 “With cloud computing, customers can save up to 30 percent on IT and energy costs”
While cloud computing is gaining acceptance globally, India is still at a nascent stage. Few Indian companies offer cloud-based platforms. In this scenario, Netmagic, an Indian Managed IT Services provider, has recently introduced its cloud computing platform in India. In an exclusive interaction with Harshal Kallyanpur, Sharad Sanghi, Managing Director and CEO, Netmagic, provides insights into cloud computing, the company’s cloud architecture, and the roadmap ahead for this platform. More from this author
What challenges are you aiming to resolve with your new cloud computing offerings?
The primary challenge that this offering aims to resolve is cost. Though we have been offering hosted services, dedicated servers and co-location services to our customers, they face a challenge when their businesses expand or the need for computing power and storage increases dynamically. Customers such as web portal providers or media groups see a spike in activity during events such as cricket matches, elections or budget announcements. Typically, they start off by having a well-defined infrastructure in place, which has been designed to meet their growing requirements. But it is when the data and traffic surpasses provisioned levels that they need to deploy additional hardware to meet the requirements.
Deploying this additional hardware, which requires additional investments, and the high lead time in getting the equipment, creates a bottleneck for most organizations. Also, the equipment ends up being under-utilized after the deployment. In case of large enterprises, if they end up deploying additional servers for every function, such as storage, web, and applications, it results in a chunk of under-utilized capital index (CAPEX) investments.
With the ambiguity over the concept of cloud computing, what do you think are the issues?
In India, bandwidth may be an issue from the cost point of view because higher bandwidth in the country still comes at a higher cost and it is only gradually that these costs will come down.
The primary issue most organizations express is with the shared resource platform that cloud computing represents. Organizations which have strict corporate policies against sharing of hardware or software resources, are hesitant about adopting a cloud infrastructure and running their applications and storing their data on it. They also have a notion that with resources being shared, performance will be affected.
How are you helping organizations get past these issues and adopt your cloud computing solutions?
We have three cloud computing offerings that can be adopted by customers according to their requirements. The first is CloudNet, which provides the customer with an entire IT infrastructure created on-the-go for an organization with ready-to-deploy cloud appliances, complete with servers for web, database and applications, firewalls, load balancers and switches.
The second is the CloudServe offering with virtual server services which will provide disposable server resources to customers. With this offering, servers can be configured and re-configured to scale up or down, on an on-demand basis, depending on the business needs.
The third offering is PrivateCloud that can be used by large enterprises which want a dedicated cloud infrastructure to themselves. We will provide the hardware and a managed virtualization platform for customers to run virtual appliances without worrying about IT resources. With a console, organizations can self provision applications on the platform to upgrade or downgrade as per their business requirements.
How will these offerings benefit customers?
The primary benefit that the cloud infrastructure will offer is cost savings. The platform works on a pay-per-use basis. After having paid a monthly cost for the basic cloud infrastructure which includes the bandwidth costs, the customer is billed on a per-hour basis depending upon how much an application is used by that organization in that hour.
A customer can provision or de-provision resources depending upon the demand. This not only brings down the CAPEX, but also the operational expense (OPEX), since the customer is billed for only that amount of resource which is provisioned. Customers have the option to host any of their applications on the cloud infrastructure, or have us provide applications on request.
With the cloud offerings, customers will save up to 25 to 30 percent not only on IT costs, but also on energy consumption, allowing them to align their IT operations with the green initiatives that most organizations are adopting today.
Do you already have customers using this platform? How many more customers are you targeting with the cloud offerings?
We started out by doing some pilot implementations with some of our existing customers. After a considerable amount of education and in-depth training programs, 10 of our existing customers have migrated some of their services on the cloud infrastructure.
Since this is a vertical agnostic platform, we are not really targeting any particular vertical or verticals. We expect most early deployments to be in the areas of development, testing and QA, and to gradually move towards production environments. In terms of adoption, we expect the CloudNet and CloudServe offerings to see major adoption by the SMB segments, and the PrivateCloud to be adopted by large enterprises. However in terms of revenue, we expect a higher percentage from the PrivateCloud offering than CloudNet or CloudServe even though the number of adoptions for the latter could be higher.
We currently have only one percent of our total revenue coming in from the cloud platform, but expect it to grow to 12 percent in the next year. Given the flexibility and scalability that the platform has to offer, we are targeting only Indian customers for now. We may also look at other customers across the globe in the future.
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