Guntur, Andhra Pradesh based Pi Datacenters has got great hopes from year 2016 – it is going to be a very exciting and promising year for Pi. The year would see the first step towards an extensive journey of Pi focusing around creating unique value propositions for its customers while it focuses around datacenter consultancy side of business.
Kalyan Muppaneni, Managing Director & CEO, Pi Datacenters Pvt Ltd speaks with Zia Askari from ChannelDrive.in about the company’s current focus and why year 2016 holds great promise for the company.
How was your year 2015? What were some of the big achievements for year 2015?
2015 has been a year of prominence for us in terms of defining our fundamental strategies as a DataCenter Organization. The year has seen us reaching multiple mile stones well within timelines viz a viz the targets set. We have outlined our short term and long term goals with precision to ensure Pi stands out as a leader in the Indian Market, with visible quantified differentiators to offer.
We have finalized the locations for our first and the second data center facilities. The first being built at Amaravati, would be our global headquarters as well. It’s a green field facility spread across 10 acres with state of the art infrastructure and 60 MW of approved and uninterrupted power supply from dual sources.
We have made significant headways in establishing key global partnerships with technology majors with the aim of bringing a paradigm shift in delivering value to the customers in the space of data center and enterprise cloud.
We have partnered with Singapore based DSCO group, a world leader in engineering consulting services, forarchitecture designing of our state-of-the-art datacenter. 2015 saw our core design of Software Defined TIER-IV Strategic Data Center being put inplace.
2015 also was the year of ironing out our GTM Strategy, both in terms of business and product development with high emphasis on industry specific solutions.
How are you looking up to year 2016 now?
2016 is going to be a very exciting and promising year for Pi. The year would see the first step towards an extensive journey of Pi partnering its customers, creating long lasting associations. We stepped into 2016 by going live with our Research & Development center (Pi Labs). This is first of its kind in the industry, from any commercial data center provider. While we would go live sometime around the third quarter of calendar year 2016, we are ready to host the first wave of customers on our @PiCloud™ platform at Pi Labs. We are also actively pursuing TIER-IV certification from UPTIME institute for the facility.
Our next milestone for the early half on 2016 is to go major with our datacenter consultancy and managed services, delivering Onsite, Remote and Hybrid support to customer’s enterprise IT infrastructure.
This year would also see us announcing and commencing the construction of our 2nd datacenter facility in a different part of the country.
The demand generated across verticals, owing to the digitisation wave in India, pumps in exciting opportunities for us.
To be in line with the current day technology trends and close to the customer business reality, we would also make strides into providing IoT and Big Data as a service, from a data center and enterprise cloud perspective.
How will year 2016 be different from year 2015 for your organisation?
2015 being the founding year for us, has been the period of putting the various strategy blocks together to set the course. 2016 is going to be a year on ride.
2015 was when our goals were defined and fundamentals were solidified towards making our mark as a leader in the Indian Data Center market.
2016 would see us putting the plans into implementation in making our vision a reality. The GTM would pick up pace to be a major force to recon with significant data center market share in India.
While we go full steam to accomplish our goals, we would be uncompromising towards our values of Integrity, ethical standards and mutual respect.
2016 would also see us investing significantly in research and development around cloud and process automation. With technology disruption as our DNA, we would focus on partnering our customers in maturing from a native data center setup to software defined strategic cloud environments. This would not only get the enterprise user community have flexibility, security, data localisation, but also would help them reverse channel the dollars saved back into their business.
What could year 2016 bring for the technology sector? What are some of the big trends that you believe will rule the tech sector in 2016?
We see IoT, Big Data, Advanced Analytics, Self Service and Automation as some of the key trends where majority of the global investments would be inclined.
The traction these trends realize would shape the renaissance in the technology space.
How are you as an organization gearing up to play an important role in these trends?
The trends shaping today’s technology space revolve around ‘data’, which is ‘the asset’ for any Enterprise.
