udaan accelerates its unicorn journey with Azure SQL Database, saves on infrastructure costs

Until udaan burst onto the business scene in India in 2016, the owners of micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) found it tough to achieve real profitability. Many Indian shopkeepers are sole proprietors struggling to serve customers, maintain their storefronts, and keep up with the behind-the-scenes work—especially sourcing inventories. Replenishing and sourcing new stock usually meant visiting suppliers in person, sacrificing precious customer-facing time to travel to and from warehouses. Ironically, many of the people connecting suppliers and sellers often inflated prices without providing any value-added service. They also limited the choice of suppliers for their seller customers. Challenges like these discouraged many people from going into the MSME market.

Enter udaan, widely regarded as the fastest-growing unicorn in India by 2019, just three years after its founding. (Unicorns are startup companies with a value of more than USD1 billion.) As of that same year, udaan had linked more than 3 million sellers in 900 cities with 25,000 suppliers. Now, udaan includes 30,000 suppliers, and many fledgling entrepreneurs cite the company as the reason they made the plunge. “New sellers know that they can source their inventory quickly and easily,” says Prince Bansal, Software Engineer at udaan. “We have innumerable success stories of our customers using udaan as a B2B e-commerce platform to enable their businesses to take off.”

With new markets and business avenues continually opening, udaan’s rise continues. The fuel for this unicorn’s rocket? Cloud services via Microsoft Azure and the Azure SQL family of SQL cloud database technologies, particularly Azure SQL Database, which supports udaan’s developers as they craft the apps that bring new possibilities to the B2B space in India.

Extending a helping hand—and a connection—to India’s B2B community

According to India Briefing, more than 63 million micro and small businesses light up the economy in India, home to the world’s second-largest MSME base. All the sector needed to unlock its full potential were easier connections between sellers and the wholesalers who supply them. Because sellers typically needed to visit each supplier’s warehouse, many who sold multiple lines struggled to offer the variety they wanted to provide to their customers because of the time, effort, and expense involved. This limited many suppliers to transactions with sellers in the immediate vicinity.

Sellers starting up or expanding their business depended on bank loans, which were often difficult to get. Alternatively, they could apply for credit offered by wholesalers, frequently at unfavorable interest rates. And the control exerted by those in the middle over the pool of available suppliers suppressed extensive choice.

udaan’s e-commerce technology gave sellers a way to expand their inventory options and kickstart productivity. The company built centralized warehouses to relieve wholesalers of inventory management burdens and make it easy for MSME business owners to stock their shelves with more options. And with affordable financing from udaan, those business owners have new opportunities for growth. Key to making it all come together? Information, delivered at scale with SQL Database and Azure storage technologies.

Building a high-volume platform with Azure SQL Database

udaan adopted Azure from the beginning, enjoying the scalability and performance offered by the platform. The udaan team naturally turned to SQL Database for its stellar service-level agreements (SLAs) of up to 99.995 percent and out-of-the-box capabilities. It’s a fully managed SQL database that takes maintenance tasks away from busy IT teams. “The SLAs offered by Azure SQL Database were very enticing for us,” says Bansal. “The Business Critical service tier delivers a 99.995 percent SLA, or up to 4.32 seconds of downtime per day, which is really low—I don’t know of a faster option.” 

udaan also touts the Microsoft architecture underlying the Azure platform. The company turned to Azure Cosmos DB to run several essential services. “We completely depend on SQL Database and use Azure Cosmos DB for document databases,” adds Bansal. His team also uses Azure Database for MySQL when they need a more lightweight data storage solution for limited queries. 

Bansal and his team appreciate the database options and the multifaceted, event-driven Azure SQL Database Serverless compute tier. Using the tool set makes it easy for them to horizontally scale Azure SQL Database with an auto pause feature. Usage is charged by second rather than hour, making it easy for the udaan team to optimize costs. “Most of our databases run under the Business Critical tier because we need that performance level,” says Bansal. “But we chose Azure SQL Database Serverless for one of our databases so that we can use the auto-pause feature to suspend processing at night, when it’s not needed for that application. That option delivers huge cost reductions for udaan.”

The company also depends on Azure core storage solutions, including Azure Blob Storage, Azure Table Storage, and Azure Files. And it uses insights from Azure Databricks reports to plan and optimize operations. Azure Cache for Redis is its primary memory cache.

The udaan team relies on Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery but hasn’t needed to use those capabilities. “We operate in almost every major city in India,” explains Bansal. “The service we get from Microsoft and the high availability are important to our nationwide presence.”

Focusing on growth, leaving the infrastructure to Azure SQL

The imagination that led udaan’s founders to fill a critical gap in India continues to power the company’s expansion into related areas. It’s adding a digital warehousing management system and a logistics platform to its offerings, improving the flow of goods between suppliers and sellers.

udaan owes its tremendous success to a combination of inspiration and hard work that earned B2B customer trust, combined with on-point technology. “We earned the trust of both wholesalers and sellers,” says Bansal. “When they realized that we could provide a reliable e-commerce platform that they could easily use, our business boomed. They regard udaan as their rescuer, and now we’re expanding into markets as diverse as pharmaceuticals, lifestyle, and electronics, with more growth every year.” He lauds the universal application of SQL Database and related technologies. Thanks to the fact that udaan's developers don’t have to worry about administering SQL Database, they can focus on application development. Their proficiency with the technology continues to lift udaan.

Kaushik Mukherjee, Head of Software Engineering at udaan, is gratified by the support udaan developers received from Microsoft engineers early in the deployment. “Our udaan engineers optimize our use of Azure SQL Database, thanks to the thorough knowledge transfer and support Microsoft provided,” he says. “Our team experienced tremendous professional growth, and we are able to use the solution more independently and innovatively because of their expertise.”

Ultimately though, he values the benefits that accrue from a technology that grows with the needs of customers like udaan. “I would point any small business requiring a highly performant relational database in a platform as a service environment to Azure SQL Database,” he concludes. “Like other Microsoft solutions, it offers a technological edge. Azure SQL Database is always up to date. After five years, it’s still our choice for udaan. Azure SQL managed services have been a major factor in our success.”

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