CEO & Founder
ESDS
ESDS is one of the World’s leading Data Center Services and Cloud Solution providers. Piyush Somani, CEO and Founder of ESDS says, applications on Cloud Technology are easy and quick to develop, roll out and make initiatives live, in an interview with Elets News Network (ENN)
What is this ESDS all about? What is its contribution towards Co-operative Banking Sector?
ESDS has been offering cloud hosting services to the cooperative banking sector for five years. We launched our eNlight cloud hosting platform in India in 2011. Since then, we started acquiring co-operative banks to be hosted on eNlight cloud. At that time, nationalised public sector banks and private banks were not ready to adopt cloud hosting but the cooperative banking sector wanted to cut down costs along with remaining profitable by hosting on cloud.
Today, we are hosting around 218 co-operative banks, some of which are Urban Co-operative Banks and some are large District Central Co-Operative Banks. We have formed alliance with partners like InfraSoft, Virmati and a few more and with these partners, we offer hosted core banking solution to banks and charge them on per branch basis.
With ESDS’s experience in serving to the banking sector, what differences do you observe while catering to the co-operative banking sector from other core banking sector?
With my experience of serving 218 Co-Operative Banks currently, I have not seen any major difference between the cooperative banks, nationalized PSU banks or the private banks. The only difference is that RBI mandated Core Banking and Financial Inclusion to the Nationalised Banks is much earlier than the Cooperative Sector. That made the cooperative sector a late entrant in Core banking as well as Financial Inclusion space.
Nevertheless, they have done pretty well to cope up and have improved the speed at which they do Financial Inclusion.
What role can cloud play on G2C (Government to Citizen) and in supporting initiatives like StandUp India?
The government was purely focusing on G2G when it came to IT, but now the Government has started focusing mainly on G2C (Government to Citizens).This has started since a couple of years only. The challenge which government was experiencing, they were not able to do the sizing when they were G2G.
Some of the large private banks and the nationalised PSU banks have been experiencing these kind of problems with DDoS attacks or malicious traffic coming through public networks. So, on premise infrastructure is not good enough to handle citizen services and that is the reason you have to move on cloud.
Our Honourable Prime Minister (Narendra Modi) announced about MUDRA Bank, StartUp India, StandUp India and all these initiatives had to be quickly developed, rolled out, made live. Because our PM now talks only about hours/days instead of months/years to implement new initiatives.
What is driving demand for data-centers in India?
Now the country has started focusing more on automation, B2C and G2C. When you talk about B2C and G2C, the requirement for infrastructure is huge and this is what is driving the demand for Data Centers in India. As per the RBI Guidelines, almost all the Banks have moved to CBS (Core Banking Solutions) but Financial Inclusion is still in process.
