Companies all around the world are adhering to the new norms of working. Not only the technical aspects, or organizational processes, but working towards strengthening their workforce, though the journey is not similar for every company. Stating the current scenario, Sonal Puri, CEO of Webscale expresses, “It’s not been smooth sailing for everyone. I know from friends and peers in the valley that the crisis has caused a significant drop in business for many startups, and investors are doing everything they can to help them weather the storm.” Sonal has taken as her responsibility to sail the company through these difficult times and thrive in the market.
She has always believed in teamwork and cares and looks after each one of her team. “Working with my growing team to make the company a global success story is what drives us to do what we do,” says Sonal.
Catering a Wide Variety of Needs
Sonal joined as an advisor at Webscale in 2015 and with sheer hard work and dedication became CEO of the company.
Established in 2013, Webscale is the “Any Platform” Commerce Cloud, and a leader in cloud hosting, automation, and management for eCommerce businesses. It stands apart from other companies in the sector—delivering a highly automated SaaS platform, built from the ground up to leverage any public cloud (AWS, Google, Azure, etc.) while delivering 100% uptime, infinite scalability, 360-degree security and blazing performance to any eCommerce platform. It enables digital transformation for over 3000 B2C, B2B, and B2E e-commerce and enterprise customers in nine countries, and seven of the Fortune 1000 businesses.
Leading a cloud company, Sonal shares that cloud adoption is just beginning. The utilitarian nature of the cloud makes it conducive to fast-growing companies and global expansion without old fashioned data center build-outs and sunk costs. Amidst the pandemic, cloud technology is assisting companies to connect and work remotely with companies all around the world. Moreover, with a workforce pushed towards working virtually, the consumption of cloud computing has certainly spiked up. It leads to the creation of many opportunities across many areas of the cloud industry.
Webscale focuses on eCommerce which, by necessity, is flourishing in this climate as online merchants cater to a wide variety of needs for a largely quarantined society. Its distributed nature acts as one of the core strengths of the company, and also as a technology platform. It allows the company to provide fast, scalable, and secure cloud-hosted infrastructure to businesses in any cloud and any location. Webscale has a global team that is highly experienced in managing and supporting customers all over the world.
Striking a Perfect Balance between Work and Personal Life
Born in Mumbai, Sonal is amongst few leaders who are at the forefront in the industry. She completed her studies in Architecture. After graduating in Building Sciences, in the late 90s, she started working at an architectural firm with many high-tech clients in Mountain View, CA. The dot-com boom took her to a startup which was her first software-as-a-service company and the dot-com bust followed. Over the next 20 years, she has worked for 2 large companies and 4 startups, all in Internet Infrastructure, bringing together the best of what we call the Cloud today.
Leadership comes with various roles and responsibilities; it is difficult to maintain a perfect balance between professional and personal life especially in the current crisis. However, being a seasoned leader, Sonal knows how to balance her personal and professional lives. “On the personal front, I have an amazing family which includes my two amazing teenagers. Their success in growing up to be decent, hardworking individuals is equally as important to me,” Sonal presses.
Providing Customized User Experience
Recently, Webscale launched a new entry-level product—Webscale Core—that delivers the best of the cloud, together with many of the core features of the Webscale platform. The product allows the company to address the entire ecommerce market, from smaller eCommerce merchants to big brand companies. This is opening up a large, relatively untapped segment of the market for the company, and expands the footprint to merchants of all sizes and in any geography. The company is also engaged in several headless and progressive web app deployments. Headless eCommerce platforms are providing merchants with the ease of management that comes with an off-the-shelf eCommerce platform, yet with a highly customized user experience across a myriad of different devices.
Webscale delivers all the pieces needed to deploy and deliver these customized front ends while increasing the security, performance, and uptime of the overall eCommerce application itself. The company continues to evolve its security stack while offering advanced features such as bot management, intrusion detection, and content security policies, and improving its overall automation so that merchants can focus on core business operations.
End-End White Glove Experience
End-End White Glove ExperienceWebscale tackles the pain points of merchants, addressing performance, security, and availability by replacing traditional solutions like load balancers, firewalls, content delivery networks, and many other technology products. It provides an end-end white-glove experience through cloud automation and management to replace traditional managed hosting companies. The company’s growth comes from servicing a wide range of storefronts, from young enterprises to global public companies, across geographies like the Americas, Europe, and APAC, from verticals like fintech, health tech, fashion, beauty, retail, and across markets such as B2B, B2C, DTC and more.
Globally, companies are sinuously promoting remote working. Webscale has also shifted towards remote working environments. The team rose to the challenge and continues to deliver the same exceptional levels of service to the customers. “The motivation for Webscale comes in the form of knowing that when our customers need us, we deliver, no matter what, and with the demands being placed on eCommerce today, with Black Friday levels of traffic and sales almost a daily occurrence, we’ve been busy,” shares Sonal.
