Sridhar Pinnapureddy, Founder and CEO, CTRLS highlights how CtrlS is redefining infrastructure as a
service (IaaS) and creating new rules in the outsourcing space.
CIO: Enterprises are beginning to turn source
agnostic, and reaching out to third party service providers for their
datacenter needs. What is driving this trend?
Sridhar Pinnapureddy: Facilities that can reliably
house the data and applications that businesses need are costly to build, and
the on-going capital expenditures of in-house facilities can limit growth, slow
time to market, and be a distraction from your core business. Since more and
more IT Dept are finding it tough to get their capex budgets sanctioned, we
have seen an increase in enterprises taking advantage of our services and enjoy
significant savings on total cost of ownership. Another important reason for
enterprises to look at outsourcing their data centres is security. CtrlS offers
a wide range of managed security services that help your organization to
prevent potential data compromises, network breaches and unauthorized system
access.
CIO: Can you tell us about CtrlS’ policy of total
ownership and how it helps CIOs?
SP: At CtrlS, we believe in meeting client
expectations and not just to follow a letter or contract. CtrlS’ commitment to
its customer is total ownership. When we started off, we realized that we could
only make a difference if we came up with a significantly improved and
differentiated offering. This resulted in building Asia’s largest Tier 4 datacenter. We have
developed the capabilities to provide a complete suite of offerings from
platform level services which include datacenter infrastructure, storage,
backup, hardware to OS layers, network and security layers. We are operational
in Hyderabad and Mumbai, and building another one in Delhi. Our datacenter in
Chennai will be operational this year, and the one in Bangalore, the next
financial year. This ensures that our geographical reach is substantial, to
meet our client’s expectations of having the datacenter closer to their area of
operation.
CIO: Running Tier 4 datacenters across several
locations can be really capex and skills intensive. How do you manage to get
the right funding and talent?
SP: Our data
centers at Hyderabad, Mumbai and Delhi are fully owned by the company, and CtrlS
is promoted by the 18 year old Pioneer Group, which has been building the
largest available infrastructure in the Datacenter space and we have had
several rounds of funding. Our datacenters are built to withstand earthquakes
and other natural disasters. We have kept our financials healthy, and our
repayment obligations have always been half of our cash flows. This is a
guiding principle that we will not grow beyond a 1:5:1 ratio between debt and
equity. Our growth rates are close to 100 per cent, making us a very financially
healthy company. Our attrition levels are extremely low, as we believe in
hiring fresh talent and grooming them. We have a training academy to that
effect. Also, once on board, we offer a clear career progression plan which
goes upto 16 levels, offering them many options in diverse roles. Our ‘Total
Ownership” policy makes our employees extremely proud of the work they do, and
they get to do whatever it takes, to make their customer happy, which keeps
them motivated.
CIO: How do you take your relationship with the
customer from transactional to transformational?
SP: Our ‘Total Ownership’ policy is definitely plays a
key role in helping us achieve this. We develop a joint roadmap, which we
commit to in being a completely transparent company, and want our customers to
look at us more as long term partners and less as vendors. We learn from our
customers too. Once the trust is established, we develop a joint roadmap, which
we then commit to our customers. We realize that our clients are varied, and we
want to give them the flexibility to customize. All of these make our
relationship with our customers more than just transactional.
Source : Smarter Sourcing Strategies - Chat with the Editor at CIO 100 2013 by Gopal Kishore.
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