Cloud computing continues to be an integral part of an enterprise’s overall IT landscape. Private clouds continue to dominate in terms of overall installed workloads, however, public clouds are growing at a much faster rate. In addition, enterprises are increasingly opting for hybrid cloud strategy to have the benefits of both private as well as public cloud models. Netmagic Solutions, one of the prominent Cloud service providers has introduced Hybrid IT Infrastructure solutions for enterprises. In a candid interaction with Channel Times, Nitin Mishra, Senior Vice President- Products & Services, Netmagic Solutions highlights current trends in Hybrid Cloud market in India.
Below are excerpts from this exclusive interaction:
Indian enterprises are increasingly embracing Hybrid Cloud, however, CIOs are still confused with the concept. How do you see the adoption of Hybrid Cloud in the enterprise segment?
We have seen a really very good acceptance and adoption of Hybrid Cloud, especially among the enterprises who have certain core ERPs and such kind of applications running on premise. Public Cloud is clearly more suitable for scaling up web based applications. Whereas, a private cloud is more suitable for some of the high performance and internal applications. We see that most of the organizations have both public as well as private cloud infrastructure. In this scenario, we are really seeing customers opting for the Hybrid Cloud model.
Manufacturing companies have adopted Hybrid Cloud in a very big way in recent years and are going for SAP and HANA deployment. HANA applications run in a private environment and SAP applications run in a virtualized environment. We believe that Hybrid Cloud is going to be a primary way for enterprises to deploy their applications.
How do you align with your channel partners to offer your solutions to enterprise customers?
We work very closely with alliance partners, we also work with ISV partners and we align with them for infrastructure services. Apart from ISVs and some of the large application integration vendors, we also have pure channel partners who resale and trade our solutions and services in the market. Some of our large traditional distributors have tied up with these channel partners to help them position our offerings in the market.
Since the Cloud space is highly contested in India with too many players offering different kinds of services, what sets Netmagic apart from the competitors in terms of offerings and services?
In terms of scale, we are the only organization to have five grades within the country. Secondly, we have invested heavily in the Managed Services. The depth of our skills in the Managed Services is our other key differentiator in the market. We have engineering skills across the platforms that goes into the operating system, database management, network management, storage, and even some of the select applications. Lastly, the SLS that we offer are much more customized. We understand the requirements of enterprises and offer solutions which may have private, public, dedicated hosting as well as colocation services as an offering.
That really differentiates us because many Infrastructures as a Service providers are the focused public cloud providers or on-site system Integrator. Whereas, we have been able to build the entire set of options and based on customer workloads we have been able to give them a right infrastructure platform to host. It means that we are not only giving them right performance effectively, but it also helps them optimize costs by putting right workloads on right infrastructure options.
What are your key thrust areas in the current fiscal?
We are looking at taking the whole service offerings to the next level.
While we are largely focused on the Infrastructure as a service, this year, we are going to offer a platform for Data Analytics. We are looking at forming multiple platforms, which our enterprise customers can leverage out of the box. This include things like MongoDB or Hadoop platform and many more in this particular segment. Secondly, our focus really is on expanding Hybrid cloud. As an organization, we have clear strengths to offer not only just public cloud, but private cloud as well as Colocation Services and dedicated hosting. We are also emphasizing a lot on the software defined services such as Tiered storage, Virtual firewall appliances and Software Defined Network (SDN), so that we are able to offer integrated hybrid cloud to our customers. These are some of the major areas we are looking at in 2016.
Netmagic has recently won Frost and Sullivan Award for Infrastructure as a Service Provider of the Year. What is a significance of this achievement for Netmagic?
Frost and Sullivan is the most respected research organization in the ICT industry and that makes it very desirable award. It is also a recognition of the kind of work Netmagic has done in the IaaS space over the years. The recognition highlights the fact that we have been really able to expand and gain traction in the services segment in terms of scaling, innovation and increasing global competition.