‘On a Mission to Democratize Cloud Management’: Centilytics, a Dover-based Intelligent Cloud Management Platform, Builds a Meaningful Picture of all your Cloud Expenses and Breaks Down Complex Cloud Billing into Actionable Insights

“Centilytics is a true-blue bootstrapped company, unlike many of the Silicon Valley startups.”

Cloud is more than a mere technology offering. For CIOs, it is a force elevating their roles to that of innovators and catalyzers of organizational growth.

When it comes to cloud-based transformation, there is no clear or single path for CIOs for getting from “here” to “there”. Yet there are forward-looking organizations that are not only rethinking the very role and purpose of IT—turning their IT departments into agents of transformation—but also leveraging cloud to deliver benefits to their organizations.

In light of the foregoing, we’re pleased to present Centilytics.

Centilytics serves as a governance, security, and optimization tool to save unnecessary cloud spend with 360-degree visibility. It pinpoints loopholes in the cloud infrastructure to put the resources into optimum utilization and check the entire infrastructure for threats and malicious attacks.

The company was incorporated in 2017 and is headquartered in Dover, Delaware.

Aditya Garg: Interview Highlights

Q. Why was the company set up? And how did you expand your company and its offerings over the years?

Centilytics is a true garage startup in the sense that I came back home (to India) for a summer before starting my masters. During those three months, this curiosity made me learn more about the cloud and I saw the massive cloud adoption that was happening. At the same time, I saw a lack of control and how customers were struggling to manage their environment. Since then Centilytics has grown from three people to a 120 people team; from a simple single-page dashboard to over 2500+ different widgets; from managing 0 to over a $100 million in cloud consumption.

Q. How successful was your first project roll on? Share the experience.

Starting with next to zero experience, we were a fearless bunch not knowing how customers would react. To be honest, our first roll-on was fairly average; it solved the purpose but had a very complicated UI with bold colours. Slowly we started to mold the console as per the needs of the customer with their feedbacks. That’s when we saw the traction coming up when we were able to find the sweet spot between problem-solving and user engagement. We have never been scared of iterations, and till date constantly revamp the console based on customer experience.

Q. What kind of responses have you received from your consumers over the years? How have they motivated you to shape your offerings/grow the company?

For a very long time, CMPs were being badged as a just a ‘value add tool’. Fortunately, that time has passed, and with cloud sprawl as a designated reality, managing your Infra is more critical than ever.

So, we have gotten all kinds of responses ranging from “It’s a good to use tool” to “it’s a must-have platform.” The beauty of our console is it can be broken down to thousands of widgets and the customers can pick and choose the bundled package they require for their infrastructurez We were built on a customer request and till date only work on capabilities requested by our loyal customers. With 100 percent customer retention, Centilytics has a very strong touch with its customer base. We have established a deep-rooted message in our user ecosystem i.e. ‘We are in the business of being heard’. Be it a quick-fix or a full-fledged solution, we are here to solve your problems.

Q. What challenges did you face in your initial years?

The major challenge we faced in the initial year was the readiness of the market. It was still very early for cloud users to realize the importance of cloud management. Most of them did not even know that there was an issue, let alone solve it.

And even today, the market is struggling to get past the complexity of cloud management.

The idea is first to educate the users around the efficient adoption process and management of cloud, and perhaps then extend them a customized solution for their infrastructure.

Another challenge faced is to scale the sales of the product to different geographies where needed. Every geo has its specific challenges when it comes to market penetration, and there is no shorter method of doing it, you have to go full front on branding to build the market presence.

Q. About the adaptability, how do you stay relevant to the consumer interests and needs in this highly volatile market?

Our key strategy towards that is the integration of the product and account management team. This approach has done wonders for us, as the product managers are always researching new things to develop in correlation to the services provided by the OEMs and the account managers are knee-deep in the daily activities of the customers. This balance of innovation and needs has always resulted in the by-product of sharp and engaging solutions for users to peal their interest. Along with that, we constantly roll out engaging content, webinars, trainings, etc. to keep them active and engaged in the ecosystem.

