Webscale goes aggressive in India, ramps up hiring and tech delivery

If you say “Integrated web application delivery in the cloud Delivered as-a-Service”-  can you expand with a context on how its manifests in a real-life scenario?

At its foundation, Webscale develops and sells a cloud-based ADC or application delivery controller. This is available as a service, with a monthly subscription, the Webscale solution is easily deployed between a customer’s website and the internet where we enable a host of features designed to make our customers’ websites stay fast, available, and secure. The real-world implications of what we do are probably best explained through real customer stories.

For instance, Trumpet & Horn sell antique jewelry and when Olympic champion Michael Phelps tweeted a photo of a ring he bought his girlfriend to his 1.5 million followers, their traffic suddenly tripled. Webscale’s predictive scaling technology saw this surge in visitors ahead of time and scaled the infrastructure out to manage the demand, preventing the site from going down, while maintaining blazing-fast performance and end-end security.

If I can cite another use case, Event Network manage the online gift stores for some of the biggest museums and cultural attractions in the US. They lost $1 Million in sales over a cyber weekend after DDoS attacks took down their 80 web domains. After coming on board with Webscale, we got them back to 100% uptime for the same period the following year along with significant performance benefits as well.

Who are the candidates for your services?

Today, we sell predominantly to mid-market e-commerce businesses, with a few customers in the enterprise, media and the education sector. We are starting to see increasing demand for both our platform solutions and our a-la-carte services in the broader enterprise segment.

If you look at the current Ecom scenario, what are the key tech challenges the companies in the fray face and how Webscale is addressing those challenges?

Research shows that 47% of consumers expect a web page to open in two seconds or less – 40% will abandon the site altogether if it takes more than three seconds to load. With consumer attention spans this short, a slow website, or one that is completely unavailable, can cause an e-commerce business to not only lose revenue, but also brand reputation and customer loyalty. Sluggish website performance can be caused by many issues: poor content optimization and no caching can make page load times very slow; not using an ADC or proactive application layer scaling can kill performance when the site is experiencing a high volume of traffic (during a flash sale for example); and a lack of a web application firewall (WAF) can leave the storefront vulnerable to DDoS attacks or other malicious attacks that can take a site down indefinitely, and potentially result in the theft of private customer data.

Webscale is the only company to be addressing these challenges with a tightly integrated technology stack, that delivers a true one-stop platform for companies looking for an easy to manage, high performing, secure solution. For customers with more specific needs, Webscale also provides a range of a-la-carte services that address the growing market need for stand-alone products that deliver specific functionality, yet remain part of a more integrated platform.

Can you talk about Webscale’s traction in the market?

Webscale has 70+ customers across the US, India, UK, Canada, China and Australia. Its global customers address a wide range of industry segments from fashion, technology and retail, to automotive, education, media, health and beauty, across e-commerce platforms such as Magento, Wordpress, WooCommerce, SAP Hybris, Oracle ATG among others. With more than $1 billion in revenue processed in 2016 alone, and 275 million visitors served through our customers’ websites, Webscale has become the leading cloud-based application delivery platform for the e-commerce and broader enterprise segment.

Can you talk about India operations and your company’s strategy going forward?

We have recently expanded our office in Bengaluru, making it our largest team worldwide. Core functions out of the office are demand generation, support, sales and marketing. We expect to invest heavily here, both in terms of hiring talent and expanding our sales and support operations to businesses in the region as well as globally. We believe India is the perfect launchpad to the rest of Asia for Webscale and with our roots firmly planted here we can make significant progress in our goal towards building a billion dollar business.