AS Rajgopal, MD & CEO, NxtGen Datacenter & Cloud Technologies, in a conversation with Express Computer, talks about the company’s unique data center services, the Indian cloud market and NxtGen’s plans for the future
What are the top two or three key differentiators for NxtGen that distinguish it from other players in the Indian enterprise market?
IT organisations today, are business enablers and they need to constantly adopt new applications and technologies to enable business agility. At NxtGen, we are working on providing a long term solution on the IT infrastructure to run the new applications and technologies without the traditional bottlenecks.
We are working on providing an “Infinite Datacenter” for enterprises as a long-term solution to address their infrastructure needs for a dynamic business. With an ‘Infinite Datacenter’, the IT organisation can focus on enabling the business with new applications and technologies and have no concerns about their infrastructure.
Furthermore, we enable enterprises to adopt the hybrid world. We have pioneered the On-Premise Datacenter (OPDC) solution and are investing in a large hosting facility for the cloud infrastructure in Bangalore. Our Enterprise Cloud Services has already delivered business value for many customers, both at customer premises and from within our own facilities. Going forward, these customers can leverage on our cloud services to meet their dynamic infrastructure needs.
While there is more hype around public cloud,do you think Indian enterprises are more likely to adopt private or hybrid cloud models? Where do you see the enterprise adoption going to a large extent?
No enterprise should miss the opportunity of taking the best of both public and private
clouds. It evident from enterprise trends world-wide, that it is leading to the hybrid world. Most new age implementations, especially in the e-commerce area, we see internet facing servers being hosted in the public cloud and the actual business is conducted in a private cloud.
Are customers also looking at hosting business-critical data and applications?
Customers with new implementations are hosting even their mission-critical applications on private clouds. Those with mature IT practices such as banks, have long term investments which would be migrated to the cloud only when the infrastructure is ready for a technology refresh.
You claim to offer customers 70% operational cost savings.How are you able to achieve that?
We work on the entire value-chain of the data center. Significant cost savings can be achieved in the non-IT components of the data center by adopting our OPDC solutions and in combination with our Enterprise Cloud Services, customers should demand such levels of savings. For one of our customers, we have consolidated 30 physical servers into a virtual environment using just 8 servers. In the process, we also created over 30% additional capacity. We have multiple cases of business value being delivered from data center and cloud technologies.
Is there a difference between your On Premise Data Center (OPDC) and a private cloud?
On-premise Datacenter (OPDC) is an integrated datacenter product which hosts a private cloud. For us to deliver the full extent of cost savings, customer should consider OPDC along with our Enterprise Cloud Services.
Do you think cloud interoperability is as big an issue as cloud security? Please share your views on these and other customer concerns.
In my view, the primarily goal of an enterprise customer today is to take advantage of cloud. Interoperability would come into picture only when hosted on proprietary technology cloud implementations. Most industry standard technologies offer interoperability, and we are able to migrate customers between various cloud platforms without a great deal of pain. However, I would advise our customers to keep away from proprietary implementations so that
they are not locked into a vendor and cannot take advantage of other choices.
What would be the priorities for NxtGen in the next few months to tap the growing cloud solutions space in India?
We have had great response to our enterprise cloud services.Today,our priority is to take
our High Density Data Center (HDDC) live in Bangalore. We expect it to be operational by April 2014.Next year,we will be working on three projects,one in India and two at international locations.As the facilities in the international locations go live,we will take our cloud services into those markets as well.