Q. If you have to list five factors that have been/are the biggest asset to your organization, what would they be and why?

• A team of ambitious young people: It would help if you had young, ambitious employees who can give their 100 percent to any organization, whether it is a small-scale, medium-scale, large-scale, or a business giant like Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc. Let’s not forget that it is the result of the on-going hard and intelligent effort put in by the happy and valued employees that keeps the organization going in the long run, competing with the competitors and keeping it ahead of everything.

• Customer-Centricity: Expanding into new markets is the key to market leadership. However, improving customer loyalty and creating a great customer experience is more important than that. We always try to co-create services with the help of our existing customers. We firmly believe that businesses that understand and respond to changes in customers’ lives or business situations will increase satisfaction and value. The business needs to have a complete understanding of the customer journey, to build value-driven interactions that lead to improved customer experience and engagement.

• Our agility and speed of development: To cope up with the consumer’s demand, we always try to be very agile and develop/deploy services quickly to maintain a retention rate of 100 percent. It also supports our customer-centric approach by providing them the features they are looking for promptly.

• Our Mentors with more than 30 years of Industry experience: Our Mentors play a really important role in our journey so far. It becomes easier for you if your mentors belong to the same industry vertical since they can help you understand the nuances of the business and the varied nature of the market.

• Our culture: Our culture is our strength. It’s the quality that binds our organization together and prevents it from falling apart. We believe that culture can have a huge impact on companies’ ability to succeed and make it big in the competitive world we live in today.

Q. What do you feel are the reasons behind your company’s reputation?

Centilytics is a true-blue bootstrapped company, unlike many of the Silicon Valley startups. We were able to break even within two years and scale it to a 5x growth with a 100 percent retention rate. Centilytics stands out as a substantial pillar of success by achieving what our competitors achieved in 3x more time and 50x more funding than us. This DNA helps us to keep on innovating and growing.

More importantly, our reputation is built around our customer relationship. The strong communication between our customers and the team gives them a sense of reliability. We are built on the foundation of trust.

Do you have any new products ready to be/getting ready to be launched?

• The most interesting article in our product roadmap is to build the same capabilities for Google Cloud.
• Moving on we are also upgrading our security module to V2 which includes customization and white-listing capabilities, and now our customers can auto remediate their security checks from the console.
• With service request management, our users can raise a ticket directly from the Centilytics console and upload their own service catalogue.
• We are also introducing firewall visibility of event logs by integrating with Checkpoint and Baracuda.
• Another one is that now our users can automate their own scripts using terraform, using which they can provision and orchestrate their resources directly from the console.

Q. Where do you see your company a couple of years from now?

Our mission for the next couple of years is to democratize cloud management. There exist a lot of loopholes in the traditional model of managing cloud. We wish to bring the power to the fingertips of the end-users, where they can pick and choose products and services correlating to their unique infrastructure needs. The idea is to do disrupt the old model, which is very rigid and boxed, with a flexible and agile model of cloud management.

Aditya Garg: A Formidable Leader

Aditya Garg, CEO and Founder of Centilytics, holds a Master’s in Computer Science from Stanford and an undergraduate degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Georgia Tech.

Spending a fair share of his life between the US and India, he brings the best of both worlds to the organization, along with his diverse understanding of the Industry.

From being an ace graduate at Georgia Tech to be a part of the Stanford’s StartX program, Aditya carries all the right badges on his chest.

He brings in a rich background of highly technical skillset tied up with sharp business acumen. He was able to jumpstart Centilytics and bootstrap it within two years, and all of this while he was completing his masters from Stanford.

“We want to provide an all-in-one solution to manage the complex and sophisticated cloud. The idea of simplifying cloud management is what drives our innovation engine.”