P Sridhar Reddy, CMD, CtrlS |
Six-year-old
CtrlS a IT infrastructure and managed hosting provider delivers data center infrastructure, Disaster Recovery,
storage, application hosting, backup, hardware, cloud computing, OS layers,
network and security solutions to enterprises. P Sridhar Reddy, CMD, CtrlS,
speaks on why CIOs should outsource IT more than ever in today’s competitive
environment.
Many
datacenter infrastructure companies - both domestic and global are aggressive
in Indian market . Is there enough business for everyone?
There is
reasonable demand from the user community and majority of the companies in this
space are growing at a healthy rate. We don’t get into fierce battles except
for couple of deals. Everybody has carved their niche through specialization
and outsourcing is a huge market. In some micro markets, there might be an
'over supply' situation but that is cyclic and for a limited period.
We
haven’t even touched the tip yet in managed services, which has been a high
growth area contributing over 65% of company revenues today. The size of deals
are however small.
“Many
projects (with a one-year horizon) fail because by the time they are
implemented a business has either ceased to need it or the technology has
changed. Outsourcing reduces that gap largely.”
Have SLAs
at the customer end become more demanding over the years?
Five
years ago, service level agreement (SLA) looked mainly at uptime, power cooling
and some MNCs demanded SLAs based on humidity. Today the list stretches to over
20 pointers including SLAs on information/physical security, telecom links/
individual component uptime, and power consumption, to name a few. The list has
elongated because vendors are introducing differentiated offerings and also
most organizations are beyond the first phase of outsourcing. Some have learnt
from costly mistakes and want to avoid such instances in future contracts.
There is
a gradual shift in IT spends from pure Capex towards an Opex model. Why isn't
the trend accelerating faster?
SMBs are
already active on Opex. For mid to large enterprise it is a slow trend towards
appreciating the ‘lease model’ offered from vendors like us. Their internal
divisions could offer resistance as some fear that outsourcing reduces the
shine of their department. Outsourcing often looks a bit expensive due to
different indirect running costs. However, we project clear TCO with significant
savings over the years.
Project
cycles today have shortened to 20% of traditional ones. Many projects (with a
one-year horizon) fail because by the time they are implemented a business has
either ceased to need it or the technology has changed. Outsourcing reduces
that gap largely as we execute highly-complex projects within a maximum of four
weeks.
Can you
offer any ‘checks and balances’ before CIOs sign the outsourcing contract with
vendors.
The
outsourcing vendor has to be extremely passionate and committed to serve
customer. This is a different business than a routine technology vendor. Check
the DNA of that company and its stability. CIOs should look into survey reports
prepared on the basis of daily feedback based on the tickets raised by
customers. They can request infrastructure audit reports including tier 3 and
tier 4 data centers certification. High skill levels at the vendor end and after
sales support are crucial.
Some
prospective customers do a comprehensive due diligence including meeting
long-standing customers. They sent experts to audit electrical / mechanical set
ups and security infrastructure at our data center. They are justified to know
our investment plan and business roadmap as they move IT to another premise
(third party datacenter).
Lastly,
what is the reality of the adoption of cloud by India Inc.?
As an
end-to-end IT provider, we are the best player to set up private clouds for
organizations. We have built an automation suite of 16 different tools to
ensure provisioning, service delivery, ticket management, to name a few. Almost
95% of private cloud deployments of enterprises reside at our datacenters. Most
banks are cautious as they want private cloud at their premises. Surprisingly,
the rest of BFSI community - insurance, payment gateways, brokers, investment
bankers are aggressive outsourcers. Around one-third of the top lines are from
BFSI.
For the
public cloud we work with 20-plus regional service providers (broadband / cell
phone providers) apart from mainstream ones. The highest end variant of public
cloud is much more secure than any in house set up even a private cloud. The
cloud platform private or public by
CtrlS is a unique value proposition to the customer as it delivers world
class, differentiated offerings at a decent cost.
The coverage is a result of a face to face interaction Mr. Sridhar had with Yogesh Gupta, Associate Editor at IDG India. Source: www.cio.in/article/validate-dna-outsourcing-vendor-ctrl-s
CtrlS is one of the Top 25 Cloud Computing companies in India based on economy, usability and flexibility. CtrlS, Top Cloud providers in India offers Data Centers, Private Cloud on Demand, Cloud hosting, managed hosting services and cloud servers hosting solutions.
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