OnePro Cloud Leadership Speaks to The Silicon Review: ‘We’re Positioning Ourselves as the MSP of MSPs, Aiming to Fill their (MSPs) Capability Gaps’

“We claim ourselves ‘vendor-neutral’ because we are not binding with any specific vendors; our products support cross-platforms migration and management.”

OnePro Cloud, a trusted cloud advisor, provides seamless and automated solutions for enterprises to migrate to cloud. It pursues a software-driven cloud service model to standardize and simplify cloud services. The company’s patented technologies and collaborative innovation will keep the ecosystem evolving and ready for what unfolds in the future.

OnePro was incorporated in 2017 and is headquartered in Shanghai, China. It has two additional office locations in Beijing and Wuhan.

Michael Wong (CEO), Ray Sun (CTO), and Carrol Yu (Marketing Manager, APAC), spoke exclusively to The Silicon Review. Below is an excerpt.

Q. Brief us about the origin and evolution of your company, Mr. Wong.

We are a software-driven cloud management solutions and services company. We started with a small group of passionate developers, and we all believe that cloud computing will fundamentally change enterprises’ IT infrastructure.

Cloud Disaster Recovery is the common approach for those who first approach to cloud, and after a period of stable operations, they will start migrating the workloads to cloud. Our original focus was on Cloud Disaster Recovery and Migration, and we are blessed that we won some sizeable tenders, which provided us great opportunities to gain practical experience to strengthen our solutions.

We look after our customers from consulting, design, development, installation, deployment, and support. But with such a small number of headcounts, our workload hit the bottleneck in a flash. At that point, we realized that we have to reshape our business model; we have to engage and serve more customers with limited resources. And that was the tipping point we started to productize common services into automated tools, develop products in the SaaS model, and develop a platform to grow the ecosystem.

Q. Mr Wong, what were the hurdles you had to overcome during the initial days?

We faced heaps of challenges and had many bumps during the initial days. Let me share the critical ones.

Fundraising: Fundraising was a challenge for startups, I believe, and it is even harder for someone who doesn’t have a “well-branded” resume. Moreover, software development is a high burn rate industry, and it will take a good while to turn business profitable. You will need to find the right investors with a like-minded vision; otherwise, it may ruin the plan and lead you to a longer path to success.

Technology Adoption: We are a technology company focusing on cloud, standing at the forefront of the fast-growing industry. Our early insight and advance experiences can add tremendous value to us and our customers’ businesses. However, we found it hard to get customers to understand and accept our disruptive ideas at the very beginning. People love to stay in their comfort zone; they are reluctant to make changes, but this is normal human nature.

We pitched our customers with the Cloud DR Solution years ago, we weren’t very successful at that time—people didn’t understand the concepts and the needs behind them. But after years, they finally understand our intention and logic. When you were trying to get your parents a smartphone a decade ago, this is similar to this. They didn’t know how cool it was and didn’t even bother to learn and try. But nowadays, I bet they can hardly live without it.

Q. OnePro Cloud is a leading cloud technology and service provider. How do you manage to stay on the top list of service providers, Ms. Yu?

In this dynamic industry, evolve, and rapid adaptation is a must. Simple, flexible, agile are our core DNA; this applies to our product design and how we take care of our customers. Our products are extremely flexible and configurable, and we will keep adapting and evolving with customers’ demands and technology trends.

Q. Mr. Wong, what are the factors that contribute to your success?

We manage B2B business and product in a B2C way. The online shopping culture and the success of e-commerce in China impressed us definitely; it changed buyers’ spending behavior dramatically. We realized this evolution blurs the B2C and B2B border, which initiated us to build the B2C elements into B2B.

The users of a B2C and B2B platform will have different expectations. Traditionally, B2C users expect more straightforward browsing and purchasing processes, while B2B users require personalized features to support their complex operations. Thus, no matter the UI design, workflow, and process, they are different. But at the end of the day, everyone would love to use the least amount of time and effort to achieve the most. Since myself and the team are from a multicultural background and have experience in both B2B and B2C, we can easily abstract the B2C logics and patterns and apply them to our products. Imagine a B2B product involves multiple stakeholders and sometimes even people from all various company departments. One of our products’ characteristics is that we do not design products only to address technical problems; we also consider things from a business perspective. This helps us to narrow the operation gap between technical and business teams significantly. Besides, our customers’ success is our path toward success.

Q. ‘We are vendor-neutral and possess a tremendous amount of resources and solid experiences to help our customers throughout their Hybrid and MultiCloud journey.’ Explain this in detail, Mr. Sun.

When we talk about Hybrid and MultiCloud, it involves various cloud services (Private/Public/Dedicated) and different cloud service providers. Customers are no longer satisfied with the single cloud approach these days, while Hybrid MultiCloud enables organizations to pick the right components to optimize IT operations to drive business value. We claim ourselves “vendor-neutral” because we are not binding with any specific vendors; our products support cross-platforms migration and management. There are many different vendors/options in the market, we cannot say which one is the best, but we help our customers to choose the best that suits them. Our solid experiences are built from the projects we handled, and one essential thing is the ongoing market analysis we’re conducting. We possess a tremendous amount of resources because we have a vast network. An expert cannot cover all areas, but we have expertise in different areas to ensure full coverage.

Q. ‘We help customers capitalising their cloud investments, avoid unnecessary obstacles, seize the opportunities to drive higher-value services, and grow the revenue stream.’ How do you interpret this further, Ms. Yu?

