The future of the IT industry is in the Cloud, and with myriad services in and beyond the Cloud, CSS Corporation—with Tiger Ramesh at the helm as CEO—is helping its clients get there. “People are looking at their organizations, and people are looking at the cloud,” Ramesh says. “People might not want to move into the cloud all in one shot, and we help our customers come up with strategies for moving into the cloud in a phased manner.”
Before starting with CSS in 2011, Ramesh was working in remote IT infrastructure management. “This was in the late ’90s, and remote IT management was a very new concept at the time,” he says. “Subsequently, I founded a another BPM/BSP [Business Process Management and Business Services Provisioning] company with my friend before coming to work with CSS.”
This background in remote IT management informs the direction Ramesh has steered CSS, which has an estimated revenue of just under $200 million and employs an international employee force of 6,000. CSS is a privately funded operation powered with investments from SAIF, Goldman Sachs, and Sierra Ventures—all big names that serve to iterate the importance of CSS’s function as a remote IT management firm. “We are an integrated technology and services company, and we provide technology support to companies on their behalf to their customers,” Ramesh says. “But beyond that, we help the CIOs of organizations move their IT infrastructures towards the Cloud, and also provide 24-7 infrastructure management.”
CSS has 20 locations worldwide, including a key center in Salt Lake City, Utah, with 500 employees. CSS also carries out its mission with 16 technology partners, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, BlackBerry, and Oracle, and 12 solution partners, including HP, TechJini, and TIG.
Cloud computing is founded on the idea of remote IT infrastructure, and functions to both displace and centralize aspects of platform, computing, software applications, storage, security, data, and application-programming interfaces. In addition to offering its clients private and public cloud-computing options, CSS also helps its customers mobile-enable their business, which is itself an essential aspect of IT evolution, lending itself to a cloud-based IT infrastructure. “The applications these clients are using to run their business that were previously only accessible through PCs or laptops can now be accessed through other mobile devices,” Ramesh says. “So one thing we are doing is making these mobile applications respond to a leaner and thinner environment.”
“Cloud computing and mobility are growing rapidly, and there’s a lot of interest in this space,” Ramesh says. “One of the ways we stay in front of this is by creating intellectual property [IP]—and this is the unique aspect of our company that helps us win business.”
In the context of IT management and development, IP gives middle-sized companies like CSS an edge over competitors by creating new mobile IP options, in applications or software, to interact with extant PC-based computing. “We can make applications leaner and thinner without touching any architecture or code, and do this all in a few weeks time for a few hundred thousand dollars, instead of millions,” Ramesh says.
—Tiger Ramesh
With these “leaner and thinner” aspects of mobility and IP-making in mind, Ramesh says that different industries think of the cloud differently. As such, the cloud affects IT infrastructures differently. “Within every organization, there are different types of information, and this is consuming resources: big data centers with armies of people managing them,” Ramesh says. By thus locating these competencies in a common infrastructure, costs of storage and management are drastically reduced while also being more secure and accessible. CSS’s positioning as a midsize company allows it to stay flexible, competitive, and adaptable for the changing market—a market which CSS itself is transforming.
