Roman Limberger, Croc: We work on expansion of a portfolio of cloud services

Roman Limberger: The movement to cloud services began with two parties. First, market trends were traced, already in the middle of zero it was clear to company management that behind it the future therefore own DPCs were under construction. At the same time vendors worked on new model of licensing. The traditional model assumes purchase of the license in property by either service provider, or the end consumer. In case of business of service provider the situation changes: there is a permanent flow of revenue based on the scheme "rendered service – received money". To service provider it is unprofitable to buy licenses, especially in such large volumes: investments and risks are too big. Therefore large vendors began to develop for service providers of the scheme of licensing who allow to pay only those products which were involved, and in that volume in which they were used. When these two moments – our understanding of clouds as opportunities for expansion of business and technical capabilities (own DPCs and schemes of licensing for service providers) – matched, we actively joined in creation of cloud services. E-mail – service which is worked well out in terms of implementation experience and which all use became the first cloud service.

Roman Limberger: The percentage share of SaaS in a portfolio of the company for 2016 grew by 45% and overtook growth rates of projects of IaaS (43% at the end of 2016). Most likely this indicator is not characteristic of the market in general as Croc traditionally works with the companies of an Enterprise segment or upper part of medium business, and it imposes a number of features and restrictions.

Roman Limberger: Big customers are more conservative in comparison with a segment of SMB in respect of transition to all new in general, and on consumption of services in cloud model, in particular. The specifics of work with large business are that often the customer needs not standard service, but the solution worked under specific objectives and parameters. For this reason whatever operational was the big customer, contracting or formalization of requirements takes at least two weeks. In SMB a segment the customer most often buys a ready-made product. Therefore he comes with the credit card, is registered on the portal, receives the login and the password for a personal account – all procedure takes ten minutes.

Roman Limberger: Transition to consumption of external services demands from the client of serious reorganization of internal business processes. Croc is focused on building of the long-term relations with the customer, and SaaS direction is not an exception, but the rule — in the context of technical support and rendering different services we are ready to customization of our standard services, to work on the non-standard diagram. Respectively, our business processes are configured under our customers.

Roman Limberger: It depends on a specific cloud service. For example, there is a service of the managed infrastructure (Managed Infrastructure), we provide it, in particular, in one very large global company. When this customer selected the supplier of outsourcing services based on cloud infrastructure and for a variety of reasons stopped the choice on us, contracting took nine months. At the same time creation of the infrastructure demanded about three months of work.

Roman Limberger: Contracting – a stage at which the customer and service provider negotiate and state key conditions of rendering services in the agreement. The type of services can be a miscellaneous. We developed the following approach: within the agreement we subdivide all rendered services into three types. The first type – cloud infrastructure, i.e. resources of a cloud platform as one of components of a service complex which is received by the customer. The second type – information services of a cloud, upon – the expenses connected with use of software in a cloud (for example, starting with OS, DBMS and finishing products of Microsoft with application solutions like Exchange and others). Expenses on specialized means of protecting also belong to this type of services. And the third part of the subject of the agreement – a technical support service. These three components of the subject of the agreement – orthogonal basis by means of which it is possible to describe any service developed in cloud infrastructure and provided to the customer.

The problem is that each customer wants to plunge differently into an agreement subsoil on rendering cloud services and the service. It is enough to someone to register certain conditions in characteristics of service (SLA), others want to control quantity of resources on each type separately. In the example mentioned by me above, the customer precisely knew how many he wants virtual machines, what power and with what disks to implement tasks of the business. At the same time all works on start and a stop of virtual machines, accomplishment of the scheduled works connected with support of the system software, the solution of incidents and other – all this is under authority of our support service.

Roman Limberger: Generally, the cloud solution can be created differently. We have unique examination regarding creation of infrastructure solutions, and practically on any software products of heterogeneous infrastructure, on the most different iron, in different environments of virtualization. In the company works hard the highly competent certified specialists. Sometimes, as in case of the mentioned project, the customer exposes in return the profile specialists participating in creation of the project solution, its approval and even undertakes a certain part of works. The cloud solution in a format of the managed service is profitable to the customer and if he is not ready to purchase "standard" solution SaaS or to give service entirely on outsourcing for one reason or another. In our example from the customer there were people who supervised the solution created by us. Croc is not the first and only provider of cloud services with whom the customer deals (the company provider with which the customer works at the western markets — one of leaders in providing cloud services in the corresponding segment), and colleagues believed that they know all subtleties and reefs and are capable to dictate to us as as it is necessary to do. Therefore we had certain disagreements with the customer at the initial stage of implementation. But as a result some practices from the solution of the colleague created by us, on the contrary, replicated on the business in the West.

Roman Limberger: Within the cloud infrastructure unrolled under the customer the e-commerce sites giving to the customer considerable percent of revenue on Russia and also infrastructure of the websites for holding promotion actions, marketing promotion of products function.

