AHEAD's vision for digital transformation and strategic expansion in India

In an exclusive interview, we delve into the world of AHEAD, a leading systems integrator. The discussion explores the company's approach to digital transformation, its heavy focus on infrastructure and data, and its strategic expansion into the Indian market. We gain insights into their unique Foundry business, which delivers customised data centre solutions, and their views on the challenges and opportunities within the Indian enterprise sector, including the role of AI and the importance of quick, decisive action.

What is AHEAD doing in terms of digital transformation, artificial intelligence, and other verticals? You claim to be a digital platform that provides digital transformation solutions. Can you provide an overview for a better understanding?

Will: We are a systems integrator. We build digital platforms that power the world's largest companies. We come from a strong infrastructure background, which is where the organic roots of our company started. In recent years, we have branched out from the traditional infrastructure world as modern cloud platforms have become more prevalent. We also have a lot going on in the data and AI space right now, which is a significant area of focus for us. We still have our infrastructure business and are heavily involved in other ecosystems like IT operations through our partnership with ServiceNow and other companies.

We help customers in three main ways: we resell our OEMs' technologies, and the real value comes from our services business, which helps customers operationalise and implement that technology. This ensures they get the value they expected from their investment. We have our professional services, which are our integration business, and our managed services business, which plays a big part in this region. We deliver a lot of our managed services and professional services out of India.

What are the current services you provide to Indian enterprises?

Nitin: This is an offshore operation.

Will: The bulk of our customers are in the US, and we are using the talent pool here to help service those customers.

Are there any expansion plans? India is a huge market, and everyone is focusing on it.

Will: It has not been a focus for us. That could change.

Nitin: We understand India is a large market with good potential as a customer base. However, as of now, the focus is entirely on US-based customers and servicing them. To answer your previous question about how we distribute ourselves, we have our foundry and a few products we offer to our customers. This gives us a real edge over our competitors in the data centre and infrastructure space.

Will: What is new for AHEAD in this region is our investment in pre-sales. A lot of our employees here have been focused on service delivery and fulfilling service contracts for our US customers. With the addition of Nitin and the team he is building, we are now branching out and expanding into pre-sales. This is a brand new team, which is why I am here—to meet them. This is a new direction for us, and it will give us scale and velocity. We have been impressed with the talent we have been able to access here, which we have certainly seen in our delivery business. We believe this talent can help us scale our pre-sales efforts as well.

You mentioned India's talent pool. GCCs are making waves in India right now, with many companies investing in them. Do you have any plans to have your own GCC or offer GCC as a service? How do you view that vertical?

Nitin: GCCs are certainly a consideration. We started with the delivery centred on the talent pool. When you brought up GCCs, we do have people working on our products, and we are building those here. However, since we are integrators with global tie-ups with many OEMs, we would like to pursue those types of opportunities from India for now. The pre-sales team we are building here is a niche because typically, every company coming here establishes operations for different reasons. We view ourselves as an extension of the US team, working on the same technology, processes, and with the same customers. Building a team here that acts as a bridge between customers and the delivery team makes pre-sales a crucial, self-driven business for us. It is viewed as a revenue generator rather than a cost centre.

You describe yourselves as a digital transformation company, but the definition of digital transformation changes for each company. What is AHEAD's perception or vision for digital transformation? What unique offerings do you bring to the table?

Will: I agree that everyone's definition is different. We define it as how our customers implement modern technologies to solve business problems, improve efficiency, or bring new products to market. How can they leverage advanced technology to achieve those goals? This could involve infrastructure modernisation, application modernisation, or many other things. These efforts tend to get lumped into the broad term "digital transformation," which, much like "cloud" and now "AI," is sometimes overused. This is where the challenge for customers lies: there is more choice and confusion than ever before. They need organisations like us to help them filter through the noise and figure out what to spend time on and what technologies to deploy to solve their problems. That is what we are here to help our customers with.

Could you walk me through the product portfolio you are building at AHEAD?

Will: We are not a product company. We do not generally build our products to sell to customers. We represent all the products of our OEM partners, with whom we have over 200 partnerships. Most of these are with well-known companies in the data centre space, such as Dell, Cisco, Broadcom, and VMware. The hyperscalers are also big partners; we have strategic investments with AWS and Microsoft. We also work with surrounding ecosystems in IT operations and observability. We do have some internal products, developed through our foundry capabilities that Nitin mentioned, to help deliver our services and run our business.

Can you give us some details about the foundry?

Nitin: In the traditional data centre world, you would ship servers, compute, and storage, and then assemble them. The key difference and niche offering we provide is customised data centres for our customers.

Do you offer customised data centres?

Nitin: Customised data centres. If a customer needs a specific compute that is not available from OEMs or requires certain changes within their applications, we build and ship that for them. We do not just work on data centres; we also work on ad hoc locations. That is a key area where we distinguish ourselves from the standard offerings of our OEMs. This is our foundry business. We proudly maintain a very distinguished infrastructure lifecycle management system. It is not just about shipping the product; we use an internal product to manage the infrastructure's lifecycle end-to-end for the customer. That provides a good return on investment.

