By Sudhir Chowdhary
Data centres are an important part of infrastructure and there are several sectors spurring this growth, says Sunil Gupta, executive-director & president of Netmagic, an NTT Communications company and a leading managed hosting and cloud service provider. “There is increased demand in this niche segment on account of a number of government-led initiatives, such as Digital India, Startup India, adoption of JAM (Jan Dhan Yojana, Aadhaar, Mobile),” he tells Sudhir Chowdhary in a recent interaction.
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Excerpts:
How do you look at India’s data centre market today?
With the growing economic and technology transformation today, India’s data centre market is witnessing a healthy growth. According to the latest estimates from Gartner, the Indian data centre infrastructure market will total $2 billion in 2016. I see tremendous opportunity in this space and right now we are growing faster than the market.
Data centres are an important part of infrastructure and there are several sectors spurring this growth. Digital India, Startup India, Stand Up India, adoption of JAM (Jan Dhan Yojana, Aadhaar, Mobile), and the roll out of the national optic fibre network for the Digital India initiative will rub off positively on the data centre business. Emerging technologies like Big Data, analytics, software-defined everything and Internet of Things (IoT) has led to accelerating demand of data centre consolidation and virtualisation.
Growing e-commerce businesses, startups and large enterprises alike expect data centre companies to host their IT infrastructure so that a company uses whatever is needed (like real-estate, connectivity, IT systems etc.) on a subscription basis. Also, more and more companies are becoming aware of disaster recovery, resulting in them approaching data centres. Then, there is increased demand of global companies to have their data centres in India to operate their corporate offices in India, besides having their data centre in their head quarters.
How do you see the data centre industry evolving especially in the wake of the e-commerce boom?
We do realise there is a huge demand for data centre resources from a large number of startups in the industry. All cloud providers including large and small provide them plain vanilla cloud capacity, but what they ultimately need is to be able to put their IT applications on a hybrid IT infrastructure, which may be a combination of in-house data centre, outsourced hosting, private cloud and public cloud of various vendors. We are working with these players and planning to create product bundles where we will not only provide our cloud offerings and manage hosting, but also provide the value added cloud offerings of other competitors, while still giving a single inter cloud interface to manage all these instances.
What new technologies do you think will lead to innovations in the datacentres?
There is an accelerating shift of IT services from traditional enterprise data centres into the co-location, managed services and consuming IT as a service. Consumption of IT as service is driving new technologies, which can be broadly referred to as software-defined everything (SDE). This (SDN) is changing the way networks are built and managed. It is enabling agility and security with reduced operational cost and complexity, in networks. SDN is transforming the landscape in the data centre by enabling connectivity mechanisms simply not feasible using legacy options.
While cloud computing is surely the buzzword today, however, enterprise customers want to approach their IT with a personalised experience. What kind of cloud driven innovations are you bringing in to augment this?
Netmagic provides cloud computing services to clients through— SimpliCloud, a world-class compute within-the-cloud offering. SimpliCloud enables online provisioning, management and pay as-you-use model for IT Infrastructure via the web, anytime, anyplace. Netmagic Solutions is among the few cloud computing service providers that can deliver the real power of the cloud at your fingertips. We use state-of-the-art server infrastructure and high-speed backbones to provide cloud hosting services.
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Customers looking for managed private cloud service can now overcome the entry barriers typically encountered for private cloud adoption. Netmagic’s new SimpliVPC (Virtual Private Cloud) will provide customers with consistent performance under their control, and facilitate the flexibility to play around with their virtual pool of resources at will. This new service will leverage Netmagic’s common service bus architecture to readily provide all Netmagic infrastructure services. Customers will be able to leverage the true value of hybrid clouds at ease by integrating with Netmagic public cloud services.
Today’s startups are interested to go with minimum capex/opex and maximum RoI. How can Netmagic help in this direction?
Startups generally enter the market with limited capex focusing on running their core business and they prefer the third-party to take care of their back-end operations, which enables them to yield scalable and profitable business. At Netmagic, we provide managed hosting services for organisations who are looking forward to everything on a subscription basis, without they heading to purchase anything on capex. We take care of all their hassles of AMCs and maintenance of servers, and equipments of data centre.
Furthermore, customers can leverage the pay-as-you use offerings and pay even on hourly basis, and optimise opex cost by using infrastructure as in when necessary for businesses. This allows scalability as in when required, without incurring capex.
How are Netmagic’s offerings different from what other competitors are offering to the enterprise community today?
We have been a pioneer in the Indian IT infrastructure services space since the last two decades. We were the first to launch services such as cloud computing, managed security, disaster recovery-as-a-service and software-defined storage. Netmagic also delivers remote infrastructure management (RIM) services through NTT Com’s Global Management One service to global customers across Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific region.
Our business is a combination of multiple businesses—cloud player, end-to-end managed services and co-location services provider to all our clients including medium, large, very large and global enterprises. And, to manage this 24×7 complex hybrid IT environment, Netmagic also runs network operation centres, and the customer gets everything from a single player like us.
We are hugely focused on customer needs and manage 24×7 supporting multiple technologies equipped with skill-sets across various platforms. We have also invested heavily in R&D, for example, our cloud orchestration is totally developed in-house by us, and this enables Netmagic to scale up and bring in more new features before my competition could bring in.
Also, we are also investing heavily in automating our business processes to provide a seamless experience to our customers. Our customers not only buy quality services from us, but they also buy quality experience.
Lastly, what’s interesting is the entrepreneurial passion and startup element remains in our DNA that always propels us to keep ourselves updated and relevant to our customers’ needs. Our employees are flexible, and hard-working with a customer-centric approach.
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