Public sector telecom company BSNL has signed a deal with the Ahmedabad-based information technology solutions firm Sai InfoSystem (SIS) to set up four Internet data centres in the country.

These four centres are coming up as part of BSNL’s plan to roll out 10 data centres in the country with an eye on the emerging cloud business opportunity. BSNL and SIS will set up centres at Bangalore, Kolkata, Hyderabad and Chertala in Kerala.

These data centres are Tier-III (a high level certification), offering high availability of services, V. Srinivasan, Chief General Manager (CGM-Andhra Pradesh) of BSNL, said, while announcing the launch of the data centre at Patancheru near here on Tuesday.

It spent Rs 40 crore on setting up the Hyderabad facility, which will be managed jointly by the two alliance partners.

The telecom firm is expecting a business of Rs 75 crore from four centres in this financial year.

Srinivasan said the firm would help cooperative banks embrace core banking technologies. “We will sign a five-year deal. We can provide services within a week to 10 days after approaching us,” he said.

New avenue

BSNL hopes to open up a new avenue of business by offering data, IT and cloud services as well as bandwidth sale for consumption of these services. “Data centres would help small and medium enterprises quickly acquire information technology solutions without having to bother about setting up and maintaining their own infrastructure. It will significantly result in reduced capital expenditure and operational expenditure,” he said.

The duo would offer all the cloud-based services such as software-as-a-service, Microsoft Exchange (email service)-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service and storage- as-a-service.

New towers

BSNL would open 2,000 cell towers in the State, include 800 in Hyderabad, to expand services and reduce call drops.

> kurmanath.kanchi@thehindu.co.in

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