Roman Limberger: The interesting project was implemented by DHL company based on our cloud infrastructure – a system for continuous data processing, arriving from online cash desks, till July 1 of the being called cash register equipment was constructed. Now for the purpose of operational transfer to FTS of information on the executed transactions it is necessary to use a data transmission chain through the fiscal data operator which becomes the intermediary between the company, the rendering service, and FTS. A new system requires both the new equipment, and building of new chains of information transfer, and new means of protecting as in each check, transactions are personal data. Within this project we implemented infrastructure by means of which a system accepts data from several hundred devices which couriers of DHL on delivery of loads to receivers use. Our infrastructure works in mode 24x7, is integrated with infrastructure of the customer and provides operational data transmission. With the same customer we implemented the project on ensuring compliance to technical requirements of 152-FZ of their systems based on our cloud.

Roman Limberger: Our customers always brought up this question and will lift especially as representatives of large business always are in the first row in the plan of checks from the controlling and supervising state bodies, in particular – systems falling under operation of Laws 242-FZ and 152-FZ. In due time, even until entry into force of amendments to law 152-FZ in September of the 2016th, we attended to the answer to a question: "What we need to offer the customer that he could implement, on the one hand, the business needs, and with another – to remain in the legal framework?"

Especially for it a separate segment of a cloud Croc was strengthened under requirements of law 152-FZ by the editions of software products certified by FSTEC and also specialized information security tools which provide protection of all components, since the level of the equipment and network, and finishing with the operating system. These means of protecting also have the certificate of regulators of FSTEC and FSB. In 2017 we received the certificate, confirmatory that our cloud infrastructure, meets technical requirements 152-FZ and allows to place information systems with personal data of the 3rd and 4th level of security and also the state information systems 3 classes. If the customer needs to provide higher level of security, we are ready to offer service of a private cloud in which any information which is not containing the state secret can be stored. Together with technical information system protection of the customer we always provide information and documentary maintenance of our clients for sale of complete set of measures of protection – both technical, and organizational.

Roman Limberger: Settlement period – month, but billing hourly, and calculations are performed either monthly, or quarterly, depending on terms of the contract. As for advance payments, everything depends on the specific agreement, but usually we do not use them: the customer pays resources upon consumption. Moreover, often we suggest to compensate the costs connected with deployment and start of the solution within the first year of technical support by small monthly additional payments. It is convenient for the customer as allows to avoid big non-recurring costs.

Roman Limberger: Disease process, but it is rather for the customer, than than for provider of cloud services as most often it is required to find other supplier. We in return render any feasible help in the plan of data transfer for new capacities. Unlike a subscription to services of world top three (AWS, Microsoft, Google) the customer always has an opportunity to arrive to our DPC with a disk or DWH and to throw data, having physically connected the carriers to our equipment.

Roman Limberger: Different reasons. Happens, the company leaves the market. Sometimes, changes provider of cloud services. And one of customers, for example, decided to refuse completely cloud services as such, to pass to own IT infrastructure for the political reasons.

Roman Limberger: At the agreement there is a point according to which we undertake not to delete data in case of agreement cancelation at once. Upon we very seldom we come up against a situation when it is necessary to remind the customer that there were his some data: their transfer is performed quickly, it is need for business. I will separately emphasize that we are focused on long-term and multilateral cooperation with the customer. And if he refuses cloud services, it does not mean at all what refuses interaction with Croc company.

Roman Limberger: A certain call consists that systems working with personal data should continue to conform to requirements of the legislation, and all newly created services which will process anyway personal data of the Russian citizens should conform to technical requirements 152-FZ. At the same time, for us obviously and already there is an experience how to solve this problem. Besides, cognitive efforts are required by communications with new target audiences – functional managers of business, all of them act as customers of cloud services and in particular the managed services more often. Naturally, we work also on expansion of a portfolio of services. In particular, lately the increasing popularity those managed services within which the customer can select a certain parameter – number of users gain, the level of availability of infrastructure or other characteristic – and to involve it as a control lever and optimization of volume of the consumed services.

Roman Limberger: From new services which we bring to the market I would mention intellectual video analytics which allows to take information, useful to the customer, from a number of video cameras, to enrich it with data from internal systems and to issue result, valuable to business, in a report type or recommendations. This service can be used both for fraud prevention, and for targeted advertizing, and in training programs, and on many other directions.

The following service, worthy references, – "Information support of HR". It is designed to simplify obtaining by non-management employees of the enterprises of different references, statements and obligatory documents, such as, for example, pay slip. By means of the booth, mobile application or the web system interface the employee gets access to a system in which it orders the necessary document and, if necessary, sends to the next printer. Such approach allows not only to save time of staff of the company, but also to reduce labor costs of staff of HR department. We improve one more our service – the book for feedback and suggestions in which will be integrated the chat-bot, a voice bot, e-mail and machine learning. It is such polysynthetic the channel for interaction of the end consumer with a support service of the customer, and not necessarily technical. For example, the consumer unsatisfied with the service level in shop can direct a claim on this channel. Thanks to this service the customer will be able to receive a feedback from more wide range of persons due to bigger involvement of youth, quicker to react to claims and to render services of higher quality.

At last, we provide in a format services an opportunity to control observance of the SLA level by means of an end-to-end system of monitoring with the engine of a system of machine learning. Our service allows the customer to trace in the single interface a status of the key services received both from third-party suppliers and from internal IT service. Also she can serve as the arbitration judge at permission of matters of argument and the powerful tool in the analysis of problems in controlled services.