CtrlS rides high on cloud momentum in India

Pushed by an aggressive government, India Inc is in the midst of a huge digital transformational wave. Almost every company in every sector is using digital technologies to improve competitiveness. This is accelerating demand for data center specialist players such as CtrlS, which is increasingly seeing a huge rise in demand from almost every segment.

Says Sridhar P, Founder & CEO, CtrlS, “Across India, we are seeing huge demand from every sector – be it the banking sector, the insurance sector or the manufacturing sector. Fintech, in particular, has been a huge area of growth. Today, everyone believes in the cloud story.”

With the rise in digitization especially in the BFSI sector, banking and insurance firms are using the cloud more aggressively for rolling out new products. CtrlS has been a huge beneficiary of the rising interest in cloud related deployments, with its customer base growing from 1,000 in 2012 to 3,500 by 2016, and the company growing at a CAGR of 47% over the last five years.

In a market which is intensely competitive, CtrlS has invested in creating its own IP. This has helped the firm create its own niche. For example, CtrlS has created a product called ‘Bank in a Box’, which has received good response from the market. “We currently serve approximately ten banks through the banking community cloud. This product has been extremely well received,” says Sridhar.

Other products which have received good traction in the market include offerings such as Cloud4C (The world’s 1st Tier4 cloud designed by CtrlS’ R&D team), Community Cloud (For Banks, Government, SAP) and Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS). CtrlS has also forged important partnerships with global leaders such as SAP. For example, SAP has signed a partnership with CtrlS to enhance the availability of SAP HANA Enterprise cloud services in the Asia Pacific region. The partnership with CtrlS gives SAP the capability to broaden its cloud offerings across the region. What’s noteworthy is that CtrlS is one of the select few partners delivering cloud infrastructure for SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud.

With the focus on enterprise security growing, CtrlS has found demand for its managed security services accelerating. “We are managing approximately 100,000 events per second and 10,000 devices in our security practice,” states Sridhar.

Sridhar believes that the market is still huge and unexplored as there are still many SMBs who want to deploy the best IT infrastructure but do not want to spend the same amount of money in capital expenditure. This data is corroborated by research from independent analyst firms such as Gartner, which state that cloud IaaS will exceed traditional data center outsourcing spend in India during 2017. In India, traditional data center outsourcing is forecast to reach $559 million in 2017, while cloud infrastructure as a service spending will total $677 million this year. Gartner has also predicted that by 2021, cloud compute and storage as a service will be nearly three times that of traditional data center outsourcing in terms of spending in India.