For ensuring that India leads in improving the quality and resiliency of data center infrastructure, Express Computer partnered with the global Data Center Leader, NTT, and organised a Data Center Thought Leaders forum, with a primary focus on discussing and sharing the best practices and perspectives on how Indian companies can raise the bar for improving their uptime and performance by leveraging emerging technologies, frameworks and best practices.
The conference took place in the evening hours of 11th August at ITC Grand Maratha (Andheri) and saw full house participation from the industry experts.
The session was opened with a keynote by Shekhar Sharma, CEO, NTT Com India PVT LTD. Addressing the gathering with a warm welcome, Shekhar acknowledged NTT’s ‘over a century old remarkable’ journey from the era of the telegraph to telecom; he shared his expertise on various issues like data center connectivity, the evolution of the Indian data center’s industry, growth in the Internet economy, and the growing shift from data centers to cloud. Talking about the future prospects that NTT is looking at, he also shared NTT’s aim of doubling capacity almost every 2 years and catering to at least 30% of the market by 2027.
India’s leading full-stack service provider
Stating the statistics, Shekhar proudly announced, “NTT Ltd., the 120-year-old venture currently has a total revenue of 10.4 bn USD, with 5000 focussed clients, PAN-India service delivery, 12 data centers and 48,000 people around in the world; NTT is serving in 200 countries”. He also mentioned that NTT was investing globally to meet local needs.
Explosive Growth in the Internet Economy
During his presentation, he emphasised the explosive growth in the Internet economy, “Digital payments have grown at a CAGR of 55% over the past 5 years. India is currently the world’s fastest-growing OTT market. Festive sales on E-com platforms grew to USD 8.3 bn in 2020 from USD 5 bn in 2019.”
Shekhar further touched upon the future growth plan of NTT, “We are working towards, doubling the capacity today almost every 2-2.5 years, and our aim is to cater to at least 30% market offering with best in class data centers regardless of the location or scale. We aim to keep on innovating keeping in mind our ambitious goal of achieving net zero operations by 2030.”
The Data Center story: Present & Future
After a descriptive presentation, an insightful panel discussion highlighting “the role of data center’s and their growth in the era of digital transformation” was discussed among leading cloud providers. The discussion was well-moderated by Matt Gyde, Chief Marketing and Demand Generation Officer, NTT. Among the panelists were Sudhir Kakkar, VP Reliance Jio, Neilmani Sahu, Head IT, JSW Paint, Vimal Kaw, AVP – Product & Services ( Colocation), NTT.
On asking about the trends in the data center marketplace, Sudhir Kakkar, VP, Reliance Jio from a market point of view said “the adoption of cloud in the past few years, the digitilisation drive by PM Modi and the way telco’s are adopting the infrastructure, are all leading to an entire change in the digital economy of India”. Quoting the example of pandemic he said, “the adoption of cloud, acquisition of 5g network and machine-machine learning, the number of data centers will triple up by 2025, the next 10 years seems to be good for India from CAGR and telco point of view.
In consent with Sudhir’s point of view, another panelist Neilmani Sahu, Head IT, JSW Paint sought his opinion by walking down the audience through the memory lane from the floppy desk to the edge. According to him, digital transformation has a few tiers attached to it-People, Processes, technology, and data which cause data-driven transformation. He shared,” Upcoming trends like IoT, connecting ecosystem, the explosion of the data center would happen and to manage these exposition data centers are required. The marriage between Datacenter and 5g will lead to the next revolution and open up a lot of opportunities.
Sharing his views from a sales perspective, Vimal, AVP – Product & Services ( Colocation), NTT shared that he looks at the edge as retail’s spillover business which comes from tier 1 cities like Mumbai and Chennai. On asking about the future of hyperscalers in India, Vimal answered “Earlier in 2011-12, India was not ready for hyperscalers but today with rapid digitilisation, and better technology available the volume is growing. He added, “If we are able to manage the cost, cope up with the technology within the timeline, India will see immense growth in terms of data centers”
Following the insightful discussion, Anindya Das, Associate VP, Product Engineering & Innovation, NTT; took over the stage and discussed “The Connected Data Centers of the Future”, he began by addressing NTT- Communication as the hero of NTT as a whole. He proudly stated that as a team “we have built a lot of data center’s in the world ranging from The North American countries, to Europe and the Asian part of the world and that NTT was the first one to launch VAN services. Further, he also touched upon the NTT globally managed networks India network services portfolio, cloud connect value proposition, the MIST cable system and data center interconnect services which enables provisioning of bandwidth connectivity between any of NTT DC’s in India.
He concluded his presentation by highlighting NTT’s cloud connect services which provide dedicated, secured, and pre-provisioned connectivity to all major public cloud providers like Azure, AWS, and GCP for ensuring faster delivery and stringent network performance.
The concluding hour’s witnessed a power-packed discussion between the audience and key speakers, followed by a special address of thanks by Prasenjit Roy, Business & Digital Transformation Leader, NTT.