ESDS aims to capitalize on growth projections and opportunities in India as well as in international markets through scaling its operations
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“We believe value drivers like customizability, control, autonomy and interoperability would play a significant role in retaining and improving the market share when competing with other hyperscalers in the market.”
Piyush Somani,
Managing Director and Chairman,
ESDS Software Solution
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The Cloud industry has been gaining momentum over the last several years. But the Pandemic and the ensuing shift to online operations and massive adoption of work-from-home-culture and online learning gave it a much needed shot in the arm. As the India market remains in the eye of a major digital transformation buoyed by a tech-centred Union Budget, SME Channels embarks upon recording the voices of the who’s who of the Cloud scape.
As part of our effort to make the voices of major cloud players heard by the channel community, we have brought in this for you as first of a series of Cloud Predictions by major vendors.
Here, ESDS Software Solution’s Managing Director and Chairman, Piyush Somani provides his predictions for the cloud industry.
Armed with more than 16 years of experience in the information technology sector, as the founding Chairman of the company, Piyush has been instrumental in expanding the operations of ESDS in India and overseas markets.
In a special interaction with SME Channels, Piyush Somani , Managing Director and Chairman, ESDS Software Solution , reveals his organisation’s strategy for growing the cloud industry, his predictions for the industry in 2022 and his vision and plans for the channel community. Edited excerpts…
The pandemic has forced businesses to take a giant leap to go online. As a leading Cloud player, how do you plan to leverage the immense market opportunity created by the pandemic?
As a Cloud provider, ESDS intends to capitalize on the expanding Cloud and Data Centers market in India as well as in international markets. The demand for Cloud and Data Center services has significantly grown in the pandemic period, resulting in increased volume of data generated. ESDS aims to capitalize on growth projections and opportunities through scaling its operations. We also believe that value drivers like customizability, control, autonomy and interoperability would play a significant role in retaining and improving the market share when competing with other hyperscalers in the market.
As a major Cloud player, what market trends do you foresee in 2022?
For us, 2022 looks like a promising year for acceleration and innovation in the Cloud Industry. The wave of IT adoption led by Cloud computing has allowed firms to transform the backend operations, resulting in an enhanced value proposition for the customers. In India, the industry has gained momentum with more than 200 Data Centers and more than 10 Cloud operators, targeting an industry market size of USD 3.8 billion in Fiscal 2020. During 2016-20, India added nearly 354 million internet users, totaling 696.7 million users in 2020, according to Ken Research Report. This is further expected to grow to around 975 million by 2025
The FY-22 union budget gives a massive boost for the Data Center sector, as the Data Center sector has been given infrastructure status. We believe that this will help Data Center operators get long-term debt at a much lower cost. Ambiguity around Data Center operations would also ease out. This allows the Data Center operators to buy power from multiple power discoms, eventually helping in avoiding monopolies, high tariffs, and dependencies. We believe that these decisions will amplify the growth of data localization and the Data Center industry overall. The Budget rightly focuses on amplifying the digital currency with correct measures and initiatives. Overall, the Union Budget brings hopes for Data Center Sector and Digital Rupee.
We believe that these changing industry trends, coupled with Data localization policy by government of India, has further contributed to the criticality of data centers in India, with some states categorizing data centers as an essential service. It is likely that the growth in data center investments in the past 2-3 years, not only from local players, but also from global firms has strengthened the role of data centers and their impact on allied sectors of economy, including Telecom, BFSI, Manufacturing, Healthcare etc. This has further been contributing to the mission of achieving USD 5 Trillion economy by 2025. It is expected that the data center industry would grow at a CAGR of 17.4% during FY’20-25, led by increased adoption of co-location services, aiding in improvement of occupancy rates of data center facilities by FY’2025 (Ken Research Report).
Please shed some light on your Cloud offerings.
ESDS’s public Cloud “eNlight” is based on in-house technology and is patented in the UK and the USA. eNlight offers a Cloud computing environment that allows vertical auto-scaling and bills customers through the “pay-per-consumption” billing model. eNlight is built on multiple layers of security and is, therefore, able to deliver enterprise-grade security. Through a web-based control panel, customers using our public Cloud manage and monitor their Cloud infrastructure. ESDS offers private Cloud services to customers who propose to migrate their business and corporate data on a secure, customizable and flexible Cloud platform without the capital investment required for maintaining an “on premise” Cloud environment.
