Cloud computing is one of the major cutting-edge technologies that can transform the workplace for any kind of organization. It is known as the on-demand availability of different computer system resources as well as data storage without any direct management. There are different kinds of clouds for enterprises such as public, private, multi, and hybrid for efficient services through IaaS, SaaS, and PaaS. The global cloud computing market size is estimated to hit US$791.48 billion in 2028 with a CAGR of 17.9%.

Here is an exclusive interview with Bhavesh Goswami, Founder and CEO, CloudThat, who elaborated on the strength of cloud computing and how CloudThat is elevating its brand while offering top-notch cloud computing services to its powerful and popular clients.

1. With what mission and objectives, the company was set up? In short, tell us about your company's journey since its inception.

I  had a challenging beginning in my career journey where I was working for AWS and Microsoft cloud divisions in the US. With a  rich experience of working on Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) development, cosmos management, cloud storage, and big data computational engine in the initial stage, I returned to India in 2011 with dreams of contributing to the technology front in his domain of expertise. By then in India, the IT ecosystem was not geared up to run the businesses on cloud platforms. Even IT giants like Wipro, TCS, and others did not have a separate cloud division.

While on the other hand, AWS was launching 1000 major features a year. So, I realized the pressing need to build a cloud computing ecosystem in India by empowering the IT workforce and fresh graduates to be skilled and competent for taking up the emerging challenges in the cloud sphere.

Thus, CloudThat was incepted in 2012 as the first-ever cloud training and consulting organization in India with the vision of enabling people and businesses to be future-ready and future-secure. Since then, the company has been operational to gear up organizations and their workforce to the rapidly changing demands of cloud and other niche technologies.

We are proud of its accomplishments in these over nine years of journey as it is the first Indian organization to initiate cloud training for professionals. In this path, our team has trained more than 400K professionals, delivered over 200 projects, and facilitated more than 350 cloud certifications on a global front by serving in over 28 countries.

2. How is Machine Learning (ML) shaping the IT/big data/robotics industry today? How is it changing the role of CIOs and leaders?

Still, many major companies are relying on old-school-style data analysis tools like spreadsheets. This is a definite hindrance to process massive amounts of data.

The modern data landscape involves processing a huge amount of data. The most challenging task for humans is handling and analyzing such huge-sized data. Machine learning platforms on cloud-like Azure machine learning service and AWS SageMaker, leverage cloud and ease the process of big data analytics with precise decision-making algorithms.

The current digital transformation spree witnessed across the industry sectors is undoubtedly driven by machine learning. This makes the CIOs and leaders embrace machine collaborated intelligence and introduce human-machine partnership models to enhance the decision-making process.

For example, emerging banks are replacing human loan officers with AI models to predict credit scores and disbursement of loans, and they have proven to be efficient than traditional banks as human bias is eliminated. Similarly, AI models are used in stock trading, medicine, designing, marketing, and all spheres of business.

3. Tell us how CloudThat as a cloud company is contributing to the IoT/AI/big data analytics/robotics/self-driving vehicles/cloud computing industry of the nation and how the company is benefiting the clients.

Being a pioneer to start training on AWS and Azure cloud platforms in India, the cloud certification training is delivered to date to over 400K professionals on niche technologies like Cloud, AI, IoT, DevOps, and cybersecurity.

The data available to the team depicts that there is a huge scarcity of certified Cloud and AI/ML professionals in India. Though approximately six lakh cloud professionals are there in India, only 3.7 Lakh professionals are certified in one cloud platform and only 85,000 professionals are certified on top cloud platforms. This data clearly depicts the need to create a greater number of skilled and competent cloud professionals.

CloudThat has served more than 200 corporates to upskill their employees and build a robust and sound technical ecosystem across the globe. As a part of enabling the talents at the grassroots level, the team has imparted training for one million students on artificial intelligence through a partnership educational program called AI classroom series in association with Microsoft and NASSCOM.

Further, cloud trainers are all industry-certified with real-world exposure to cloud environments. They relentlessly work to strengthen the cloud computing ecosystem by training a bigger number of professionals to get certified and join the workforce. Through proven expertise in consultancy services, the company is enabling organizations to possess best-in-industry cloud infrastructure facilities.

4. What is your biggest USP that differentiates CloudThat from its competitors?

Training and consultancy have been two primary objectives since the day of inception. The strength is delivering quality training and consultancy services through experienced and certified trainers and creating a larger pool of talented professionals in the emerging technology realm like cloud, IoT, DevOps, AI/ML, security, and data analytics.

As the first organization to delve into cloud training in India, CloudThat provides a training curriculum aligned with the industry needs. The training fraternity ensures that the industries approaching the team for upskilling their workforce receive sculpted project-ready professionals at the end of these training programs.

Our team ensures that learners are delivered quality service by partnering with industry stalwarts for various niche technologies. The company is an authorized learning partner for AWS and Microsoft gold partners. Being a seasoned campaigner and offering consulting services to leading Fortune 500 companies, it gives the edge in understanding client pain points with clarity. This in turn enables to have all training programs in alignment with industry expectations.

