Pitch Off Interview series

DigitalOcean is an American cloud infrastructure platform which is used by developers all over the world. The provider, with its services, aims to simplify the web infrastructure for software developers.

Prabhakar Jayakumar, India Country Head, aligns his role’s responsibilities with DigitalOcean’s vision of empowering software developers and startups. Formerly, he had worked as Head of Seller Marketing at Amazon and was responsible for building as well as marketing Amazon’s business in India.

He also boasts of an entrepreneurial experience as he had co-founded a social networking startup specialising in social commerce space. Here, we bring to you an exclusive interview with Prabhakar –

What is DigitalOcean’s key focus in order to empower startup ecosystem in India, particularly the developer community?

Our goal is to empower developers and software companies around the world to build amazing things, and our robust, affordable, and simple infrastructure is making the cloud more accessible than ever. Today, India is home to the fastest growing ecosystem of startups and entrepreneurs. With the number of software developers throughout India expected to grow to over 5 million by the year 2018, this region is poised to unleash a tremendous amount of innovation in the next decade. We want to be there to support every startup to grow and succeed.

How do you differentiate yourself from other renowned companies specialising in the same domain?

We have always focused on keeping our products simple. The major cloud providers have to focus their energy on large enterprise and legacy companies; we’ve streamlined our platform for next generation companies built in the cloud.

We have also focused on building a true community of developers to help foster the industry and support them as they build the products of the future. Our community site provides extensive tutorials and guides for developers learning to work with Linux and developers seeking to create complex setups within their infrastructure. Along with this, we offer 24X7 support to all of our customers free of charge.

What more can businesses and startups expect from DigitalOcean in the near future?

We would like to help grow and support the innovation landscape in India. We consider ourselves “the startup for startups” – having been through the process ourselves, we know exactly what scaling companies’ needs are. Through our partnerships with relevant stakeholders in the ecosystem (such as the Government, accelerators, incubators and VCs), we enable entrepreneurs in India to create companies and chase their dreams, by lowering cloud infrastructure’s barrier of entry. We assist startups on both technical and non-technical aspects, through one-on-one interactions, workshops, boot camps and mentorship programs.

From a product perspective, we will be introducing capabilities to support larger production workloads and which meet the high availability, data storage, security and networking needs of our customers.

Startup ecosystem has been growing fiercely all across the world. What do you think attributes to this gained momentum of setting up a startup?

While the reasons for starting up would vary for each founder, some of the common attributes that have boosted the momentum of setting up a startup are: more awareness about the support systems available for a startup, an increased personal appetite to take risks, an increase in startup success stories and role models to emulate and in many nations, the role being played by the Government to incentivize and support startups.

What are you expecting from Pitch Off Season IV in Jaipur?

Given that hundreds of startups have been a part of the Pre-PitchOffs, the finale where just a handful of startups would be shortlisted to pitch should be interesting and I look forward to interacting with them.

Listen to Prabhakar Jayakumar’s insights on futuristic tech at Pitch Off Season IV, happening in Jaipur, on February 18, 2017, at Birla Auditorium! We will continue to bring more sneak peaks into the event, stay tuned at pitchoff.thetechportal.com

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