Renova Cloud – Conquering Vietnamese market with AWS Cloud

Doron Shachar, CEO of Renova Cloud

Living in Vietnam for over 10 years, Doron Shachar, CEO of Renova Cloud has seen dramatic changes and realised great opportunities here. The Israeli man established Renova Cloud four years ago when the public cloud business just started. Since then, Renova Cloud has covered a tremendous journey to enable more firms in Vietnam to successfully go to the cloud.

Great journey

Doron Shachar still remembers one case that happened three years ago when Renova Cloud came to a huge company manufacturing food and beverage in Vietnam. At the time, they told him that there was no way that the government would allow them to go on public cloud and there was no way that public cloud would be successful in Vietnam. They told him that cloud was not safe, it was costly, and offered no business benefit. But everything has changed since then. The same company has taken almost 50 per cent of its services to the public cloud and plans to move almost 100 per cent of services to public cloud.

Like that food and beverage manufacturer, many others in Vietnam have began to explore cloud opportunities during the last four years and the ecosystem has grown and expanded significantly, along different verticals and in different sectors. Several sectors are leading the market while others are lagging a bit behind but they definitely understand the trends and expect cloud to become an integral part of their business.

The journey of Renova Cloud to conquer the market started when it became a partner of AWS about four years ago. It is now a partner of Amazon Partner Network (APN), a global partner programme focusing on helping partners build a successful business by providing them with valuable business, technical, and marketing support. Today, APN has tens of thousands of partners around the world, with over 60 per cent of partners actually headquartered outside the US.

Doron Shachar told VIR, “AWS is the leader and most advanced cloud technology offering, with a strong ecosystem and networks in which partners like us with managed services capabilities are playing a key role in enabling the market to cloud transformation. AWS also invests and continues to show its full commitment to the Vietnamese market. The regional and Vietnam management and the local team are critical to building the local ecosystem and working with partners like us.”

At Renova Cloud, the company develops an ecosystem around cloud enablement capabilities and partnership with AWS, it also offers software-as-a-service solution to optimise cloud usage, as well as training and upskilling courses and bootcamps in data and devops to support the growing demand for skilled workforce. Moreover, it launched its own intensive bootcamp which is open for all, inclusive, as well as free of charge. Right after the bootcamp, students are able to join its junior level team and earn experience on various exciting projects.

Since then, Renova Cloud has helped many businesses gain success throughout cloud transformation and modernisation processes.

The CEO admitted that the key to Renova Cloud’s success is the deep understanding of the vertical/industry as well as the organiSation’s environment. “We must treat our customers as fully equal partners and there is a learning curve that we must accept. Experience is a key factor to deal with the local market, no one should underestimate local organisations and their understanding on what is best for their business. You need to listen, watch, and ask questions, we are just a part of the overall process. Always be humble and focus on the specific relevant benefits you can bring.”

Bright prospects

According to Doron Shachar, Vietnam a little bit behind others countries in the region such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, or the Philippines but it is catching up fast, with tremendous growth in the financial sectors, retail, media, and e-commerce. They all need to leverage the cloud to act and react fast to changes and catch up with new markets trends and customer demands. Other sectors starting to get into the technology include supply chain, manufacturing, logistics, and transportation.

For instance, the banking and finance sector today has been open in Vietnam for different kinds of solutions. The government allows different platforms an independent financial platform and solutions to approach the market directly. This is the big change today. People can get quite fast a license to open a digital bank and legacy bank. Moving to the digital is to help them approach newcomers and users while enabling them to keep their current users and their legacy business.

Things continue to move tremendously fast in the Southeast Asian country where sectors are accelerating digital transformation, with telecoms and cloud computing being the backbone. Even over the past two years overshadowed by COVID-19, Vietnam has still seen companies gain success with cloud.

According to Renova Cloud, the COVID-19 crisis created a climate of high uncertainty for businesses in addition to directly affecting some verticals such as retail, food and beverage, and services including entertainment and tourism which are still suffering from the impacts. On the other hand, some growth has been seen in some verticals/segments.

Experts also said that businesses in sectors like manufacturing and supply chain began to understand the need to change their mindset towards adapting to cloud and new technologies to survive these ups and downs. The same applies for the entertainment sector and e-learning.

According to the CEO, success in digital transformation rides, above all, on the culture inside the company. This is the most significant factor to be changed, and change must come from the leaders and involve all main stockholders in the process.

Industry insiders said that Vietnam is definitely going to catch up with regional markets in the coming 2-3 years and within the coming 3-4 years, the potential and growth especially in specific verticals will even surpass those countries.

“The Vietnamese government clearly understand the cloud trends and we can see relevant authorities working closely with public cloud vendors. A clear security regulation in specific sectors will encourage and boost the digitalisation within leading sectors,” they added.

Aware of this trend, Renova Cloud, which is now home to 35 people, plans to have over 50 people during the next year as the company sees the growth and the demand for all digital transformation.

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