Will: The challenge we are solving with the foundry business is that customers want an integrated experience. To deliver a rack of infrastructure, you have a compute platform, a network platform, a storage platform, and various software assets. We solve this by bringing all the equipment to our facility, integrating it, physically racking it, cabling it, labelling it, staging it, testing it, and deploying some software and configurations to it. We then deliver a full, pre-configured rack of infrastructure to our customers. We ship a pallet of an entire rack of gear, meet it on-site, plug it in, and it rapidly accelerates the time to deploy that infrastructure in their environment. This provides a better experience; they do not have to worry about any of the integration. It just shows up ready to go. We deliver this as a turnkey experience at a large scale, delivering hundreds of racks of infrastructure, which we see as a major competitive advantage.

When you say customised data centres, what specific requirements do these companies bring up?

Nitin: From a global perspective, we have a specialised offering with liquid-cooled technology for our data centres. This is a new type of offering in the data centre space, which is more ecologically friendly and sustainable than a traditional data centre. When you ask about customer requirements, customers want to move to such data centres to make them more self-sustainable. This not only helps with cost but also provides more value for their investments. Given that we have our foundry, we conduct a lot of R&D in the product segment before shipping to customers, which enhances the overall customer experience. We do not just provide infrastructure; we manage it for them. This makes the ROI look very good for customers. They do not have to worry about what happens to the technology after four years; we take care of keeping it up-to-date. Our global partnerships with various OEMs are very helpful. With the advent of AI, every new server comes with integrated AI chips. Our recent partnerships help us build our offerings and assist customers with their offerings.

When you build this multi-vendor environment, how do you handle security and privacy, and the sustainability of the infrastructure?

Nitin: The top pillars for AHEAD are data centre, networking, and security. Security is a pillar where we state that a data centre cannot operate without it. Given that we operate global data centres and manage them, security is, by default, an integrated part of our data centre offerings. We have a large team of security analysts and specialists in the US and India who ensure security is paramount in all our offerings. This is not just a concern with multiple vendors but also because each vendor has different offerings, and we customise these offerings for our customers' specific needs.

How do you align with the regulatory policies of each country, such as Europe and the US, which have their policies regarding security and AI?

Nitin: AHEAD also has an advisory services division. We do not just acquire a project; we follow a proper methodology. This involves a small engagement on advisory services, followed by proposals, implementation, and maintenance. In our advisory services, we have many customers in the compliance industries who must adhere to specific regulations. Our internal functional experts and security teams ensure those compliances are met. The advisory team produces a report that is incorporated into the proposals, ensuring all compliance parameters are listed and implemented.

How AHEAD is working on machine learning and artificial intelligence. What is your level of understanding and the integration of AI in AHEAD's solutions?

Will: We have a variety of consulting services where we help customers develop AI use cases that make sense for them. A lot of proof-of-concepts (POCs) are currently happening as customers test the waters for viable investments. On the infrastructure side, we are delivering a lot of high-end, rack-scale, GPU-accelerated platforms via our foundry to customers all over the country. This is a growth area, with significant investment happening, and we expect it to continue.

Nitin: We get the latest GPU chips from various OEMs, which are being embedded into our racks. The POCs we mentioned are part of these customisations. As you said, AI means different things to different verticals. We use AI and ML not just in our data centres and foundry business for POCs, but also in our offerings, such as with ServiceNow and other advisory services we provide on the implementation side. We have a dedicated delivery team that works on providing these technological outcomes. It is not just about using AI on paper; it is about delivering practical, value-oriented outcomes to our customers. The biggest selling point is delivering a tangible impact on our customers' deliverables. While the term "AI" is widely used, what we deliver on the ground is where the true value lies.

What are your observations, and what are the backdrops of Indian enterprises compared to the US market, such as Silicon Valley?

Nitin: I would say there is a good decision-making process here. However, Indian enterprises sometimes lag in investment in R&D. For instance, when we talk about our foundry, you would not typically hear about a service-oriented firm or integrator spending money on R&D, but we do. There is a delay in decision-making, which can be a significant factor, especially in the technological world, where fortunes can change overnight. There is immense growth potential for AHEAD in India; it is just a matter of time before we decide to enter this market.

Could you elaborate on the talent pool you are getting from India and the expansion you have done in Gurugram and Hyderabad over the past two years?

Nitin: In the past two years, we have grown from zero to over 550 employees. I started building the pre-sales team about four months ago. We have a significant talent pool with an average experience of 17 to 18 years. We are not just hiring engineers; we are hiring highly qualified, experienced, and talented pre-sales people and engineers who understand their business. This distinguishes the kind of solutions we offer. We are an extended arm of our US teams and collaborate extensively with US engineers. They discuss and develop specific or custom solutions. That is the kind of talent pool we are developing here.

Will: In pre-sales, we areorganisedd into teams of specialists, which we call specialist solutions engineers. They are organised by technology disciplines. To start, we have hired resources in India for our modern data centre team, networking consulting team, security practice, and our modern workplace practice, which covers collaboration technologies and the Microsoft 365 platform. We will look to expand this over time into our other practices, such as IT operations with ServiceNow and cloud platforms.