Cloud4C’s Journey 
to Becoming a Visionary 
in Gartner Magic Quadrant

It’s 2021, the year of reboot, revival and restoration. A year that is increasingly being defined by the rise of cloud-native applications and containerization in the public cloud. And, it couldn’t be a better time to announce that Cloud4C is recognised in the Gartner Magic Quadrant report this year! The much-anticipated Magic Quadrant for Public Cloud IT Transformation Services¹ is out, and we are absolutely thrilled and elated to share that Cloud4C has been positioned as a Visionary.

What does it mean to be a Visionary in Gartner Magic Quadrant? By definition, a Visionary in the Magic Quadrant is the one who understand where the market is going or have a vision for changing market rules, but yet to execute well. In this report, Gartner assessed 16 managed service providers (MSP) across 15 criteria encompassing the ability to execute and completeness of vision.

Gartner Magic Quadrant for Public Cloud IT Transformation Services

According to Gartner, “providers in this cloud managed services market offer solutions designed to deliver transformational IT outcomes via cloud-native professional and managed services built exclusively from public hyperscale cloud infrastructure and platform services. Organizations seeking to use public clouds like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and other “hyperscale” platforms engage with providers in this market to get the greatest transformational benefits from cloud services.”

The story behind the recognition- Our opinion

“Mean time to repair is so archaic.”
That’s how the idea of transforming MTTR or the time to remediate was first conceived at Cloud4C. In today’s technology-driven world of instant gratification, complex environments, distributed systems, real-time developments, and ultra-fast transactions flowing across the stack, being faster in solving issues is not only better but crucial more than ever. Just a 3.7 seconds delay can cause a lost sale. Remember the saying, “if you ain’t first, you’re last?”

Modern IT infrastructure, whether deployed in the data center or consumed in the public cloud, demands minimal manual intervention and routine administration as compared to its legacy equivalents. Modern systems have two dimensions changing constantly and simultaneously - applications like microservices or continuous development and ephemeral behavior of infrastructure like containers, elastic, serverless, etc. To keep pace with the changes, modern organizations can no longer afford the simple way of responding to incidents i.e. sense, categorize, respond. Enter predictive and ‘preventive healing’.

Figure 1: The evolution of incident response from novel to emergent.

As a company handling mission-critical workloads for more than 4,000 enterprises worldwide, we help augment their heterogeneous and complex technology environments through an optimized delivery model, supported by robust processes such as ITIL, ITSM, CoBIT, our proprietary service delivery processes backed by SLAs. However, we wanted to go over and beyond those standards, ensure that any best practice we deploy for a certain company is being adapted to all the other customers.

With this vision, we designed SHOP, our home-grown low code Self-Healing Operations Platform that is built to integrate various tools and platforms required to deliver managed services to enterprises. The fundamental objective of SHOP is to bring dozens of diverse operational platforms and tools including auto-remediation and self-healing onto a single system. By doing so, customers are able to manage the infrastructure and applications through a single pane of glass while gaining a holistic view of their environments. The platform improves engineers’ efficiency while also allowing engineers with less experience to handle more complex tasks.

Our approach

In order to transform incident response as well as our managed services, we took the path of industrialization. The progressive transformation happened through shared services and our home-grown single platform, SHOP, that brings all other operational platforms and tools together. We have an API factory, UI factory, SOP warehouse, and more that are part of SHOP, which operate through loosely coupled but tightly integrated APIs. With SHOP, delivering end-to-end managed services becomes faster and more effective and holistic as the platform provides complete visibility from order entry to end-customer reporting. Everything is connected and operated through this home-grown platform.

Ethos that set SHOP apart

SHOP, the autonomous remedying platform with efficiency in its DNA, instantly improved operational efficiency by 33%, engineering efficiency by 50% and we witnessed saw a 50% outage reduction for all the 4000+ customers we have. While other managed cloud service providers try to differentiate with the number of resources certified on cloud we started showcasing our competitive edge around real-time reporting, optimization, automation in the entire lifecycle, and more.

Predictive & Preventive

By using clustering and regression models, SHOP can predict any anomalies that might lead to outages in a system, making sure they are quickly dealt even before they occur.

Collective Knowledge

SHOP is also a full-stack infrastructure and Business Activity Monitoring solution that enables a 360-degree view of all the data relevant to flagging early warnings and issues that might occur.

Situational Awareness

SHOP collects all contextual data at the time of the anomaly to present relevant root cause scenarios enabling coherent and complete repossess.

Remedial & Autonomous

Our home-grown ML engine ensures the best possible remedial action suitable to the problem and the system.

What’s next?

We believe that this recognition in this highly competitive world of cloud managed services wouldn’t be possible without the unmatched dedication, commitment and support of our world-class team of public cloud experts as well as the trust of our partners and patrons.

Today, as we are excited beyond words to receive this recognition, our commitment to continue delivering the best-in-industry public cloud transformation services grows stronger than ever.

Cloud4C’s future vision is 3 pronged

1. To have minimum manual intervention while managing even the most critical workloads. Complete autonomy to the customer even while they operate multi-cloud and/or hybrid cloud models.
2. Total transparency and single pane of glass visibility enabled irrespective of the applications, geography, underlying infra.
3. Total commitment to sustainability goals: Carbon neutral and Zero wastage by 2030

Strategy

While customer centric processes are in place, it was evident a unifying platform would make the implementation possible. Hence, the SHOP conceptualization and roll-out. Next step would be making the self-learning engine stronger so that the accuracy of prediction is high and the repair sequences are done with no manual intervention.

¹Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Public Cloud IT Transformation Services, Mark Ray, Tobi Bet, David Groombridge, Craig Lowery, DD Mishra, William Maurer, 2 August 2021

Disclaimer:

Gartner, Research Methodologies- Magic Quadrant, as on 24th August 2021.

Gartner Press Release, Gartner Forecasts Worldwide Public Cloud End-User Spending to Grow 23% in 2021, April 21, 2021.

This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document.

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