How iZooto leveraged open-source technology on Microsoft Azure to build a market winning product

For startups with limited funds, the best way to go is open source, says Sachin Grover, Founder and CTO at iZooto. The world’s first owned audience marketing platform allows marketers to send app customised push notifications to subscribers through the mobile, tablet and desktop platforms and own their audience.

Operating on a massive scale, sending over 30 billion push notifications a month, the CTO says they rely completely on open-source technology. “There is a lot of literature on open sources on the internet, making it simple for users.”

iZooto is hosted on Microsoft Azure. The cloud services from Microsoft offers a wide range of open-source databases to choose from in addition to several proprietary options. And no matter how a startup likes to store data, there's an open-source option on Azure that will fit their needs.

However, there were more reasons why iZooto looked to Azure to meet its needs. “When we began our journey, we saw that traffic, scale and data streaming were some of the most utilised services on our platform. So, our major consideration was that there should be on-demand instances and Azure made a perfect fit here. We also wanted managed services because our team wasn't big, and on Azure, open-source services are managed, giving us better manageability of Open Source In addition to the technical reasons that made Azure a great choice, Microsoft also has a Go To Market(GTM) programme. As a startup that is building a product, marketing and sales happen on the go. We knew the GTM programme would help us grow faster vis-a-vis if we were to do it all by ourselves.”

Having helped some of the biggest brands optimise push notifications, the startup is now working on applying the same fundamental concepts on other channels to help businesses own their audience.

In this interview with YourStory, Sachin deep dives into the early days of iZooto, the challenges they faced and how they overcame them by leveraging open source technology.