NxtGen focusing on expanding both EDGE locations and Partner base in India

In a chat with VARINDIA, A. S. Rajgopal, CEO of NxtGen Infinite Datacenter discusses about its SpeedCloud, enterprise preference for EDGE than Cloud, data privacy, opportunities in India and also for partners and much more

Kindly explain about NxtGen’s SpeedCloud.

As a company, we wanted to break the shackles of having proprietary platforms for Clouds. We built a new cloud with the latest technologies of open source and OpenStack inputs. Our product delivers very good value to customers but more importantly, it delivers super performance. The thought-process was not just to provide some virtual machines but make sure that customers leverage the open source, build new applications and quickly go to market. This will be a global product, available for users across the world. We can proudly say that this will be a product from India to the world.

We looked at the offerings of many global cloud providers, in comparison, we are charging around 70% lower. Our thought process is simple, we deliver very good value and super performance. As our product is built on all NVMe, all technology deployed is latest.

Can you share your thoughts on the conventional landscape, challenges & opportunities for the cloud services industry in India?

First, cloud is a very good starting point but once a company wants to scale it, it becomes an expensive proposition. We understood the customer’s requirement in terms of what they would build for themselves and at a very good value. Second, there should be more people who should be able to support this, hence we are going to build a very large partner base. We want to have a minimum of 2,000 partners who are not just resellers but eventually become service providers. Once we have 2,000 plus channel partners with a lot of services capabilities, customers can scale it without a great deal of cost. This becomes pretty commoditised and all pervasive.

Enterprises are preferring EDGE as compared to the Cloud. What is your view on this?

The rollout of SpeedCloud will include 14 locations where we will have large processing capabilities, and will be complimented with 236 Edge locations. We need to understand that India is a fairly large country; we have 644 districts, so if we have to really cover the length and breadth of the country, each district has to have its own Edge at the minimum. Our current thought process targets 236 districts where we will have Edge locations. We already have a few customers looking at it. We have three customers in fact who will benefit from Edge. We are also looking to make sure we are adding value to a lot of government organizations to use Edge. For example, it will be great if you can vote from wherever you are, all that is needed is to validate your face. Current voting statistics show that we cannot get beyond 70% but technology can make it 100%. Edge can get us there. We already have three customers using EDGE. As on date, there are only four deployed but during this year, we plan to take it to 236 locations.

There are reports that all airports in India, the defence based air bases and borders will go for the EDGE. What is your take on it?

We started working with Ubuntu and is one of the reasons why we are closely associated with Canonical Ubutu. It is actually the operating system which is not just on the server or desktop, they now have an operating system for the device as well. So our thought process of taking an open source product to Edge is actually spearheaded by Ubuntu’s thought process globally. Hopefully we will have these drones and all other devices running on Ubuntu IoT device operating systems and it becomes seamlessly integrated with our Edge.

What is your view on data privacy?

The key fact is that we do not have access to customer data so the minute you don’t have access you don’t have an issue. We do not want access to customer data and hence will provide them support from outside. Customers have segregated networks, everything is end-to-end encrypted so we do not have access. We will make it so secure that they will not lose customer data. Our approach is simple, we do not want customer data so we will not get into any privacy issues.

What opportunities do you foresee in the coming days?

It is a fairly large opportunity. One of the most important things we realised in the last eight years of NextGen is that we can’t be done by one company. The challenge is to penetrate to the farthest interiors in a country like India. This cannot be done by an organization alone so the big change we are bringing to the table is that we want to have 1000 partners who will help us get there. However, we don’t want the partners to resell. We want them to add value to this product and we are working towards achieving that by teaching them how to deploy, manage and even scale applications for customers. We will train our partners to become service providers. Just imagine instead of us being one service provider, we are a group of 2,000 plus service providers and that to us is a very strong way of making it happen in India. I see small companies trying to do some very exciting things. If we can enable that with this large value added reseller base, I think we have reached our goals.

In India there are already many companies in the data centre business and many are planning to enter the business in the country. Do you think India has ample opportunity in the space of data centres and cloud computing?

The answer is yes. If you take Europe as an example, they have roughly around 850 megawatts of data centre capacity but Europe serves many other countries and continents. In India, we currently have approximately 150 megawatts of capacity being built out right now and there will be more to come. For example, we are the largest payment transaction country in the world and nobody does digital payments like we do, not even the US. We are a very digitally literate country that will require a lot more in terms of data centre capacity. For us, the data centre is slightly different from the way everybody thinks, we actually look at the data centre as the ‘Centre of Data’, so basically we want to ensure that we are able to get data into the data centre and process it by providing applications and use cases for Enterprises. We want to augment the big buildings with smart storage and a lot of smart technologies so that customers can leverage data. Our approach is centre of data, you will not see us building these huge data centres as we are not wanting to serve another cloud service provider, we want to serve the enterprises and we want to serve them through our channel partners.