Tailor-made IT Solutions to MEET SPECIFIC NEEDS

nitin_mishra
Nitin Mishra,
Senior Vice-President – Products & Services, Netmagic

Traversing through the days of ‘Bubble Burst’ to a favourable ‘Digital India’ times, Netmagic has managed to grow slowly but surely, as we understand the requirements of individual clients like nobody else does, avers Nitin Mishra, Senior Vice-President – Products & Services, Netmagic, in an interaction with Poulami Chakraborty of Elets News Network (ENN). Excerpts:

Please take us through the journey of Netmagic in the Indian business ecosystem.
Netmagic was formed in 1998 and its operation started in 2010 started with the launch of its first data center. During this period, we crossed a few milestones, which contributed to the growth of the company. Till about 2006, we were a single data center company and this phase was more of building base for the organisation. Due to the dot.com crash that happened in-between, the new-age companies and their business model took some time to take off.
Primarily, during this phase, we built some basic services and invested in managing these services. In the next phase – between 2006 till 2012, we witnessed rapid growth of our business. We scaled up from one data center to five data centers by raising data centers in Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai and Noida. During this time, we were able to see a lot of enterprises evincing interest in putting their servers in third-party data centers. Earlier, organisations remained cold about putting their servers in third-party data centers due to security concerns. However, this has changed over the time and contributed to our growth.
Another important development was that eCommerce business had started finding acceptance in the Indian market. A lot of travel portals also emerged out as new pillars in the economy. In contrast to the earlier phase, this was different, as investors were able to build trust on internet for doing business. Besides internet banking being accepted by the masses, 3G also heralded mobile banking. These were the factor that helped us stay in the market during this phase.
The third phase is what we call ‘post-entity business phase’. Whenever we had to raise fund to build our own private data center, we had to visit a BC. It helped us convince them easily as an established entity in the market. In fact, we also plan to expand our facilities further in the next two years. A lot of new businesses are coming from entity customers or global customers and we are also getting some more new contracts in the market. Today, we are able to build an enterprise base for almost 1,500 enterprise customers.

As a premium service provider in data analytics and information management system, how do you perceive your market presence?
We are not confined to data analytics; rather we are expanding by providing a platform where people can get to taste data analytics. Today, our focus is more on providing the IT Infrastructure as a Service (IAAS) to our customers, which they can use for multiple purposes like analytics, applications, SAP, etc. our focus is on customers who can bring their servers and co-locate; typically targeted for customers who have a good IT team and can manage these frontiers. There is a second set of customers whom we provide our service with complete packaged solutions, including storage, application, computing, security and also management of the whole infrastructure. The third area is cloud computing, where we provide every service as a virtual infrastructure to our customers. We differentiate ourselves from others in terms of depth of skill sets on the managed services and security to our customers.

netmagicWhat is the USP of Netmagic and why should a prospective customer opt for it?
We offer a whole range of IT infrastructure services, which acts as a differentiator for us. We provide hosted co-location for managing cloud infrastructure. There are organisations in the market, like Amazon and Azure, which are purely on public cloud and look for lot of co-location in private cloud. Based on customer requirements, we can re-size it and distribute the workload suitably. Some of the workloads require a lot of scale up and scale down, so we place them on public cloud. At times, the customer has a long term requirement. In that case, we enable him to integrate it for a long period of time with enhanced security. For enterprises today, compliances are very crucial, both from security perspective as well as from the standards perspective. Thus, when we give an integrated solution, it becomes easy for them to comply with. Besides, we have a strong financial organisation backing us in the India market operations.

Which are the key sectors of operation that Netmagic is primarily catering to?
eCommerce and media are the prime sectors of operations for us, which include companies like Flipkart, Shopclues, Apple, NDTV, Sahara Live and Business Standard. We have a unique portfolio of clients that includes some of the top national media and e-Commerce companies. The second key focus area of Netmagic is the BFSI sector; rather, it is the Banking & Financial Services and Insurance sector that we are more focused to. The third key sector for us is Manufacturing, which has been growing rapidly. We are also involved with governance ecosystem, though not much share of our revenue is drawn from this sector, as we focus more on quality of our product than being competitive on price point. Incidentally, MHADA uses our solution for the government lotteries and also for a variety of purposes by the Maharashtra Education Department. However, less than 5 per cent of Netmagic’s revenue is generated from the government sector.

Would you like to recount the roadblocks faced by Netmagic during your initial days of operation? Initially, the biggest challenge we faced was the dot.com bust that took place. As we started off in 2000, we have got some investments from the first-time adopters of data centers. Thus, it was straight from the hardware age to the data center age; so, it took lot of efforts to convince our clients to believe in our services and capabilities.

We are not confined to data analytics; today our focus is more on providing the IT Infrastructure as a Service (IAAS) to our customers, which they can use for multiple purposes

How do you outline the roadmap of Netmagic for the coming a few years?
We are presently investing on a lot in technologies and cloud computing to keep up with our year-on-year growth of about 40 percent. We are soon to come up with our own data centers at Mumbai, Bangalore and Chennai and are expecting to hit a CAGR of 30 percent in the next five years. In fact, with the recent government’s keenness to adopt technology at every level, we can see a steep growth in the number of state-owned data centers.

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