ESDS’s private Cloud platform allows organizations to have full control of their Cloud environment, located in a data center that has been granted TIA-942-B Tier 3 compliance status by QSA International Limited. Built on the eNlight Cloud platform, we believe that our private Cloud is able to offer solutions for any type of workload, with high levels of security and privacy.
ESDS’s virtual private Cloud is a secure, isolated Cloud derived from a public Cloud system, providing higher levels of data security and granular control in the hands of our customers. Our virtual private Cloud customers have full control over their Cloud environment without going out of our secure internal network through a layer of virtual network isolation. A feature of our virtual private Cloud is “Cloud Burst,” which allows enterprises to deal with peaks in IT demands.
ESDS’s eNlight hybrid Cloud is a combination of our public Cloud and private Cloud offering. We believe it provides an intelligently scalable and secure platform by prioritizing workloads between public and private Cloud platforms. Like our virtual private Cloud, our eNlight hybrid Cloud also includes “Cloud Burst,” a feature that permits applications to migrate on our public Cloud when necessary, thereby avoiding interruptions.
ESDS was the first Cloud service provider in India to offer community Cloud services, provided on a multi-tenant model to a group of organizations that have similar business models and requirements, such as data privacy, security, compliances, and regulatory considerations. We offer community Clouds for the Government, Banking and Financial Services, SAP/ HANA, Smart Cities, and Enterprises.
What is the USP of your offerings?
ESDS offers a comprehensive and integrated range of offerings that provide a “one-stop-shop” for managed Cloud solutions to a diversified and marquee clientele. ESDS is characterized by multiple levers of growth, such as Government initiatives for promoting Cloud services, technology, and other partnerships. ESDS believes it is well-positioned to leverage such opportunities due to our robust and scalable business model due to patented Vertical Auto-Scalable Cloud Technology, which plays an important role in achieving optimal capacity utilization, allowing us to service larger load demands. We also offer innovative billing solutions that derive value to customers. As part of our business model, ESDS has introduced several billing solutions such as Pay-Per-Consumption, Pay-Per-Branch and Pay-Per-Transaction. ESDS derives significant value to its customers. We believe that such innovative billing models have assisted in customer retention, scaling of operations, and cross-sell and upsell services. To add further to this, ESDS is amongst India’s leading Managed Cloud Service and end-to-end multi-Cloud requirements providers. Today, ESDS has the largest number of banking customers in India, including more than 400 Cooperative Banks, District Cooperative Central Banks, and Small Banks. ESDS is also a market leader in hosting Government Cloud applications.
What all a channel partner needs to have to adopt Cloud business and what are the steps to start Cloud practice?
We believe that the first step in driving Cloud services is to guarantee that the customer is adopting Cloud solutions. If your clients do not willingly embrace Cloud solutions, it is possible that you miss out on potential revenue. SMEs with lean IT resources need to know that there’s availability to cater to their questions at any hour of the day, particularly when they rely on the Cloud for their business-critical data. At ESDS, we believe transitioning to Cloud necessitates helping partners to identify the type of Cloud Service they require. We also think that this enables them to discover their own value as a Cloud partner. It is our belief that transparency with the channel partners and commitment to pay the partners on time is one of the important cores to ESDS.
Would you please brief us on the kind of service support you extend to your channel partners? What sort of pre as well as post-sales support do you offer to your partners?
At ESDS, we provide complete IaaS, PaaS, SaaS Support. We also provide Extended – Migration, one-time solution deployment, operational support for operating system and database, security devices, and monitoring services. In order to deliver appropriate customer support and engagement, ESDS constantly endeavours to assist our customers in deploying and continuing to use our platform and products, resolving performance issues, addressing interoperability challenges with the customers’ existing IT infrastructure, and responding to security threats and cyber-attacks and performance and reliability problems that may arise from time to time.
Since Cloud is a tech-intensive product, it requires proper skilling. Please detail us on the training programs offered by you to upskill your partners.
ESDS’s ability to provide quality services, to manage the complexity of our business and our success depends largely on the ability to continue to hire, integrate, train, and retain qualified and highly skilled personnel in the areas of management, sales and marketing, research and development, compliance, finance, human resources and administration and technical team. We are dependent on the continued service of our existing engineering personnel because of the complexity and domain experience involved in our offerings.
