“GPX started its operations in India around three years ago. In this short period, we have been able to establish GPX as the “State of the Art Data Center “and have become a benchmark in the industry and vendor of choice of marquee customers. Normally, it takes several years for a new player like GPX to establish a data center business when there are already several other large incumbents, says Manoj Paul, Managing Director, GPX India, in an interview with Poulami Chakraborty of Elets News Network (ENN)”.
How has been the journey of GPX in the Indian market since inception?
GPX India is a part of GPX Global Systems which is a US-based organisation, founded by people who held leadership positions in companies running data centres, metro Ethernet and undersea cables etc.
The company was founded to create high quality data centres in emerging markets.
We started our operations in the Indian market around three years ago and in these three years we have been able to establish GPX as a “State of the Art” data center. Normally, it takes several years for a new player like GPX to establish a data center business when there are already several other established players like Tatas, Reliance, Netmagic, Airtel, and others.
However, in just three years, GPX has won good orders from Marquee customers, the who’s who of the carrier, content and cloud space worldwide. Today, we claim to be India’s most inter-connected data center. By which we mean that we have the maximum number of Telecom service providers (12) and ISP(s) – Internet Service Provider (s) (over 50) who are connected by optical fibers to our data centres, as compared to any other data center in the country.
GPX is also the first Direct Connect Point of Presence (PoP ) for AWS in India and also has several other Cloud Service providers and CDN service providers hosted at GPX DC.
As a result of these successes, within three years we have been able to become cashflow positive.
Tell us about your ventures in the Banking and Finance sector in India.
GPX has several clients in the banking and finance sector. BFSI companies need highly reliable data center for their 24×7 operations. We are glad that IFTAS, an IDBRT company, which runs India’s largest payments messaging platform, has chosen GPX, where they have set up their DC to provide core banking and other managed services over cloud to banks and co-operatives.
IFTAS runs INFINET, the communications backbone between all the banks in India and SFMS, facilitating RTGS and NEFT. A large broking house runs their complete back end and services their downstream brokers from GPX DC.
GPX, being India’s only True Carrier Neutral Service Provider has the largest number of Telecom Service Providers connected to our DC and so our customers are not restricted and can use services of any of these TSPs based on their reliability of services, feasibility at remote ends and commercial offerings.
Enterprises including banks are also evaluating the option of migrating to cloud or having a hybrid set up of some applications on their own infrastructure and some on the cloud. GPX is well geared to meet the requirement of such customers with a very highly reliable DC offering 99.999% along with AWS Direct Connect service available in GPX DC.
Now customers can host their servers at GPX and use the cloud services of AWS, the world leader using Direct Connect Service of AWS available only at GPX DC, thus connecting to the cloud over cross connects (LAN) of 1 Gbps without having to pay for bandwidth.
GPX also has few other large and small partners which provides cloud services including compute, storage and other managed services at GPX data center. Thus, whenever a bank/financial institute does not want to spendcapex on infrastructure, they can use the services of these cloud service providers. In this way, we believe that GPX can play a very crucial role in the BFSI Sector.
When it comes tapping a prospective client, what are the key USPs on which GPX India vouches?
Indian data center market is very competitive and there are many large well established players in this business space. Hence, when GPX came into the Indian market three years ago, the market was already mature and we had to differentiate ourselves from the incumbents.
To grab the targeted customer’s attention; we built a State of the Art data center and got an Uptime Institute Tier 4 design certificate, which is one of the most stringent certification for data Centres and the only DC offering 99.999% uptime. There are only 32 data centres in the world which are certified Tier 4 by Uptime Institute.
Ours is also the most automated data-center in the country, so customers can have the confidence that even if an equipment failure happens at wee hours, things will automatically be controlled without any involvement of manpower.
We also make the processes very simple to enable our customers to use our services with minimal hassles and without wasting time. And, as mentioned earlier, GPX is the Direct Connect PoP of AWS and the most interconnected True Carrier Neutral DC.
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