'Digital Expertise To Pave SMEs In New Normal Amid COVID-19'

Elasticity is built into public cloud infrastructure, which enables end-users to scale their workloads up or down with few clicks. DigitalOcean serves SMEs and individual developers with a global presence of 12 data centers around the world.

Discussing various contemporary aspects of digital technologies among SME sector, in a candid conversation with Faiz Askari of SMEStreet, Prabhakar Jayakumar- Global Head: Go-To-Market at DigitalOcean highlighted some interesting insights. Here are edited excerpts:

• What is the present market scenario amid Covid-19 pandemic? What is the state of digital transformation among the Indian SMEs? Which sectors are driving the market for cloud computing aggressively and why?

Cloud is the backbone for most of the new-age tech businesses.  Given the increase in people working from home and the lockdown situation across the country, businesses in the domains of e-commerce, video streaming, gaming and ed-tech to name a few are seeing significant growth in their customer base and as an extension, there is the increased usage of cloud infrastructure to keep up with the growing demand they are seeing in their businesses. 

Elasticity is built into public cloud infrastructure, which enables end-users to scale their workloads up or down with few clicks. DigitalOcean serves SMEs and individual developers with a global presence of 12 data centers around the world. This combination of our infrastructure scale, advanced capacity planning and targeted customer mix has allowed our end-users to scale their applications without any issues. 

• What is DigitalOcean’s unique value proposition? 

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. This way, businesses can use their developers to power their digital transformation projects and bring their business ideas to life, rather than have them focus on the infrastructure heavy-lifting which is made simple and intuitive by DigitalOcean. 

• What are the competitive advantages of DigitalOcean?

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 and small-and-medium businesses (SMBs). 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 & SMBs deploying and scaling their applications 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. 

We empower developers and SMBs around the world to build amazing things, and our robust, affordable, and simple infrastructure is making the cloud more accessible than ever.

• How is COVID impact on Digital Ocean's business? 

Most of the applications such as video and audio streaming and real-time communication whose usage has spiked in the Covid-19 environment are bandwidth-intensive. Bandwidth costs on most cloud platforms can be substantial and constitute a significant portion of a customer’s cloud computing costs. 

DigitalOcean has proven especially popular with companies developing network-intensive apps because we charge only ~10-20% of what other clouds do for bandwidth. The savings can easily add up to hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars for apps that require large scale.