This is very straightforward, e.g., foreigners want to set up a business in China, and it can be a complex process if they do not have local help. They may struggle with the language barrier and their non-familiarity with the laws of the land. That said, an agency can provide professional advice to foreigners and can do all the tedious work on their behalf. Similarly, we provide professional cloud services and solutions to our customers not to waste time, effort, and money on something they are not familiar with. We are the cloud experts; we know the challenges customers may face throughout their cloud journey. We understand how to help them optimize cost and improve operations efficiency by using our self-developed tools. So basically, we provide customers a shortcut to cloud and guide them for post-management.

Mr. Sun, delineate an overview of the services OnePro Cloud offer.

Our two main product lines— HyperMotion^® and HyperOne^TM—are designed for cloud migration and management, respectively.

HyperMotion^® is our self-developed cross-platform migration tool (to or away from cloud). It provides superior automation and governance experiences through many different functions to enhance workload mobility and ease the complex migration process. It enables users to complete migration in only three simple steps via an intuitive user interface. Our API-based migration supports 90 percent of China’s public and private clouds.

HyperOne^TM is an intelligent IT service management platform comprised of different modules to address MultiCloud management requirements. It provides a “single pane of glass” approach across multiple cloud platforms, enables enterprises to achieve operational excellence through a unified platform.

Q. Ms. Yu, where do you stand as a company in a crowd of competitors? And what are you doing to stay ahead of the curve?

We are a China-based company, but we do business across various countries. We see the business through different lenses that help us bring the good stuff from West to East and vice versa. Furthermore, we allow local enterprises to extend their arm overseas, and at the same time, help foreign enterprises to access opportunities in China. This is what differentiates us from the competition.

Q. Ms. Yu, how do you plan to combat your competitors in the future?

We keep optimizing our solutions and endeavor to grow the ecosystem; who knows, our competitors will become our partners one day. Cloud computing keeps evolving; therefore, customer behavior and the competitive landscape will keep changing somehow. So, what we can or should do is to focus and enhance our capabilities, treat customers’ pain points like our own, and get them resolved promptly. Moreover, adding more strategic partners into our ecosystem is essential; we hope to expand our geographic reach, enhance our solutions, make them truly comprehensive, and last but not least is to evolve ourselves from good to great!

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

COVID-19 attacked the globe suddenly. It ruined traditional IT planning and turned enterprises’ digital transformation to full speed. Cloud computing is acting as an enabler for majority of the digital business initiatives rather than just a datacenter replacement. To accelerate cloud service delivery maturity, leveraging MSPs’ services and automation tools are the right and common ways to commence, scale, and optimize important aspects of cloud operations. We noticed that MSP’s demand is rising dramatically; many traditional system integrators (SI) are transforming themselves to become qualified MSP. However, capabilities acquisition is the key pain point of 80 percent of those SIs. We are positioning ourselves as the MSP of MSPs, aiming to fill their (MSPs) capability gaps.

After months of seed customers’ cultivation, we launched HyperOne Cloud Service Brokerage (CSB) platform late last year. HyperOne CSB runs with patented API-based resources orchestration—MSPs can use the platform to buy/sell MultiCloud and network connectivity resources, consolidate customer bills, and manage multiple accounts with a single sign-in. MSPs can also integrate their solutions with cloud/network resources, package everything together and deliver the products to their customers via HyperOne CSB. In addition, we built-in HyperMotion, our key migration tool to HyperOne CSB, so that MSPs can leverage HyperMotion to complete Cross-Cloud Platform Migration and DR in full automation. In the process of rapid iteration, we ready to include Monitoring, AIOps, and Data Analysis modules from ecosystem partners to provide comprehensive solutions to empower MSPs’ service management capabilities. 

We have confidence that HyperOne CSB can relieve MSPs from daily operation hassles, allow them to focus on their capable areas, and serve their customers. That said, OnePro Cloud aims to become the key partner of 65 percent of MSPs in China a couple of years from now.

Ray Sun, CTO: Ray is a pioneering technologist, the Ambassador of Ceph Foundation Asia Pacific, and co-founder of Ceph China Community. He has been working in various senior positions in the IT industry for over 15 years. Ray has received numerous industry awards and certifications, including the Alibaba Cloud Most Valuable Professional, Tencent Cloud Valuable Professional, AWS DevOps Professional, and more. His focus is on Cloud Native development and the evolution of modern infrastructure software, including software-defined, virtualization, containers, and cloud infrastructure.

Carrol Yu, Marketing Manager (APAC): Carrol is a highly motivated marketing professional with over 15 years of experience in the IT industry. She has extensive experience in both B2B and B2C segments and has a great mix of Product + Project + Vendor + Key Senior Stakeholder Management experience. She’s well-known for formulating go-to-market strategies to drive high-impact marketing programs and initiatives in the APAC market. Carrol can relate well with people at all levels and from diverse cultural backgrounds.

The Leaders at the Helm of OnePro Cloud

Michael Wong, CEO and Co-founder: Michael is an insightful, results-driven IT professional with extensive experience working in consumer and commercial segments. Stands at the forefront of the fastest moving technology industry—Cloud Computing, Michael delights in helping enterprises discover how to get unstuck, keep their IT budget on the plan, and accelerate growth throughout their digital transformation.

Michael is a hands-on CEO who leads, directs, and is accountable for all product development, sales, and marketing matters of OnePro Cloud. He has the innate ability to build high-performance teams. His strategically-selected executive management staff and channel partners work hand in hand, serve as a growth catalyst, and contribute towards a productive cloud ecosystem.

"We are the cloud experts and know the challenges customers may face throughout their cloud journey. We understand how to help them optimizing costs and improving operations efficiency by using our self-developed tools.”