 We're starting a monthly series here called TFIR topic of the month or T3M The idea of the series is to take a pulse of the ecosystem of the industry and then bring together experts To deep dive into these topics. I sit down with C-level executives, Analysts, engineers and experts to explore these topics and then bring these discussions to you And today we have with us once again Prabhujo Singh Sethi, VP of engineering at Courage. Prabhujo, it's great to have you back on the show. Thank you What kind of broader trends you are seeing in your industry when it comes to cost cutting or As companies are trying to become more cost efficient if you are referring to some of the layoffs and Other trends that we have seen around some of the bigger organizations So the way I put through is every Every business thrive for making profit, right? So at the end of the day They will either try to increase their revenue or try to cut down on cost to make sure their profits are good, so essentially The point is through technology or through efficiencies in your business operations or Development you would try to make better revenues and profits and Bottom line is there will be a situation in scenario where you are not going to meet them And that's where you are going to observe The cuts So usually it's the side one is usually the side effect of the other the way I Put it So if you if you reach to a point where your technology is efficient enough You would try to streamline your business and now if your business streamline in lining is not happening. Usually what cuttings are The triggers to indicate that okay Now this is where you need to work more and more and there is no way to justify the cuts per se, but If you try to relate they happens in cycles, right? So There will be cycles where the technology innovations will happen and then after a certain saturation point when Everyone will start putting in a lot of money a lot of investment in one area They will become a saturation point where you will bound to have some cuts Now these cuts usually happen in other scenarios. Also, so of course We'll not be getting into those discussions for the time being I don't like to put cost cutting and cost efficiency in the same bucket. How do you look at these things? So both of them are some of the necessities from a business operations person If you put it into perspective Now cost cutting can be of various means, right? You could be performing cutting With respect to either overloading the infrastructure or making sure your energy saving Your turning off the equipment when it is not in use And then of course the traditional People that The traditional point that people relate to is the layoffs That essentially also happens Usually when operations require a major overhaul Specifically For the optimization part, it's a continuously ongoing activity Where you try to improve efficiencies of the system try to optimize The way your work would happen The technology itself, if you look at has been continuously evolving in the sense of Automation and there is a lot of innovation happening on Some sort of closed loop mechanism AI machine learning Now many times people say that they are just trying to replace human labor, right? But The reality is those innovations are actually enabling some of the scenarios use cases Some of the market positioning which you would have never been able to achieve with human interventions, right? So at the end of the day, because of these innovations and efficiencies that you are improved I mean integrating in your technology and process It helps you solve certain scenarios and use cases which were completely unachievable Now if you will talk about cost cutting, they are not essentially going to match to each other So those are most business driven steps where Now you reach to a saturation point where you will say that okay, if I can't Go in the efficiency part, what about cuts? Can I do better? With that, but of course that adds up a lot of pressure on the team also if it is happening in the terms of Layoffs because at the end of the day the same Set of people which were the same set of work which was being done by 10 people Now you are reducing this The load is same, but you are reducing the people the headcount. So Everyone will feel more pressure and Somewhere things will innovate or it may even fall sometimes so it can go either way So cost cutting usually is not a very good situation to be in even for the organization Not just for the people who are getting laid off Due to these layouts, does it also mean that companies will refrain from do it yourself project And actually start embracing more and more open source technologies And dedicate resources in areas that give them a business edge. What do you think is happening? Of course with the with the cost cutting It adds a lot of pressure on the organizations on delivering to their commitments and The technology that they're working on So the natural choice of course becomes that whatever solutions that are open I mean available in open source The communities are there you would be attracted towards collaborating with them and Work towards some common goals And then you will be only Responsible for working on how those systems will be plumbed into your Solutions rather than working on to the core of the problem which is being already solved by open source solutions So that is obviously one of the main advantage which I believe these cost cuttings would probably I mean have on the open source communities And specifically with respect to the proprietary software solutions It as it is known that with the lesser workforce of it Of course, it becomes more and more challenging for you to deliver the same Kind of maturity and the solutions around