The Jelastic Spotlight: Aravind Kumar and Agriya ACE

| September 28, 2012
This week's Jelastic Spotlight comes to you from India! We have a large and growing user base there and this is the first of many Spotlights to come, I am sure. Our interviewee this week is working on a pretty cool project that allows you to run your own online marketplace.
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Don't forget! We want to hear from you! If you are working on a project that you have running on Jelastic and you would like to get some visibility, we would love to feature it here on the blog.

Aravind Kumar and Agriya ACE

Hey, Aravind. Thanks for taking the time to do this. So, tell me, where are you from?

Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India

Is that where you are currently based?

Yeah. Our operations are completely based in Chennai.

Tell me a little about yourself and background.

Well, I am currently the CTO of Ahsan Technologies Pvt ltd, where I over see all the technology aspects of the business. Prior to this, I worked as perl developer at Cricinfo, which is now, interestingly enough, owned by ESPN.

Nice. Guess you were doing something right! What are you working on now?

Our company has developed the Agriya ACE (Activities, Courses, Events) marketplace script. Basically, it enables you to run your own activities/courses/events marketplace. It is a little similar to Vayable, Uniiverse, Gidsy, SkillShare and Udemy, but with its own twist. Event organizers can use it as a booking platform and leverage social features to sell their services. The owners of the site can then earn revenue for every booking made on their website.

You can see how one of our clients is using our product at http://www.shareknowledge.co.nz/.

How do you like Jelastic? Is it working for you?

We are really happy that Jelastic supports the Play! framework and MongoDB. Our app is built on these technologies. For our company, Agriya, needed the capability of selling more than 10,000 copies of most of our products. So, that scalability feature really matters. Our customers are very happy with Jelastic’s auto-scaling features. Jelastic’s smooth WAR deployment is also great time saving feature.

And I can't forget to give a shout out to Jelastic support. They always stand out, especially Anton Liaskovskyi. That guy is a machine!

What are your future plans for your application?

ACE currently supports activities/courses/events that are held in physical locations. The following items are in the roadmap:
1. Growth Hacking Module – Best practices to increase user growth.
2. Online Module – Enabling users to sell ready-made videos/courses.
3. Live Streaming Module – Enabling users to conduct classes remotely.
4. iPhone and Android apps – Through our CSSilize.com, PSD to XHTML/HTML5/CSS/Native Mobile Apps conversion service.

Last questions: how would you say that Java has affected you life?

Java, especially the Play! framework, has enabled us to jump into the enterprise stack. With its enterprise ecosystem, it’s easy for us to scale our products and help our customer to grow and scale easily. With the JVM and compile-time error checks, our applications have fewer errors.

Thanks for your time, Aravind.

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