CEO, ESDS India
Piyush Somani, CEO, ESDS India, underlines USPs of his company like managed services, Patented Cloud platform and Managed Cloud services. Somani, in an interaction with Poulami Chakraborty of Elets News Network (ENN), says ESDS hardly has any competitor in this space in India primarily because of the technology and quality of the managed services ESDS provides. Excerpts from an interview:
ESDS is primarily into solution providing for web-hosting. Kindly take us through the journey of ESDS in the Indian market.
ESDS started as a BPO company about 11 years ago. Later, we diversified and discontinued the BPO business and began our journey in the web-hosting business. In 2005, we acquired three other web-hosting companies, which gave us phenomenal growth. With whatever we accumulated in the past few years, we wanted to start with our own data-center in India. The foundation stone of this dream was first laid in 2008, when we started with the construction work of our own data-center in Nashik. While we continued to grow in UK we started to experience some challenges there. Even though our growth ratio doubled in a span of three months, our customers started facing problems in their virtualisation platform; which in those days was referred to as BPSO. During those days, humongous traffic in website made the platform slow. Our customers complained of the fact just when they have an important season going on for their business. To provide solution to our customers beyond our deliverables, we hired fresher computer engineers to provide scalable computer resources for resolving customers’ problems. In those days it was not referred as ‘Cloud’ but as scalable virtualisation platform. We have an American patent for real-time adjustable compute resources.
How do you perceive your brands presence in the Indian market?
Majority of our progress earlier was in UK or USA market, whereas in domestic market our presence has just seen five years of operation. Location of being in a Tier II city has been disadvantageous for us initially. People did not take us seriously as we originated in Nashik, however, with time we evolved and built our owned data-center in Mumbai. Customers who have joined us in the past five or six years are still there with us and they are growing too. Now, we have strong presence in Indian metro cities like Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore with our own data-centers in Mumbai & Nashik and a leased facility in Bangalore. At present, none of the data centers in India are certified by Uptime Institute except ours. All the major OEM’s and start-ups are partnering with cloud and discuss about cloud-opportunities, at the back-end of which everything is done by ESDS. ESDS has emerged as the Cloud facilitator for many billion dollar companies like AtoS, KPIT, L&T Infotech, Tencent, GMR, Mastek and many more; which shows we barely have any competitor for Cloud services in India. Most companies are selling virtualisation as Cloud hosting, which people are buying as well; however, our product has 100 per cent uptime, scalability and high availability. Ours is the only platform where all core banking applications like Finnacle and others can work efficiently, hence, our Cloud platform provides easy accessibility to our customers. Having an upper hand on Amazon and other platforms in terms of the patented vertical scaling Technology, we have accessibility of all enterprise solution applications.
Please elaborate on the role of ESDS in the banking sector.
We work with our partners like Infrasoft, RS Software, HCL, Virmati and few more who provide software solution to banks and we provide them with our Cloud platformtogether we cater them with our solutions. We have over 200 co-operative banks with around 4,000 branches who store their data on our platform. Surprisingly, co-operative banks are doing extremely well as they have minimal expenditure budget and they much focused on technology. Large PSU banks spend huge amount of money on software and hardware for their core banking solutions. Other aspects of banking like mobile banking digital payments, NEFT, RTGS, UPI payments, Bharat Bill Payment System (BBPS) and IMPS also require our solutions. Our Cloud enabled security solution “MTvScan” protects the online banking and websites of many nationalised PSU Banks. Now, that the new Payment banks are coming up there is additional scope that has opened for us.
What is the USP of ESDS that the company bank on when it comes to convincing new set of customers?
The main USPs of ESDS is our managed services and our patented Cloud platform and managed Cloud services. We hardly have any competitor in this space in India because of the technology we use and also for the quality of the managed services we provide. We are the only company in the world which has technology for key verticals. Applications for enterprise solutions for every vertical are supported on our Cloud platform, which do not work on other platforms that work on the concept of Load Balancing only. Amazon or Microsoft Azure works only on load balancing, when there is more work load it is distributed between multiple virtual machines. This is the major technology differentiator between major players in the space and us; which is why major alliance partners have chosen us to work with them in this space.
What were the major challenges that ESDS has faced in the Indian market when they started their journey?
Indian mindset of customers is to verify a vendor’s background thoroughly before ensuring any business to them. They ask questions like annual turnover and company background. Initially, when we forayed into Indian market we hardly had any background here and hence lost the market very much. It took us some time to convince people with the help of our advance technology and here our turnover did not matter at all. We have also ensured our Cloud services for major government projects like Start-Up India, Stand-Up India, SIDBI and Mudra Bank.
ESDS is the only company globally with technologies for all key verticals. Applications for enterprise solutions for every vertical are supported on our Cloud platform, which do not work elsewhere
Recently, NPCI has launched Unified Payments Interface (UPI). Please express your opinion on the same.
To make all these new things successful it’s important to go on a pay-per-transaction model and this is only possible when your business is on Cloud. In Cloud, your cost per transaction in comparison to on-premise hardware deployment comes down to Rs 1 per transaction for over a period of five years. Besides, Cloud is the only secure platform today and is more secure than any other internal platforms for organisation in case of B2C applications of Banks.
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