Exclusive Interview with Sushil Goyal, Co-Founder, and COO of Rahi

The growth in the IT industry skyrocketed with the world wide web turning up on the scene in the 1990s. The Indian economy too underwent major economic reforms in 1991. It led to a new era of globalization and economic integration, IT industry was greatly benefited due to the economic transformation of the country and since then it has grown leaps and bounds. Rahi was founded to provide end-to-end global IT solutions that could help businesses convert long-term goals into success. Analytics Insight has engaged in an exclusive interview with Sushil Goyal, Co-Founder, and COO of Rahi.

Ques: Kindly brief us about the company, its specialization and the services that your company offers.

Ans: Rahi was founded with the purpose of providing end-to-end global IT solutions that could help businesses convert long term goals into success. It was co-founded in 2012 by Sushil Goyal, Tarun Raisoni, and Rashi Mehta. The entrepreneurs continue to work towards harnessing the ongoing evolution of technologies and facilitate building businesses with enhanced productivity and profitability.

Rahi focuses on tailor-made solutions that meet every organization's specific requirement and helps them scale and adopt technologies in a flexible and effective manner. We are a single stop provider for an organization's IT needs and leverage the best of breed innovative technologies to give a curated solution.

During the pandemic, our seamless processes ensured smooth transitioning. We have developed processes and skill sets to deliver IT solutions to customers globally and the pandemic did not change that for us. Our logistics and distribution teams understand supply chain processes and continue to deliver engineering and support resources efficiently. The journey which started 10 years back has been full of important milestones with strategic investments and recognitions coming our way. As of today, Rahi has a presence in 6 continents, 22 countries, and 32 cities with 1000+ customers. The hyper scale start-up provides a full life cycle of technology solutions and works around various IT verticals that are critical to advancement of digital businesses.

Our key offerings include:

• Data Center: Our data center infrastructure solutions are helping organizations to create a dynamic and efficient IT environment that can respond to today's business demands while being agile enough to adapt to the changing landscape.
• Enterprise IT Infrastructure: Our enterprise IT services extend from data center infrastructure management (DCIM) solutions, server consolidation, virtualization to storage and asset management.
• Networking & Security: Any company, regardless of its size or sector, needs a level of network and security solutions in place. Not just to expand its growing environment but to also keep it safe from ever-increasing cyber threats.
• Cloud Infrastructure: Our expertise in designing and implementing private or hybrid cloud environments using existing or new infrastructure has helped many businesses maintain visibility and control of workloads ensuring performance.
• Audio/Video: We offer a suite of carefully vetted A/V products that can help to enlighten, entertain and increase engagement and enhance collaboration. We enable businesses with flexible options that can be tailored to each specific environment.
• Global Services and Logistics: We also offer logistics services that include product assembly, packaging, tracking and security. Together, these capabilities enable us to deliver multivendor IT solutions across geopolitical boundaries, helping customers operate efficiently and effectively in every market they serve.

Ques: What is your USP that differentiates that from competitors?

Ans: To sustain business and reduce risk through IT planning, enterprises need to adopt a new technology consumption model that is relevant to today's business needs. Prepared for an unpredictable future, a network architecture that enables operational efficiency and flexibility, robust IT solutions and lastly a trusted strategic partner can make this vision a reality.

We are uniquely capable of combining Data Center, IT, software services, and audio/video solutions to create an integrated environment that drives efficiencies, enhances customer service and creates competitive advantages. Our three pillars include:

• Innovation: People and process driven yet fast and flexible
• Design: In-house certified design and implementation team
• Vision: Strong and focused relationships with customer first approach

Ques: Tell us how your company is contributing to the cloud computing industry

Ans: Rahi works with companies to build the right strategy and workload migration plan to ensure success, address networking, security and identify requirements while helping teams understand how to use cloud resources effectively. Our teams help develop the strategy, review any proposed cloud architecture and create a plan to put the customer on the right track. Rahi offers two ELEVATE cloud assessment service packages to help customers determine where they are as far as cloud readiness is concerned and give companies the details, they need to build a plan for migration, refactoring or development in a cloud environment. With Rahi's managed services team, customers can reliably hand their cloud project environments to a dedicated staff running 24 hours a day, seven days a week, every day of the year, ensuring our customer SLAs are maintained. Rahi offers two ELEVATE service packages for managed services to help customers offload their operational costs to a partner dedicated to a customer's cloud service success.

Ques: How is your company helping customers deliver relevant business outcomes through adoption of the company's technology innovation?

