Indian small and medium enterprises are increasingly adopting cloud technologies these days unlike in the past, said Prabodh Vyas, Director and Country Manager, GCR (Global Channel Resources India Pvt. Ltd), in an exclusive interview to SME Times.

Excerpts of the interview...

Please tell our readers about GCR and its entrepreneurial journey.
Prabodh Vyas: Global Channel Resources (GCR) was incubated and founded by Tony Tsao, who has an avid cross-sectional experience of more than three decades in the IT Infrastructure & Cloud Services gamut. He has been a part of major tech giants in countries including Taiwan, Singapore, and Australia to name a few. 

Continuing to have a strong desire to seek more challenging roles, he founded GCR in Singapore with an objective to focus on futuristic technology like IoT, positioning it as a business transformation tool.

His experience helped him to identify the challenges of the IT business, and he decided to formulate a new business model for his new venture. To ensure that the right solution reaches the right customer he modelled GCR as a platform company, which connects the Managed IT Service Providers (MSP) with the Business Transforming IoT Solution Providers (ISV) so as to enable them to offer the best solutions to the end customers. This platform is called the CPSP (Channel Partner Service Portal), an exclusive platform for GCR registered MSP’S.

GCR started its operations in Singapore and its R&D centre in Taiwan. 

After doing an extensive research on the go to market strategy, GCR realised that 43% of the successful IoT companies globally are incubated in India and that motivated GCR to make India as their home market and GCR registered its India operations in March 2018 with its India headquarters in Mumbai and also made GCR India as the Global sourcing hub.

GCR India has an extremely vibrant and experienced team with R&D, Pre-sales, Product Managers, Marketing and also a large Inside and Field Sales Team. GCR within less than six months of its presence in India has more than 150 + registered partners on the platform who have access to 130+ SaaS connected ISV’s and solution providers.

GCR is seeing very good traction in its existence within two quarters in India and has almost created a great value for partners.

Today, GCR offers fully validated SaaS connected vertical specific IoT solutions.

'CPSP, GCR’s first of its kind partner platform is enabling SIs and ISVs for the ultimate end-customer satisfaction' - please elaborate.
Prabodh Vyas: CPSP is GCR’s premium Online Solutions Platform. The registered partners(MSPs) can select and configure customised IoT solutions for their customers. 

The ISVs can partner with GCR to offer their solutions on the GCR CPSP platform.

Before on boarding the solutions, GCRs expert team validates the vendors’ solutions. GCR also offers services like training, digital marketing and pre and post-warranty support and support for POCs and installation.

How your services can be beneficial to industry and MSMEs?
Prabodh Vyas: GCR offers validated IoT solutions from multiple vendors across the globe to its customers. The customers have the option of selecting the best matching solutions to suit their requirement, from a single source, that is GCR.

Please explain about SaaS connected solutions and their benefits.
Prabodh Vyas: Most of the IoT solutions are hosted by GCR and are offered to the customers as SaaS connected solutions which provides simplicity of adopting a solution without worrying about all complexities of implementing it. SaaS connected solutions lower entry barrier for adopting any technology. IoT platforms with AI and ML could be complex in implementation with a higher cost for adoption. However, with new IoT solutions based on a SaaS platform, it allows users to utilise technology at a lower cost.

Users can scale as per their requirements. Users receive better SLAs from SaaS providers, thus lower worries about managing hardware, networking, software and disaster recovery.

Do you think Indian SMEs are lagging behind in adoption of cloud technologies?
Prabodh Vyas: It is true that, in the past, Indian SMEs were having reservations like data security and secrecy in the adoption of cloud-based technologies, but today, cloud-based service providers (SaaS,PaaS, IaaS) have proven their capabilities to end customers by providing higher uptime, better security standards and adopting newer business challenges. This has helped Indian SMEs to adopt Cloud technologies easily. Friction from management has lowered as cloud technology is omnipresent and it is here to stay. 

Please share your future plans with our readers.
Prabodh Vyas: GCR has introduced IoT solutions through SaaS platform for verticals covering Education, Hospitality, Manufacturing, Logistics and Retail. We plan to bring innovative IoT solutions to the Indian market so that consumers can get a taste of the solutions available globally. For easy adaptability, a cloud-based delivery model would be the key. We also plan to introduce IoT solutions in other business verticals as well.