TigerCloud is a private Cloud solution stack aimed at SMBs. By Heena Jhingan
US-based IT products company Zenith Infotech has announced a Cloud offering for Indian SMBs. TigerCloud is a converged infrastructure play for SMBs.
A lesser known name in the Indian IT solutions market, Zenith Infotech’s CEO, Akash Saraf, was upbeat about the solution and optimistic that it could prove to be game changer in this space. The company has already launched the solution in the US and claimed to be serving around 6,000 clients there.
According to Saraf of Zenith Infotech, the Cloud market in India can be pegged at about $80 mn and most solutions that are available in the market are focused at the requirements of large enterprises and telcos. Although the SMB space is being projected as a segment that will be an early adopter of Cloud services, the market still lacks private Cloud options for these players.
Saraf argued that IT infrastructure was headed for convergence and that Cloud adoption was mostly driven by the need for business continuity. Consequently, TigerCloud was designed to offer a private Cloud, business continuity and backup in a single solution.
Packaging the product
TigerCloud is powered by the Intel Xeon E3 processor family, DBS1200BTS board and 320 series SSDs. Debjani Ghosh, Managing Director, Sales and Marketing, Intel South Asia, said, “The solution offers higher responsiveness with nearly 30% better performance over the prior generation of servers. We have never had a product targeted at SMBs at this price point.”
Explaining that the next generation of Cloud environments had to be federated so that data sharing could occur beyond public and private Cloud environments, Ghosh said that even enterprises were looking at solutions that were client aware and automated.
The fundamental assumption behind the adoption of the Cloud, especially among SMBs, is the goal of attaining cost-effectiveness and this what Zenith is attempting to help SMBs achieve. It is hopeful of capturing about 200 customers within the first year of the launch of the product.
Strategy & competition
Aware that players like Cisco and IBM have been going hammer and tongs at the SMB segment, Zenith Infotech was confident that none of the solutions could match its price.
“We have invested over Rs. 200 crores in R&D to arrive at this solution for SMBs, built around Microsoft’s Hyper-V technology. For a similar converged infrastructure product profile, a customer is required to spend somewhere around Rs. 50 lakhs but we have brought down this down to about Rs. 4 lakhs. Having compared our product against offerings from Google and Amazon, our product is almost 64% cheaper,” Saraf said.
Confident that the newly launched product would be able to replicate the response that it had earned in the US market, Saraf claimed,“ For the first time, we decided to go the other way. We first launched the solution in a more difficult market like the US and then brought it to India.”
He said that the company was aware that the Indian SMB market had potential but said that price had been a big deterrent in the past.
Market watchers believed that Zenith’s move in the Indian market was timely and could give it the desired mileage as Indian SMBs are price sensitive. Even though the Indian IT market is clearly dominated by large players, which have their own game plans to tap SMBs, Zenith, could carve out a niche by aligning with the right kind of partners to approach the market.
