RackNap, a unified cloud services automation and business cycle management platform, today announced the appointment of Guruprit Ahuja as Chief Executive Officer, and Sabarinathan Sampath as Chief Operating Officer.
The move is significant for the IT and cloud industry as both Guruprit Ahuja and Sabarinathan Sampath have held leadership positions in key organizations over a number of years. Their arrival will help cement RackNap’s position as the fastest growing cloud service delivery platform, enabling service providers to sell cloud services on their own infrastructure, as well as via third party cloud providers like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, IBM, and others.
Guruprit brings to the table 25 years of experience in Cloud computing platforms, Data center services, and Software solutions. Prior to joining RackNap as CEO, he was Director of Middle East and Africa at Acronis. Guruprit has served as Director of South East Asia, India, and Korea at Parallels (now Odin), where he successfully established relations with some of the key cloud players like Korea Telecom, Vodafone (India), Telekom Malaysia, Telkom Indonesia, and Star-hub (Singapore). Before Parallels, Guruprit was Business Lead – web hosting and cloud at Microsoft, driving web services adoption, and managing relationships with leading service providers and telcos.
On joining RackNap, Guruprit said, “Currently valued at $208.6 billion, the cloud industry is seeing a rapid growth. With huge investments being made in the cloud space by industry leaders like Microsoft, Google, AWS, IBM, there is a new breed of service providers who are traditionally telcos, systems integrators, hardware and software distributors, and now want to add cloud services to their existing product portfolio. However, to do so they need a solution like RackNap that automates provisioning and billing, offering customer self-service, support and CRM, inventory management, business intelligence, and multi-tier partner management capability.”
“In my role as CEO, my immediate focus is to establish mutually beneficial alliances with industry leaders like Microsoft, Google, AWS, IBM, and ensure that cloud service providers can use RackNap to launch complete suite of cloud services, and benefit from this multi-billion opportunity,” he added.
Sabarinathan joins RackNap as COO, with over 18 years of experience in the IT industry with specialization in Cloud Services Delivery. He will also head the Product and Technical Delivery function of RackNap. Sabarinathan joins RackNap from Ingram Micro Cloud (Odin), Singapore where he headed the Professional Services division covering Asia Pacific, Japan, and Russia helping big Telecom Companies, Hosters, Enterprise customers profit from the Cloud using Odin Service Automation platform. Prior to that, he held various roles as Head of Service Assurance and Programme Management Office, working for Hostopia, National Health Service and Cognizant Technology Solutions. His forte is Professional Services Delivery, Operational Excellence, building delivery teams from scratch, enhancing customer success, and helping them get maximum benefits of the software.
“Our research has found that Cloud Service providers need help in choosing the right business strategy, and skilled manpower to be successful once they have chosen the automation platform for delivery of Cloud Services. In my role as COO, I’ll focus on extending to RackNap users our ‘Well Rounded Managed Services Package’, covering sales, marketing, billing, operations, and technical support. We will help cloud service providers choose the right business model, target right market segment, select appropriate product portfolio structure; thereby increase their average revenue per customer, return on investment, and above all, be profitable. RackNap’s consultative and partnership approach will differentiate us from other platforms in the market,” said Sabarinathan Sampath.
RackNap forecasts a rapid growth of customer base in both mature cloud markets like USA and Europe, and also strong emerging markets like India, South East Asia, and Middle East and Africa. The platform has had several successful deployments in these emerging markets.
“RackNap enables us to manage billing and provision services from multiple cloud providers like AWS, Azure, VMware and Hyper-V plus. Apart from offering traditional web services like domains, web hosting, SSL; using RackNap, we are also able to plug in Next Generation Cloud Applications and offer it to our Cloud Partners with its multi-tier partner model,” said Samir Jhaveri, Managing Director, XcellHost Cloud Services.
“RackNap has adapted as we scaled our cloud business, and has helped us manage our global cloud infrastructure in 50+ countries from a single pane of glass,” he added.
Guruprit and Sabarinathan will be instrumental in leading RackNap’s efforts to penetrate the cloud, datacenter, hardware and software distribution, telco, and hosting industry segments in months to come.