P. Sridhar Reddy, Chief Executive Officer of CtrlS, claims that his company is India’s only data centre that can guarantee 99.995 per cent availability or uptime (in industry parlance) to customers. Its centres near Mumbai and Hyderabad are Tier-4 certified; they can withstand earthquakes, floods, fires, and have stringent security zones.
The firm, funded by IDBI and hedge fund Orch-Ziff, competes with the likes of Reliance IDC, Tata Communications, Sify and Netmagic and others, for a slice of India’s outsourced data centre market that is estimated to grow to Rs 5,500 crore by 2015. A data centre holds the servers, storage and networking gear in which companies store and process data relevant to them. Though many companies have their internal data centres, many are now handing over data centre responsibilities to third parties.
In a freewheeling chat with Business Line, Reddy, a serial entrepreneur, who founded the company in 2008, explains why the data centre market in India is set to grow. Edited excerpts.
Third party data centres in India are like fortresses where security is taken to an altogether different level. Some of the security procedures seen in India are not prevalent in data centres in the West…
Before we started the company, we visited several data centres around the world and made a lot of observations. We quickly realised that Indian civic infrastructure is quite different from the West – especially when it comes to policing. For example, load shedding in a developed country makes for headlines, whereas in India it is a daily occurrence.
Considering that data are usually the lifeline of our customers’ business, we are very particular that our facilities must have the best available security, both physical and virtual. We decided to bridge the gap while building our centres. For example, our Mumbai facility has eight security zones that a visitor must pass through, before actually entering the data centre. These zones include crash-proof perimeter wall and gate, bullet proof doors, biometric secure entrance, among others.
Traditionally, Indian companies like to have assets under their control. There is hesitancy in parting with something as crucial as a data centre to a third party provider. Is that changing, given the increasing costs and fluctuating power situation in the country?
There are companies that view captive data centres as the most secure, but this is changing in India very rapidly. Chief Information Officers (CIOs) are getting progressive and wish to leverage technology and ensure that the organisation is catapulted to a better market position. Such CIOs are ahead of the curve and are outsourcing their IT infrastructure requirements to external data cent, all of which ensures huge savings in terms of the total cost of ownership.
So far, CtrlS has been establishing and managing data centres for customers from an alternative location. How about sending your staff to work on the customers’ captive data centre? Is that a model that interests you?
We have come across such opportunities. Even though we own and operate tier-4 data centres, we realise that there is only so much that human intervention can do in keeping a data centre up and running. We have offered consulting services and assistance to some of our clients who have asked for our suggestions while upgrading their data centre infrastructure. We are also exploring sale and lease back transactions and joint ventures with some large customers.
The company recently ventured into overseas territory by establishing a data centre in California, US, a market which is well served by other data centre providers. What was the thinking behind this move?
You are right. The US is a saturated market with established names doing quite well. Rather than offering similar services, our focus is to provide unique offerings that can help address the ‘business issues’ of our clients. We are looking at a growth rate of 10-15 per cent in the US market, which would be a fair achievement for us.
After the US, which other geographies would the company tap into?
We are considering several possibilities at this point of time: UAE to cater to West Asia while Singapore and Australia are being evaluated for the Asia Pacific markets. Our core offerings would be disaster recovery and cloud based services. We should also venture into West Asia soon.