Thaindian News

By Fakir Balaji
Chennai, Oct 6 (IANS) India’s leading managed IT services provider Netmagic Solutions Tuesday unveiled its “green” data centre here to offer a range of third-party services in the tech infrastructure space.

As the Mumbai-based company’s fifth data centre in the country, the Chennai facility will cater to large and medium enterprises across verticals in the southern state of Tamil Nadu.

The privately-funded Netmagic has three carrier-neutral data centres in Mumbai and one in India’s tech hub Bangalore.

The data centres cater to areas such as banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI), telecom, IT and IT-enabled services, media and entertainment and travel and tourism.

“Chennai is a strategic location for being the third largest city in India after Mumbai and Delhi in the internet traffic density,” Netmagic chief executive Sharad Sanghi told IANS at the new facility.

As India’s automobile hub with a strong industrial base, Chennai has huge potential for providing a host of managed IT services to enterprises, especially small and medium businesses, for which investing in back-office operations to run their applications or maintain data bases is cost prohibitive.

“Many of our enterprise clients in Mumbai and Delhi also favour Chennai as disaster recovery centre from security and seismic viewpoints,” Sanghi said.

The 30,000-square feet data centre offers plenty of space, ample power and industry leading uptime, carrier neutrality and power efficient design.

“As a third party vendor, we not only provide end-to-end infrastructure management services, but also reduce the cost of ownership by eliminating capital and operational expenditure for enterprises,” angel investor and Netmagic chairman B.V. Jagdeesh said.

In line with technology trends and changing business models in a competitive environment, the data centre will also offer cloud computing to enterprises for scalability and efficient delivery of services.

As next-generation technology, cloud computing enables enterprises to provide common business applications online from a web browser, while the software and data are stored on servers at data centres.

At an investment of Rs.25,000 per square feet, the company has 5,000 square feet of raised floor in the first stage to serve about a dozen customers it has signed up for hosting their IT managed services.

“We will raise an additional 13,000 square feet in the second stage to expand our customer base over the next 12-18 months,” chief technology officer S. Jayabalan said.

In the medium term, the Chennai centre is projected to generate 10-20 percent of the company’s total revenue.

According to a study by global market research and analysis firm IDC (International Data Corp), the data centre market opportunity spanning Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata, Pune and Bangalore is projected to grow by 16 percent for captive market and by 35 percent for the third-party vendor market in the next two years.

Worldwide, the IT managed services market is estimated to grow to $43 billion in 2013 from $30 billion in 2008.