This bazaar on the cloud connects software vendors, small business buyers
My Cloud Bazaar is a cloud service brokerage that offers a marketplace for SaaS and IaaS applications.
You can buy your anti-virus software online, and a whole suite of business applications too. However, what of software vendors who are too well known to attract repeat customers, and what of small businesses that are looking to buy application software on a pay-per-use model?
While setting up their cloud business, Siddharth Jain and Vijaya Kamath had several software requirements but did not know where to source them from. This sparked the idea of My Cloud Bazaar, and keeping their planned cloud business aside, they set up a platform that acts like a marketplace for software applications for small and even medium businesses.
My Cloud Bazaar helps owners discover, compare, get recommendations, and buy software for various applications on a pay-per-use model.
“We are disrupting the traditional software sales model where one had to interact with multiple solution providers, manage multiple relations, and deal with multiple billing cycles. A vendor listed on the platform can get discovered by multiple users on our platform, which allows him to concentrate on product development,” says My Cloud Bazaar co-founder Siddharth.
The platform catalogues various SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) and IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) solutions and allows vendors and cloud service providers to showcase their applications and solutions.
The beginning
Siddharth says basic software tools like a customer relationship management software, document management system, and digital transaction management services are mainly available in on-premise variants, meaning companies have to buy them to run on computers only within their premises, and that these applications are not hosted on a remote facility such as a server farm, or the cloud.
“Our idea remained in ideation stage for almost a year before we decided to start working on it, and we spent a lot of time searching, comparing and evaluating multiple applications. We interacted with industry veterans, small business owners, vendors, etc,” says Siddharth.
In 2016, the team won the Economic Times Power of Ideas award, and received seed funding from the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India through the CIIE at IIM Ahmedabad. It was also recognised as a NASSCOM 10,000 startup, and is recognised under the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion’s Startup India programme.
Delhi-based My Cloud Bazaar started operations in 2017.
The team
An MBA graduate from Asian Institute of Management, Manila, Philippines, Siddharth has over 14 years of experience in setting up global businesses. He was actively involved in setting up data centre services businesses across India, Southeast Asia and the SAARC region.
Vijaya completed his education in computer science and applications from NIT, Surathkal, and Osmania University, and has over 23 years of experience in managing global software projects for the telecom vertical while working at an Indian software company in Singapore.
A team of eight people now, My Cloud Bazaar’s operational model involves on-boarding software vendors and Cloud service professionals onto the platform to showcase and catalogue their products.
Clients and operations
Siddharth says the biggest challenge was to on-board partners on to the platform and to spread word about the platform.
“We have invested a lot of time educating partners about the benefits of being listed on My Cloud Bazaar and we are working with various SMB associations to popularise the platform,” says Siddharth.
My Cloud Bazaar has two categories of partners. The first category is fully integrated through APIs (Application Programme Interface) which means an application gets auto-deployed as soon as the payment is made, and the second category is a product listing, which can be transacted for online, but is deployed offline or remotely.
End users can visit the marketplace, search for applications, compare options, and buy what they like much like any product marketplace. Once an application is paid for, it is auto-deployed in a few minutes, and is ready to use.
The My Cloud Bazaar platform basically targets three markets:
a. Small and medium businesses with 10-500 employees and up to Rs 1,000 crore in annual turnover who can use the marketplace to discover, compare, and buy applications.
b. Managed Service Providers (MSP), telecom companies and Internet Service Providers (ISP)catering to a large existing customer base of SMBs who can start offering customers cloud services in addition to their core offering of voice, data, and managed services, etc. This can help increase average revenue per user.
c. Enterprise and government customers who can use the platform as an internal cloud broker to catalogue the services they want to offer to internal customers.
My Cloud Bazaar follows a marketplace model, and does not control the pricing of applications. However, it ensures partners provide special pricing. It collects payments and remits the amount to the partner or merchant after deducting a commission.
For MSPs, telecom companies and ISPs, My Cloud Bazaar has a one-time set-up fee, and a recurring revenue share of all applications sold on its platform.
Cloud Figures
According to Forbes, the public cloud services market in India is expected to reach $4.1 billion by 2020 from $1.8 billion in 2017. Appdirect and Jamcracker in the US offer a similar service.
“We have a good number of unique visitors to our marketplace, and are gradually increasing the number of SMB users,” explains Siddharth.
The company is still in its Beta stage, and claims to have seven to eight paying customers. With average monthly revenue per customer around Rs 9,000-Rs 10,000, it is targeting revenue of Rs 10 lakh for the first quarter of 2019.
Going forward, it plans to extend the platform to offer industrial IoT (Internet of Things) capabilities for telecom companies and enterprise customers in the manufacturing and auto sectors.
My Cloud Bazaar is also looking to raise funds by the second quarter of 2019 to scale up its platform capabilities, marketing, talent acquisition.