it and Usually these cost cuts sometimes also hampers the quality and the deliverability of the solutions, right? So I mean, you will never know what kind of Workforce what working behind on a proprietary product Even though there will be some data that will be shared by the Organization, but in open source model the transparency also Helps you achieve Better goals and more confidence on what kind of vulnerabilities and security constructs that are taken care of so of course I do see a positive impact on how the open source adoption will happen As a side effect of this cost cuttings Now let's talk about how core edge technologies are helping organizations become more cost effective So specifically core edge started from the perspective of when everyone started talking about cloud, right? So People think that okay When you have cloud everything is given, right? Application will just magically come over and deploy and all the solutions will be available readily for you So it was working very nicely to a certain extent by various cloud providers like aws as your Your google and all others right even including oracle and ibm. So the the point is it worked For certain use cases still certain level, but the more and more people started consuming it They started coming up with further requirements, right? They won't now want to kind of commoditize cloud itself That's where the birth of multi-cloud happened and over and above There are even With the technology innovations now we are talking about edge locations private 5g kind of solutions and some of the other things Which requires similar technologies that are provided by these cloud providers, but now it is needed on the edge So either your telco provider would be giving you that or probably you will be having your own infrastructure Now you are not in a space where you can deliver the same kind of Experience that you are getting from one of these public cloud providers, right? So what we are trying to do is we are trying to abstract these things simplify and commoditize the Technology which is available with these tech giants to be useful in the remote areas where you cannot afford to put people With specific skill set. So you are going to get same kind of operations Same kind of technology same kind of functionality Everywhere across the globe as if it's a uniform cloud offering for you And that's one of the key crux that that courage we are trying to Solve for our customers where we we kind of assume That it is going to be difficult to put Kubernetes experts sitting in a remote location daily managing the some of the Smart city projects that are being deployed. So that's not practically feasible, right? Forget about the Cost or operational cost behind it. You can't practically do that for a larger set of operations. So those are some of the things we are Thriving to solve and Achieve so from our perspective, we are trying to make technology more and more cost efficient So it becomes achievable and usable for the Areas or the scenarios which currently it is not available Can you talk about the role of cloud? What role is cloud playing in helping companies become more cost effective? Of course cloud provides a lot of capability and inbuilt capacity Of the table so that you don't really have to think about provisioning a lot of servers Having the running cost corresponding that building your own data center and some of the stuff So as part of a huge trend many of the organization actually moved their workloads to the cloud but What what I personally feel that it was a great Experience in an initial phase at the moment it is started growing further and further What they are observing is For a large scale operations The economics of the cloud Certainly overshoots substantially about the expectation that they had right and That's where now the trend where People are trying to figure out if some of the things they can have managed So there is a hybrid model. Everyone is kind of figuring out where they will have a piece of technology Running as part of their data center and some of the services which they Don't want to or they don't have expertise to build they can leverage from the cloud and Deliver it in a hybrid mode rather than relying just on one cloud And this is adding more complexities as well. So it's not really achievable solution at the time for everyone but the people with the specific Specific skillset are still trying to Go in this direction and they are able to successfully improve on their operational costs And at end of the day, we need to understand that even the cloud providers who are giving you those services are somewhere taking care of those costs that they are in Accreting for the people behind, right? So of course the moment you expand in scale The cloud operations are somewhere going to be less Effective from the cost perspective. What advice do you have for companies? For becoming more cost-sufficient while they also remain competitive and innovative There is no one answer to this question But I think the main crux of this is don't try to do everything yourself at end of the day. You need to figure out what is your core business and Stick to that Rest of the things you either collaborate or work with partners try to deliver a solution Have a better go to market strategy That will always help you achieve your goals faster and in a more efficient way. So That's the usual thing, which I believe sometimes are missed specifically for startups and Some of the small companies bigger organizations are way streamlined to give any Advice to them. So, yeah, bravo. Thank you so much for taking time out today and talk about this topic And as usual, I look forward to my next discussion. Yeah, same here. Thank you. Nice talking to you