Over past few years Cloud Telephony has come a long way in India. Businesses of all shapes and sizes, especially startups and SMEs, are harvesting on cloud because it has much to offer – from cost efficiency to manageability.

Cloud telephony service providers in India have understood well that one-size-fits-all will no longer work here. Knowlarity is one such player that is revolutionizing the cloud telephony technology with customized plans based on the needs of an industry and its business elements. SMEpost.com caught up with Ambarish Gupta, Founder of Knowlarity Communications and a technocrat at heart, in an exclusive conversation on some of the fundamentals of this new industry in India and his vision for it.

Q: Let us start by asking a couple of fundamental questions – what according to you are the key advantages of using cloud infrastructure by an enterprise?

A: According to me, there are a lot of advantages of switching your business from traditional telephony to cloud telephony. Here are a few of them:

Cost Efficiency: With cloud telephony, the only hardware costs you incur are handsets and a central router, and there are no added maintenance or support costs to consider.

Simple Set-up: Cloud telephony is an easy adaptation for most small businesses. As a hosted service, maintenance and upgrades are handled off site by your internet service provider, eliminating the need for an on-site IT team or off site consultant.

Increased Mobility: Employees can access voice mail, change answering machine messages, redirect calls, hold conference calls, and fax messages from any location. This is particularly important for businesses on the move, where employees may be working from home or out in the field.

Flexibility: Adding new extensions or new direct lines is easy, and can be done through a simple online interface. More importantly, because your phone system is cloud based there are no restrictions on location. All it takes is a single communications system to manage all of your company’s needs.

Manageability: The essence of cloud telephony is its simplicity. Because your new communications system is software based, it is easy to manage.

Q: What is Cloud Telephony and what need does it serve for clients who avail such services?

A: Cloud Telephony in simple terms means you do not have to deal with telephony jargons, knowledge of how telephone works as long as you know what you want your telephone to do! And most of the time, it is pretty simple for everyone to understand, make/receive (pick up) a telephone call, hang up or disconnect the call, play an audio file, transfer the call, conference the call! With Cloud Telephony, these kinds of telephony functions can be added to any computer application!

Q: How do you see the future of Cloud Telephony in India?

A: Cloud telephony is the best fit for businesses that want to track, measure, monitor and analyze all business phone interactions.

Cloud telephony service providers in India are coming with customized plans based on the needs of an industry and its business elements. Today, you can witness cloud telephony service for hospitality, cloud telephony service for healthcare, cloud telephony service for financial institutions and so on.

Going forward, the cloud telephony market may see new startups offering tailor-made solutions catering to specific industries.

Q: Tell us something about Knowlarity Communications – how did the company come into being. Tell us something about your growth story so far.

A: Knowlarity was born in 2009 out of the necessity of the industry to manage their phone numbers in a more powerful way on a hosted automated manner. We started offering two packages of solutions – one for the large enterprises and the other for the small business. Unbelievable but true, our first customer was the present CM of Orissa, who used our solution to support his election campaign during 2009.

We raised a $2-million angel fund five years ago, and $6.5 million in Series-A from Sequoia Capital in January 2012. We have also secured $16 million in Series-B funding from Mayfield and Sequoia in 2014.

We are currently the market leaders in Asia for cloud telephony services with 80-90% market share in India. We are already 10x the size of our competitors. We expect to grow by 5x over the next 3 years and our interim goal is to be a billion dollar company.

Q: What are the products & business solutions provided by Knowlarity?

A: Knowlarity solves business problems by making telephony intelligent and reliable in a real time over cloud for start-ups, SMEs and Enterprises. The company provides a distributed and extensible telephony platform that utilizes and combines the calling capacity of each cluster on demand to serve high volume requirements for its telephony products or services.

Knowlarity has bagged both National and International awards such as Fortune India (40 under 40) 2015, Nasscom Emerge50 (League of 10) in a product conclave in 2012, Deloitte Tech Fast 50 award for year 2012, Finalist for Red Herring Top 100 Asia awards in 2011.

SuperReceptionist is our best selling product. This robust, cloud based, telephony service is your virtual assistant, front office receptionist, lead manager, and CRM rolled into one.

SmartIVR creates the impression of a professionally managed company at very little costs to you. You can create multiple departments within your company with the help IVR.

Q: Is Knowlarity also into overseas markets?

A: We are operating in more than 65 countries. We have made considerable headway since initial pilot runs in the overseas market. We are in talks to raise a fresh round of funding, which will be used to expand our international presence in markets such as Indonesia, Philippines and Thailand.

As a software company, the way forward is to enter into mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship with local businesses. At the same time we have no intention of ignoring our domestic market, which provides the bulk of our 6000-and-growing customers.

Q: In the technology enabled seamless business landscape of today, data stored in call records needs be seamlessly integrated with other customer touch points such social media platforms, mobile apps and other digital communication tools such as WhatsApp etc. Do your products & solutions allow such seamless integration?

A: Yes. We have a lot of integrations such as Sugarcrm, Freshdesk and Zendesk. These tools have such social media and mobile app data links that makes all the data come into one place and become consistent.

Q: What are the key market segments you cater to? How do SMEs feature in your profile of clients?

A: Our communication platform is built on the AWS cloud platform. We are a SAAS company. Cloud is a viable option to meet a variety of mission challenges, right from spurring innovation to developing collaboration and data sharing initiatives that is critical to corporate mission goals and objectives. It frees enterprises from the chore of managing IT systems, allowing them to concentrate most of their energies on mission goals and statements.

We provide the most comprehensive cloud-based communication tools to start-ups, professionals, and SME clients. Besides telephony, we provide IVR, smart fax capability and cloud conferencing. Our platform is very flexible. It can be integrated into any CRM platform or customer service ticket application.

Q: Coming to a more general issue related to the SME sector, Knowledge and implementation of best business practices is a challenge for SMEs. How, in your opinion, can one mitigate it?

A: SMEs that want to ramp business must look for solutions that help unify compute, network and storage access into a cohesive system. Such an approach helps reduce architecture complexity, provide unparalleled flexibility, visibility, and enable policy enforcement within virtualized datacenters.

By choosing integrated solutions designed to simplify the infrastructure requirements without compromising on key features such as high-availability, SMEs can easily scale up or down as needed.

Transitioning to a virtualized environment requires change on many levels. SMEs that move away from a piece-meal approach to an integrated one and manage the datacenter as a whole rather than as individual technology stand to benefit in the long term.