Co-location and managed hosting are most sought after: Bhaskar Vadlamani, Pi DATACENTERS

With real-time data driven industry as the key stake holder, the data centre market would take leaps towards being much beyond the regular bricks-and-mortar facilities and develop to be the smart and intelligent enablers. Bhaskar Vadlamani, CCO, Pi DATACENTERS, shares his views

What’s your view on the current overall Indian data centre market?
Indian data centre market is catching up at a fast pace vis-a-vis its already matured global counterparts. The lag in adoption is balanced with the fact that we get to onboard the latest and greatest of technologies avoiding the long transformation cycles. Digitisation wave already hitting the Indian shores has given us a head start. The data centre market is prone to grow multiple folds in the years to come, inviting huge investments from across the globe. With real-time data driven industry as the key stake holder, the data centre market would take leaps towards being much beyond the regular bricks-and-mortar facilities and develop to be the smart and intelligent enablers. This gives a long runway and scope of opportunity for service providers to innovate and grow along with the growing industry.

Enterprises today demand smart and intelligent data centres with inbuilt features like scalability, flexibility, reliability, integrity and security to support their growth cycles. High availability of infrastructure elements to avoid downtimes is of significance for enterprises to ensure resilience. Enterprises are aiming to make their applications available on a real-time basis to their customers and have a quicker time to market. Features like self-service and automated provisioning would avoid any possible delays in provisioning of data centres and making it up and running on a click, would derive highly competitive value to enterprises today.

The demands from this conscious end-user are helping to increase the innovation quotient from the service provider’s side. Most of the players are yet to travel this path, but the journey is inevitable.

Which services are in demand, from your company’s perspective?
Along with co-location and managed hosting being most sought after lines of services from Pi, we also see a lot of traction at the cloud hosting and managed services front. With the startup culture in India on an upswing, our hosted cloud solutions are already seeing some serious traction. These solutions are touted to be the most sought after, as they help SMEs/startups to go operational on the click of a mouse and be market ready in no time.

The evolving nature of these enterprises might not allow them to diversify investments and manpower in building sophisticated, scalable and highly secured databanks. That is where we as Pi, being a software defined strategic data centre with our flagship cloud framework, come in to deliver top-of-the-league end-to-end data centre services with high level of automation, self-service and a strong managed services layer, that just suits the dynamic nature of the market and delivers the best to end users.

Enterprises can optimise their cost by channelising their resources to their core, and not spread too thin across non-core elements of their business, like IT operations. Hyperscale enterprises are seeing lot of value in choosing us, as their partner of choice for collocating their far DR with us, owing to our strategic location from a seismic zone perspective and being TCO optimal vis-a-vis the other metro locations in the country. We are also seeing significant traction from the Middle East and APAC.

Being SAP certified for our DC infrastructure and cloud, we are observing increased adoption of our cloud and data centre from the enterprises with significant SAP footprint and workload. Our services around IoT and Analytics-as-a-Service, are enabling enterprises to do real-time decision making and analytics of their data pool in the right way, at the right time.

As an aftermath of us witnessing recurring calamities globally off late, latest being something like the Mumbai and Chennai washouts, at Pi, our architecture is practical, scalable and state-of-the-art, to be just the right choice for DR for enterprises of all ticket sizes, to keep both natural and man-made disasters at bay. Our automated DR solutions, leveraging the stable Harbour1 platform, address the traditional issue faced by most Indian enterprises of not many global class options being available to them in India for an on-the-fly, on demand DR.

What’s your average year-on-year growth rate in India?
The Indian data centre market is today standing at $3 billion mark and would hit the $5 billion mark by 2020. Owing to the tremendous data pools generated and the digital wave in India, the market would continue to grow. The opportunities for the service providers are equally huge, owing to the continuously growing market.

Please name some of your major clients in India.
Being under stringent non-disclosure clauses with our customer, we might not be able to explicitly name them, but we can surely tell you that we have critical installation of few state governments, couple of banks are running their primary and secondary core banking environment on our cloud, not to mention some famed BFSI and Fintech, IT/ITES and large national universities running their core environments on hybrid model with us.