Ans: At Rahi our main focus is to keep our customer's needs first and foremost. We have developed end-to-end solutions that encompass our team's significant capabilities to help customers maximize the value of their IT investments anywhere in the world.  We are dedicated to helping customers meet their business goals by leveraging innovative technologies. We are continuously adding cutting-edge products and solutions for our customers in India. We do not believe in pushing the customer in a spot to gain profits for ourselves. We believe that the success of our business depends on the success of our customers. A long-term relationship with the customer is our end goal.

Ques: What is the reason that organizations are using IOT/big data/AL/ML?

Ans: The pandemic has accelerated the pace of the IT landscape. The requirements of every organization have become dynamic as they need a strong IT infrastructure to support their organizations and smooth functioning as employees are on a hybrid working model. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) technologies help to automate manual and time-consuming tasks, allowing employees to focus on higher-value work. AI is used to extract new insights, transform decision making and drive improved business outcomes. Machine Learning (ML)is used to improve the security features of a company's IT infrastructure which is a major concern in today's world. ML allows new-generation providers to build newer technologies, which quickly and effectively analyzes risk factors.  ML helps in improving customer satisfaction and ensures superior customer experience by using the previous call records for analyzing their behavior. Growing data volumes, easy data availability, cheaper and faster computational processing, and affordable data storage have all contributed to a massive ML boom.  As a result, organizations can now benefit from understanding how businesses can use ML and incorporate it into their own processes. ML in medical diagnosis, for example, has assisted several healthcare organizations in improving patient health and lowering healthcare costs by utilizing superior diagnostic tools and effective treatment plans. Cloud computing combined with Artificial Intelligence is revolutionary. When these two disciplines are joined together, they give incredible results. Organizations that adopt ML have observed less errors in data analysis precision levels.

IoT helps to monitor important business processes and give insights into how customers and partners are using the products and services and this information helps companies to make accurate business decisions. Data collected from IoT devices helps organizations to improve and deliver personalized experiences to customers. Also, the insights from IoT devices can be useful for businesses to provide personalized information to increase customer satisfaction. IoT enhances employees' efficiency by automating the time consuming and repetitive tasks and this allows employees to focus on complex tasks. IoT devices such as sensors and cameras help to monitor the workplace and prevent physical threats.

Ques: How does your company's strategy facilitate the transformation of an enterprise?

Ans: Rahi's integrated environment encompasses the core technologies that drive the modern enterprise. Rahi also assists with solution design, product selections and implementation. Our objective is on creating customized approaches to meet every business' specific requirement and help customers scale and adopt technologies in a flexible and effective manner.

Our areas of expertise include – Data Center Solutions, Enterprise IT Infrastructure, Networking & Security, Cloud Infrastructure, and AV Solutions which help businesses to create an integrated environment that drives efficiencies and gives the customer a competitive advantage. Our offerings cover the full lifecycle of technology solutions, from assessment, architecture, design, implementation, managed services, to professional services and support.

Rahi helps its customers in the digital transformation journey by offering products and solutions. We not only help customers deploy the solutions but manage them for the years to come providing comprehensive managed services and becoming the true partner of its customers.

Ques: Which industry verticals are you currently focusing on? What is your go to market strategy for the same?

Ans: Rahi's extended network of partners and customers is spread across sectors such as IT enterprises, education, healthcare, professional services sectors, manufacturing, automobile, retail and hospitality.

Our business is built on serving as a single-source provider for all IT requirements.  Here is what that means in practice:

• Our team has the skills and expertise to deliver advanced IT solutions. We have a large talent pool with trained and certified team members and continue to grow. We also invest in the ongoing development of our team members.
• We deliver our services around the globe, with local expertise and understanding of language and culture, which help us in providing global standardization for our multinational customers.
• We act as a single point of contact for customers and streamline all operational and business interactions. Our experienced finance, sales operations and logistics teams make conducting business with us pain-free.
• We make strategic investments to help drive new solutions. We also continue to strengthen relationships with providers of disruptive technologies that can give our customers competitive advantages.

Although we take a vendor-neutral approach to develop solutions, we cultivate long-standing relationships with some of the industry's top vendors. In our quest to offer world class solutions, we have curated a shortlist of industry-leading solutions that we are proud to represent.

Ques: What's your growth plans for the next 12 months?

Ans: During the pandemic Rahi consolidated its presence in India, Rahi will be expanding to newer locations and working with new customers. The work that has been done in the past years has started showing results. There is a lot more work in the pipeline for this year. We have a huge data center project on our way. There are multiple other projects in line for audio-video requirements and we will be setting up a 30-conference room office in the country before the end of this year. Adding to those we have introduced Cloud as a platform in Rahi and the team is rapidly adding clients to our ecosystem. We plan to hire freshers as management trainees, new sales managers and executives and adding more technical talent to the team almost every month. Rahi recently announced augmenting its workforce by 50% and hiring 500 people by the end of 2022.