Owing to tremendous data generation, these trends result in, the spectrum of services to enable them, need not be mere data keeping, processing and analysing but a self-sufficient and smart environment with scalable data keeping, agile processing and real-time analysing,which would help enterprises stay ahead of curve.
As a datacenter player, we are gearing up to facilitate the data revolution in all fronts, through our intelligent & dynamic infrastructure coupled with services that serve the need of the hour.
Our highly scalablearchitecture with smart storage & compute capabilities would support the increasing customer data pool to scale to fit.
The multi-tiered security cover, casing our infrastructure, would solve the issues of data security, which is one of the prime concerns, in adapting to the trends .
Our focus in deliveringfully software driven datacenter, which would underline the need of “smart systems”,drives us to innovate at Network, Storage and Compute levels. We strive to be of strategic value to our customers, to enable themride this wave.
We cognize the fact that, though these trends are across industry verticals, the application of the same in each industry would vary with unique infrastructural and implementation requirements. This has been a driving force for us to build our architecture framework grounds up, with industry specific solutions leading the show for us.
We advocate partnering our customers, than being just a vendor to them. Practicing the same, we fundamentally work on what is best for the customer, rather than, what we have at our stable.
What could be challenges that lie ahead to realize the full potential of these tech trends?
With the exponential increase in connected devices, there has been a sudden surge in IOT space, which was un-predicated to this extent. This has resulted to the big data growing bigger and faster.
Challenges, that some of these tech trends like IOT and Big Data face, are of effective data collection. In some cases, on real time basis.
Software defined everything, Internet of Things, 3-D Printing, Digital transformation, Predictive Analytics, are just few to name from the technology revolution, those have pushed the boundaries beyond limits.
Lack of easy and on the fly availability of effective and predictive analytics is another challenge that these tech trends are coping with right now.
Enterprises with real time analytical capabilities would drive in more value and cost optimisation back into their business. With speed being the essence, sensor enabled industrial analytics is taking the world by storm.
The need for true enterprise level hybrid cloud was never more, than what it is now. Effective capturing, storing, analysing and making them available for consumption on a real time basis is that would make the difference in enabling quick and informed decision making.
To realize the benefits gained out of the trending technologies is easier, but adoption to them would remain a challenge and is vitally dependent on how soon they would integrate into the current IT Landscape.
Early adopters and their success stories would drive a higher traction towards these trends in the coming years.
Total Cost of Ownership and the Realization out of it, would play deciding roles in adoption.
How do you look at the ongoing Digital India and Make in India initiatives by the government of India? Is there any role that is being played by your organization today?
Digital India initiative envisaging a digitally empowered nation is overdue ever since.
Comparing ourselves with the likes of China, we are far off from achieving decisive digitisation as a country. This inspite of the fact that Indians have been playing significant role in digital innovation globally.
Digital India and Make In India initiatives by Govt Of India, stands to complement each other, in ensuring that the Talent erosion to west is arrested and they contribute in bringing digitisation to the last mile common man in terms of ease of communication and redressal. This revolution clubbed with availability of quality resources at low cost, would make India a much more investment friendly destination for global enterprises to set their shops and manufacturing hubs.
In the coming years we clearly see a digital wave across the country, with more than half billion population gaining a decent access to internet.
The growth in demand will continue to challenge the current Indian Infrastructure, which has a high scope to scale up. This is a great opportunity and privilege for Pi to be at the forefront in being just the right mix to be the medium to deliver the fruits of the mission to the last mile.
Pi, with its ahead of the curve innovation, enterprise class cloud and IT infrastructure, foresees itself to be the backbone in enabling seamless data storage and delivering it to the last mile in executing the diverse Digital India initiatives like smart cities and citizen programs into multiple verticals.
To support multiple e-governance models proposed as a part of Digital India Initiative, we are geared up to host City/State & Central Governments in multiple fronts.
