India's Data Center Services Market Growth is 25% CAGR
Last week I took a trip to India to film a customer testimonial and an episode of Data Unknown. My expectations for the trip were not super high. As Americans, I think we get most of our knowledge and insight from TV / news, so all I knew about India was based around this. This is why it is SO important to travel and see the world for yourself.
I was amazed by some of the things I learned about the India technology market and their culture. First, I had a very gracious host, Bala Karthick SP. He took us every place we needed to be, co-ordinated everything with the customer and gave us a tour of Delhi. (It makes a big difference if you have a good host.)
The first day we did the video shoot of Data Unknown with Neil Pollock, CEO of Nxtra Data. Nxtra is a Data Center Managed Services business. Neil is an Australian who came to look at the Airtel data center services business (what was spun out to be Nxtra) to see if it had what it took to become a data center managed services business with over 200,000 KM of fiber in the ground to service the enterprises of India.
After spending 18 or so months reviewing the technology and the market potential, Neil said, “We are not shutting this down.” But rather they spun the business out to a company called Nxtra Data and have continued to grow the business over the last 4 to 5 years.
Neil’s passion about the service provider space is intoxicating. He talked about the appetite in India to adopt new technology is both phenomenal and exciting. He goes on to talk about the fact that the market in India is not afraid of technology and adopt new technology rapidly and, being a part of the 3rd largest cell provider in the world, he is seeing that more and more, the evolution of voice to data. People doing more business on their cell phones and mobile devices.
It is almost as if the market in India skipped a generation of data center build outs and have fully embraced cloud adoption. I mean, there are businesses that will have some portion of their data on prem and Neil fully admits this. He talks about security being the number one issue for people to put things into the cloud so for a company’s IP they would probably keep that on prem, but for everything else, they are more than happy to push it to the cloud and let the folks whose core business is data center management, do just that. A mining company’s core business is not data center management, its mining, so they want to spend the money on what makes them more competitive, and that is not IT management.
This trip was eye opening. The potential in this market is huge and growing at 25% CAGR. It was truly a pleasure to meet Neil, see his passion and have him share his insights about the India market with me. Stay tuned, you can see the full story on Data Unknown coming in a few weeks.
I also met the extended part of Neil's team who worked with me to shoot the customer testimonial on the InfiniBox. The team is extremely knowledgeable about the market and our product. They were also very accommodating during our visit. They took us to some great restaurants where we had some great conversation about the Cloud market in India. It was eye opening. I find I come away from events like this smarter and humbled.
Thank you all!