The international presence with serving clients from over 28 countries has won the company many laurels, to mention few CloudThat is the winner of the Microsoft Asia Superstar Campaign for India 2021 for imparting the highest number of training, recognized as Microsoft Learning Partner of the Year Finalist-2020, and rewarded as Microsoft Learning Partner of the Year Award 2017.

Most importantly it is a strong over 200 team of industry-certified trainers and consultants that ensure the company is ready for any challenging assignments coming from enterprises.   

5. How is IoT/big data/AI/robotics evolving today in the industry as a whole? What are the most important trends that you see emerging across the globe?

According to NASSCOM reports, the demand for AI and other emerging technology professionals was 140K and the available workforce was 78Kin 2018. The gap between supply and demand was 62K. Now in 2021, the demand is for 230K resources, and the availability is 90K. The shortage is 140K. These statistics clearly depict the widening gap between demand and supply of skilled workforce.

As Gartner reports, AI will create 2.3 million jobs and eliminate 1.8 million jobs. A statistic emphasizes that reskilling the workforce is of paramount importance in the current scenario and is the need of the hour.

Also, IoT, big data, AI, and robotics will work in tandem in the coming days. Each of these technological realms will complement each other and are changing the technology space.

IoT in healthcare has taken rapid strides in real-time health monitoring and diagnostics. Also, significant developments are witnessed in hospital and pharma management.

The retail industry has gathered steam by embracing IoT, big data, and AI-driven developments. In this sector, intelligent aisles and self-serve kiosks are built to analyze the time spent by the customers on the shopping floor and to gather customer-specific data to understand shopping patterns.

The enterprises are moving towards edge computing transferring the computation workload of data analytics to the IoT devices instead of the centralized cloud.

The manufacturing industry enfolds emerging IoT and AI trends through automation of quality control and other production activities.

The self-learning AI-driven autonomous cars operated via smartphones has redefined the automobile industry.

6. How can businesses efficiently extract the value from data, without increasing cost and complexity?

I believe that businesses need not be over ambitious in embracing data analytics methods. They can take up the challenge of becoming a data-driven organization by taking smaller and achievable steps.

For instance, a B2C business rendering subscription services— one can leverage the benefits of data analytics by analyzing data to identify the customers who are keen on unsubscribing from services. By identifying those customers who are looking forward to stopping their association, one can come up with strategies to retain them. This can be a starting point for making the organization data-analytics driven and ensure minimal investment for data-driven strategies.

Data analytics success primarily relies on how clean the data extraction process is. No matter how efficient data analytics algorithms the Garbage-in-Garbage-out principle is applicable to the data analytics sphere too.

Businesses should ensure data is clean, privacy and compliance standards are met. Importantly, organizations can always ensure minimal cost is incurred by upskilling the existing workforce on handling data precisely and accurately.

7. How is CloudThat contributing to the growth and transformation of analytics and big data education?

Our team realized the need for equipping the workforce and new generation with the rapidly evolving technology innovations and incepted CloudThat. In this challenging journey, it has partnered with Microsoft, AWS, and Google and is constantly thriving to bridge the gap existing between supply and demand for data analytics and big data professionals. The courses help in reskilling and upskilling of workforce with industry certifications on data analytics and data management like Exam DA-100: Analyzing Data with Microsoft Power BI and Exam DP-300: Administering Relational Databases on Microsoft Azure.

The current success of training one million students on AI technologies through AI classroom series educational program in association with Microsoft and NASSCOM and the rise in demand for big data professionals have helped to envision a new project of training one million students on big data and analytics stream as the next goal.

Importantly, as the training process is always aligned with the industry's demands, CloudThat delivers training that equips the workforce of tomorrow to be industry-ready.

8. Mention some of the awards, achievements, recognitions, and clients' feedback that you feel are notable and valuable for the company.

The efforts have always been appreciated and recognized globally. The mission to deliver best-in-industry training and consultancy services has won accolades and partnerships with leading Cloud providers like Microsoft, AWS, and Google. Prominent ones include the winners of the Microsoft Asia Superstar Campaign for India 2021, recognized as Global Microsoft Learning Partner of the Year Finalist 2020, rewarded as Microsoft Learning Partner of the Year Award 2017, recognized Microsoft Gold partner, recognized AWS Advanced consulting partner, and Authorized Training partner.

The client testimonials speak for accomplishments during this exciting journey of more than nine years. The company receives appreciation for technology enabling services from all segments of the industry for services.

The feedback was given by Mandar Jamble, Sr. Software Engineer from General Electric sums up the competency of trainers for their ability to think from a developer, an entrepreneur, and a system administrator perspective.

Similarly, Sandeep Singla, Lead Client Architect, from Unisys applauds the training fraternity for relating real-world concepts to classroom teaching.

Chandan B from Tila.com, a startup eCommerce company, praises the efficient consultancy services rendered for deploying, managing, monitoring, available, scalable, and fault-tolerant microarchitecture on AWS.

So, it can be proudly said that in India and on the global front very few learning partners would have trained over 400K learners. Our clientele includes professionals from all the major IT companies in India like TCS, Wipro, and HCL. Product pioneers like Philips, Intuit, and top-notch management consultancy firms like Mckinsey and PwC are proud clients.

Concisely, I can say of the 100 top IT companies in the world, most of them are clients of CloudThat.