Freshdesk has sights set on global growth

Born-in-the-cloud customer support startup Freshdesk said it has plans to take advantage of the elasticity of its cloud infrastructure to continue the global expansion of its business.

Speaking to ZDNet, Krishnenjit Roy, Freshdesk director of IT operations, said having recently secured $50 million in funding, as well as opening a Sydney office, there are plans to grow the team in Australia by attracting more talent.

Underpinning the expansion plans will be the company's public cloud infrastructure that's hosted by Amazon Web Services from datacentres located on the east coast of the United States and Ireland.

Initially, when the company was first established in 2010 in Chennai, India, Roy said the company had hired managed cloud services provider Engine Yard to take care of all infrastructure necessities -- a relationship that lasted for one-and-a-half years.

But following experiments with AWS' Red Shift and ECS, and seeing the benefits, the company made the decision to gradually move its entire infrastructure onto AWS.

Roy explained one of biggest benefits the company saw in making the move was having greater control over its own infrastructure.

"Engine Yard used to control everything for us; here [on AWS] we could control the environment, we could control the database, we could see what was going on in the database," he said.

Another benefit was a reduction in cost.

"When you have few systems you don't really see the cost benefit, but when you have a large system you do. We were growing rapidly. Right now we have more than 55,000 customers, which has grown from two years ago when it was only 8,000. We're seeing rapid scale and we could not have imagined scaling up the infrastructure had it not been provided by Amazon," Roy said.

Roy said expansion plans will also see the onboarding of the infrastructure of its recent acquisitions -- 1Click and Frilp -- into its AWS infrastructure.

While there are no immediate plans for any more acquisitions, Roy said they won't rule it out as a strategy further down the track.

"We just want to concentrate on building what we provide and build that desktop service for our customers," he said.

Disclosure: Aimee Chanthadavong travelled to AWS re:Invent 2015 with Amazon Web Services.