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sakha v0.14: opsZero Next Decade and New World Order

· 8 min read
abhiyerra

opsZero is reaching a decade in age. While I have grown it I have made a lot of mistakes which I want to address systematically. Second, opsZero is going to be standardized allowing us to grow in a consistent manner and as a single brand. Lastly, with the geopolitical situation access to compute is going to become more important and we will be returning to a world moving away from the Cloud and focused on cost and efficiency.

While we will have to address the situation of opsZero, the Iran War has created a new World Order in which the East dominates and power will wholesale move out of the West. One of the pillars of this new world will be India. As the value of the dollar shrinks the only outcome for a lot of Western companies is to move their bases to India.

Failures​

opsZero's focus has been scattered in terms of technology and business. We have moved the business into areas that are just not our core competency. Here are a list of our failures:

  • Partnerships. We have focused too much on partnerships and they haven’t yielded much. Most of the partners we have worked with have gone bankrupt or have been dismantled. I met some interesting people but overall not useful in terms of revenue generation. I would even state that the AWS Partnership is a failure. These companies have gone full blown into AI putting an immense amount of CapEx with the expectation that it will replace humans. Ironically, this is destroying the human relationships that power these businesses in the first place.
  • Ventures. Multiple brands, multiple APIs, different services, etc. while fun are a waste of time. It is diffusing the energy of the company on too many things and makes it difficult to communicate to the team what we are working on. It makes more sense to have a single brand of opsZero and add additional levers to that brand.
  • Sales. Because of the different brands it has become hard to sell as each brand requires a different set of expertise. The gist of it is that we are a DevOps Agency with a focus on Cloud + AI. That is the core of the company and it is on top of that we add additional capabilities. However, my sales has been honestly not this. It has been going all over the place. There is no core focus that everything else is built around.
  • Resale. We decided to do reselling which is a painful business that is not worth the time. It is low margin, the APIs are annoying, the taxes confusing and so on. The time and energy I focused on it the last two years were largely pointless. I should have focused on other things like growing revenue without the need of an AWS. Reselling isn’t glamorous and is monotonous.

Standardization​

Because of the failures listed above we will be changing the business. For the next stage of our growth we are going to focus on a few things and deemphasize many others.

  1. One Brand. Everything will be under the opsZero brand. No ifs and buts. I will no longer be dealing with multiple brands. It is just a pain to deal with and we already have the opsZero brand being strong anyways so it doesn't make sense to manage multiple brands.
  2. Product First. We will incrementally release new product under opsZero. Since we are limiting the focus to just opsZero.com it will make it easier to develop.
  3. Aggressive Direct Sales. We will build our own sales team that will be aggressive in nature looking to grow the company.
  4. Limited Resell. We will only do resell if it makes sense, it is not the core part of our business. We will only do resale for companies we provide DevOps services.
  5. Limited Partnerships. We are going to do direct sales and focus our energies on that. We will only do partnerships if there is value. Going direct to customer is better than having an in between. What this means is growing the company internally. To focus on increasing the size of the company.

Verticals​

opsZero has been chasing every niche and this hasn't been fruitful. This has us chasing enterprises, SMBs, startups, etc., etc. This has proven to be ineffective. Each industry has a different tempo, requirements and style. Each is different from the other and we haven't created a tempo of outreach. Chasing after healthcare companies is difficult versus chasing after enterprise, etc.

So we will focus on just three verticals that are under served and where we can drive a lot of value:

  1. Startups. I do believe that the startup ecosystem will move to India and the USA market will dry up as capital costs increase due to the Iran War. So new startups will largely die off, but for the time being this is still a primary area we need to go after.
  2. SMB. There are a lot of SMBs in second tier cities that don't have expertise that need DevOps. We can gain significant leverage in these areas.
  3. SLED. City and local governments will need support as their taxes crash when the US economy tanks. They will need to be more efficient. SLED is complex but it will allow us to become sticky overtime.

Solutions​

We are diversifying from the Cloud to be more Hybrid Cloud. Especially, with the Iranian attacks on the AWS UAE data centers the age of centralization is over. As the American Empire crumbles the centralization of power into American companies like AWS also starts to reduce. So decentralization becomes the norm again.

  • DevOps. The basis of our go to market. We do all DevOps with OpenTofu/Terraform as the basis.
  • Kubernetes. Kubernetes is our bread and butter. We will focus on making this the core of our value. Moving Windows, Linux, etc. workloads to Kubernetes is a primary goal.
  • Identity. Setup and manage identity solutions.
  • Compliance. Focusing on HIPAA, SOC2, PCI-DSS, etc.
  • Datasets. Build and host core datasets for companies that want to use these for their own specific use cases.
  • DBA. Database and performance tuning to lower the cost of compute for companies.
  • AI. Low cost AI compute solutions such as running workloads on Macs, etc.
  • Savings. Resale business, but we will likely limit to just the Cloud.

One of the goals with the products side is to focus on build out using open source.

New World Order​

With the Iran War we will see a rather fast destruction of the American Empire. Wealth and power will move to the East specifically India and China. Incidentally, I also think this means multinationals will move East as well. With a drop in the dollar and a lack of growth opportunities in the US a period of stagflation will take over the country and a debt crisis will essentially cut the dollar's value by 50%. Low growth and high inflation means hiring people in the US becomes an economic burden resulting in wholesale migration of jobs East.

Multinationals are not inherently tied to a location. They move as needed to different jurisdictions based on their focus on profitability. This is nothing new and has been a constant throughout history. This disadvantages SMBs and startups that don’t have these relationships or ability to build businesses in India. Migration of these roles to India is the area that we will target.

However, as multinationals and other companies didn’t die when the British Empire collapsed there is a way to get through to the other side of the American Collapse. We need to understand that we are moving to a:

  • Low Energy. As Middle East War rages the amount of energy drops by 25% for the foreseeable future. Low energy will also affect other things such as chips and food. Overall, energy becomes exceedingly expensive.
  • Resource Poor. With energy going up the amount of resources such as capital that is available to people and businesses will reduce. This means there will likely be less capital intensive businesses that will become the norm.

To address this situation we must force ourselves towards two specific goals.

  • Low cost. We will focus on being the low cost provider. Our goal is to drive costs further down.
  • Standardization. Standardize all parts of the business and continuously reduce costs for ourselves and our customers.

Hindurastra​

Lastly, the goal of our business is to strengthen and turn India into a Hindurastra. As the American Empire dies, Sanatana Dharma will be a dominant force in the world. India will have a difficult time for the next few years, but once the 30s come along there will be a rapid acceleration of energy and focus with India becoming one of the major forces alongside China.

When this happens Indians will notice that Hindu Dharma is the driving force of the world. With Buddhism in China or Yoga in America. This will lead to a recognition of India's spiritual contribution to the world and a return to our roots. The timeframe around the 2040s is when India will become a spiritual power again.

So our goal until then is to grow internally using Sanatana Dharma as our core.