01732 759725 15 magazine INTERVIEW continue to innovate with their own silicon chips (Graviton). They have a better price/performance ratio than third party silicon, which is driving down the price of compute for AWS customers. In your opinion, how has the cloud industry evolved postCOVID? Do you feel growth has stagnated? KR: Covid was a huge shot in the arm (pun intended) for the cloud industry, creating a significant acceleration in cloud adoption as businesses strived to remain online during the pandemic. While the press may be jumping on topline growth deceleration in the cloud industry, there is a bit of a post-pandemic reset going on, where businesses are seeking to optimise their cloud spend, which the vendor and partner ecosystems are doing their best to help with. Rapid adoption led to suboptimal setups which are now being optimised. Customers are leveraging better purchasing plans, optimising their compute and moving to lower cost, more cloudnative technologies. In my opinion, it’s not that cloud adoption is slowing, it’s that customers are getting better at optimising their costs. Some estimates state that only 10-20% of all IT workloads are currently in the cloud, so there is still a huge amount of market potential. How do you think the cloud industry will grow and develop in the coming years? What do you see as the biggest challenges? KR: The cloud industry will continue to grow by tapping into the latent market potential that still exists for traditional IaaS and PaaS services, while innovating and offering more value-added services to both new and existing customers around data, artificial Intelligence and machine learning. I don’t think we’ll see a significant shift away from the skills and experience to become a partner – it’s not the case that just anyone can sign up. There is a lot less risk involved in working with an AWS Partner with demonstrable skills and expertise. How does AWS compare to other cloud solutions? And why did you decide to specialise in this area? KR: AWS is by far the market leader in both overall market share for cloud services and in the breadth and depth of its portfolio. AWS has been built from the ground up by developers, for developers. Many of the developers and engineers I speak with much prefer working with AWS because of the user experience, whether that is via the AWS Console or command line. Customers buy into AWS for these reasons. Conversely, we have found that many businesses buy into the services of AWS competitors because it makes commercial sense for the business due to existing licensing or advertising spend, which can be converted or applied to cloud infrastructure spend, and not because those cloud infrastructure services are the best tools for the job. How do you think AWS will continue to evolve in the coming years and what benefits will this bring to businesses utilising the solution? KR: Data and Artificial Intelligence are the two major focus areas right now for the evolution of AWS. AWS are leading the way in driving business insights from unstructured data, which will help businesses to serve customers in ways they had not previously considered. AI technology will also help to improve and streamline business processes, enabling developers to develop faster and businesses to accelerate their innovation. In addition to this, AWS ‘Big 3’ vendors any time soon, but as we’ve seen in this industry before, nothing lasts forever. It will certainly be interesting to see what comes next. The monopoly position of the big 3 is definitely starting to raise some eyebrows. Logicata has achieved impressive growth over the last few years. What has been the secret to your success? KR: Logicata’s success has been due to our laser focus on what we deliver for our clients. We have 100% customer retention in our AWS Managed Services customer base – we listen to our customers and ensure that we are continuing to add value. We also have 100% staff retention and strive to make Logicata a fun, inclusive and flexible working environment where our team can bring their whole self to work and develop their skills to continue to delight our customers. That retention of customers and staff leads to long-term working relationships between Logicata and its clients, which really delivers value. We’re also selective about who we choose to work with. The customer/supplier relationship needs to work both ways, and it’s important for us to continue to enjoy what we do. What is next for Logicata? KR: Logicata is looking to continue our growth trajectory by finding more customers to help and developing more ways in which we can help them. Right now, we focus on infrastructure management for our customers, but our strong software development pedigree enables us to extend our management services higher up the application stack. Ultimately, we want to help as many businesses as possible to optimise their cloud infrastructure, ensuring that their products and services remain available, scalable, secure and compliant.
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