others to access your systems. So in that way, you are automatically keeping a lot of bad factors out without being immune to those facts. The second one is the cloud firewall that we built in. It is actually a free product, which is again, built in an additional layer of security. The third one is the hardware layer. So we use a lot of tools at our actual server level that keeps a lot of attacks at bay. We also know that because we are not a managed service provider, we will never be able to implement security at an application level. But we give you access to the kind of best tutorials and best practices that you can read from guides and as a system administrator go back and implement those practical applications.”
As a Key Differentiator
Prabhakar feels that DigitalOcean will come as a fresh air to its customers. “With DigitalOcean users are actually making a lot of time available for the developers and system administrators to focus on other things in the business than having DevOps. So the workforce is getting more productive. Secondly the transparency and simplicity that we built in the pricing automatically translates into cost savings for customers as a business. The third one is the community that we have built around ourselves, makes customer interact with others and learn technology. It is not just open to DigitalOcean customers, but everybody else, irrespective of what they do. These are great forums for people to come and learn things on open source,” he concludes.
