CIOInsider India Magazine

Looking at today’s world of business, the adoption of multi-cloud environments to drive agility and innovation has become an imperative or shall we call, a necessary evil. However, this shift comes with significant challenges. Uncontrolled resource sprawl, lack of real-time visibility, and skyrocketing cloud costs due to inefficient management have become a pressing challenge that is haunting the businesses to drive its growth bandwagon. Adding to this, traditional IT teams, accustomed to on-premise data centers, often struggle to adapt to the dynamic nature of cloud computing, where a single oversight can result in massive financial waste.

Understanding this, Aquila Clouds, founded in January 2020, has been instrumental in solving the aforementioned issues by providing AI-driven cloud cost management, governance, and optimization solutions to navigate tech-driven disruptions. Since the get-go, it believes in empowering businesses with deep visibility across multi-cloud environments so as to enable businesses to track, analyze, and optimize their cloud spending with utmost precision. Like its namesake, the Aquila constellation, symbolizing sharp vision, the company helps organizations detect inefficiencies and maximize the value of their cloud investments, ensuring financial and operational efficiency in today’s hybrid computing landscape.

In an exclusive interview with CIO Insider, Suchit Kaura, CEO, Aquila Clouds unroots the journey of Aquila Clouds in driving excellence to hand-hold business in today’s tech-first intelligence age.

What are your flagship hybrid computing solutions, and what makes Aquila Clouds the ideal choice for clients?
Aquila Clouds specializes in cost observability, governance, optimization, budget management, and chargeback for hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Furthermore, CFOs managing millions in cloud spend often struggle with visibility. Understanding this, our patented technology creates a hierarchical cost flow, allowing organizations to track expenses from business units down to individual projects. Our observability features help businesses see where every dollar is spent, while our policy engine enforces governance, preventing costly misconfigurations like unauthorized GPU instances or untagged resources.

Essentially, we provide just in time visibility by every stakeholder in an Enterprise Company, empowering them to make data driven budgetary decisions.

We also provide AI-driven optimization, identifying underutilized resources, automating start-stop schedules, and resizing instances to maximize efficiency. By bridging the gap between finance and engineering teams, our platform eliminates friction and enables data-driven cost reductions rather than arbitrary budget cuts. Additionally, our chargeback capabilities help enterprises fairly allocate shared costs based on actual usage, solving complex financial challenges at scale. Supporting AWS, Azure, VMware, and more, we deliver precise, real-time cloud management, ensuring clients spend smart, not just spend.

Having experienced the industry for over 35 years while leading large organizations across major companies, my leadership approach is rooted in servant leadership, where my primary focus is enabling my team to succeed. One of the key principles I follow is to tackle the problem, not blame the person. In any challenging journey, issues will arise, but it’s important to separate the problem from the individual. Instead of pointing fingers, we focus on collaboration and solutions. I also emphasize continuous improvement. When a problem is identified and resolved, we ensure that processes are refined so the issue doesn’t happen again.

Another core belief is working with agility. I strongly advocate for automation and efficiency, finding ways to accomplish tasks in significantly less time by leveraging smart processes. Clearing roadblocks ahead of time and ensuring smooth operations is essential for maintaining momentum.

Adding to this, collaboration and customer focus are also central to our culture. We deeply listen to our customers, which sets us apart from competitors. Many companies delay customer requests for years, while we act swiftly, often implementing changes within a month. In one case, a customer casually shared an idea, not expecting immediate action, and was surprised when we delivered results quickly. Ultimately, my leadership philosophy revolves around empowering teams, fostering efficiency, and driving customer centric innovation, ensuring that everything we do adds tangible value.

What is the future roadmap you have envisioned for the next five years?
The problem space we tackle is vast, starting with multi-cloud and hybrid cloud challenges but extending far beyond. With this, our vision is to streamline and automate resource management and optimization across the application ecosystem of the modern enterprise, Kubernetes, Databricks, AI, databases, and more. We aspire to make Aquila Clouds’ platform the de-facto reference for all financial, budget tracking and optimization decisions for the enterprise. Highlevel expertise in these areas is scarce, but by codifying this knowledge into a centralized platform, we make it globally accessible. Our system intelligently manages assets across ecosystems, reducing reliance on a few specialists. Due to our competency, we operate in 10+ countries, serving hundreds of customers with 20+ partners, including Wipro and Hitachi, who resell our products globally, today.

Additionally, AI is central to this vision. Last year, we became the first in our space to launch an autonomous insight module, Chat Genie, which analyzes customer data, detects issues based on KPIs, and allows interactive problem-solving. The response has been overwhelmingly positive, and we would be expanding AI-driven agents for specific ecosystems, going forward.