Looking beyond the horizon

Datacenter is a term which has off-late
become synonymous with the databank needs of any company; small,
medium or large. Backed by the tremendous growth in this sector
lately, at more than 30 percent on a YoY basis, this boom has
definitely augmented the scope for solution providers (SPs). Mostly,
datacenters follow the capex model and lease out on an operational
expenditure basis to clients. This gives SPs, the opportunity to not
only come up with solutions pertaining to network integration and
system integration, but also infrastructure integration. The scope
area for SPs also include datacenter consulting services, design
engineering and build consultancy, management and supply and
integration of products and solutions. Besides, there is huge scope
for SPs in datacenter management and they can also look in the
direction of managed hosted services and cloud computing to expand
their businesses.

Though the conventional datacenter
services space has a lot of players jostling for attention, an SP can
differentiate himself from this crowd by having managed services,
that deliver value for the customer and eases his IT operations and
management. Here again the possible services are boundless and
innovation can result in revenue stream which were till now unheard
of. Moreover, with its own datacenter, an SP can leverage the
liberty of designing the offerings, create various flavors in
collaboration with different applications and software, build the
cloud in offering mode, deploy the applications, build the
fulfillment models, prepare the menu card, and nurture the
infrastructure.

WHERE THE OPPORTUNITIES LIE

There is a heap of enormous
opportunities today for SPs in the datacenter business. From an
end-to-end datacenter IT infrastructure play, SPs can address
requirement from cabling and networking to setting up the entire
datacenter. For example, Frontier Business Systems, as a System
Integrator, offers a broad range of project expertise. It specializes
in planning, designing, engineering, constructing and management of
datacenter solutions, that integrate 'best-of-breed', critical
infrastructure technologies. The result is an always available,
scalable, redundant, fault-tolerant, manageable and maintainable
datacenter environment. Col (Retd) Balwinder Singh, Director, href="http://www.dqweek.com/Targus-Technologies-on-a-global-expansion-drive">Targus
Technologies said, “We envision opportunities in terms of extending
our services in the hardware sector, providing server, storage,
routing, switching to our clients. Besides, other kind of services that
we are asked to deal with
are i n f r a s t r u c t u r e , integration services, maintenance
and consultancy. Like for example, we have looked after the
requirements of the multiple components of datacenters of MTS in
Chennai and Jaipur.”

“Building a datacenter requires a lot
of design and then implementation. Every OEM has specific products, but
integration of all these
pieces and creating a solution which will give high uptime,
cost-effectiveness, best RoI and greener solution is a very big
opportunity for us,” added Ganesh Mahabala, Senior VP, Valuepoint
Systems. Sanjiv Patki, Global VP-Managed Services, href="http://www.dqweek.com/Allied-Digital-enters-Cloud-computing-space">Allied
Digital
Services, further pointed out, “With our strength in
virtualization, we bring to table the concept of green initiatives
for the datacenter. Hence, we see huge growth opportunities in areas
starting from designing the datacenter to building it, managing the
program of building datacenters, and finally managing the
operations.” Additionally, with several organizations shifting
their focus from expensive and complex Disaster Recovery (DR)
solutions to innovative and cost effective ones, the scope for SPs
has increased. This is because it requires very little integration
skills and is simple to configure and set up in a customer's
environment. While the expectations of the customers towards DR
solution have not changed over the years, the solutions have changed
remarkably. The concept of 'DR on Demand' is slowly
but surely making appearance. This ensures that SPs can quickly and
effectively configure a DR solution for the customer.

Avinash Pitale, Co-Founder and Joint
MD, Omnitech InfoSolutions highlighted, “We believe this behavior
and decision making pattern would defiantly increase. Customers look
at cost saving and capable team managing their business data. As a
service provider, Omnitech offers common pool of executives serving
the end-customers and this further offers reduction of cost for the
end-customers. We shall see small and mid-level business moving on
this path in next 12 months.” Ravi Verdes, Founder and Director,
Frontier Business Systems, is however of the view that technologies
like virtualization provide innovative and cost-effective DR
Solutions. It does not mean SPs require little integration skills;
in fact, integration skills are required more from the technology
side. Today, DR is more of a requirement than insurance. Lot of
compliance rules have also played a large role in getting a DR built.
Even if DR is built, the processes around the execution of business
continuity like who, when on what scenarios is also a very big
opportunity. Integration, configuration and set up is one part, to
automate, or to create processes and systems ensure that business is
as usual is also very important.

GETTING INTO CONSULTANCIES

Today, companies that need high
availability or 24-hour services outsource their datacenter services.
And this gives SPs an opportunity to get into consultancies for their
end-customers as well. SPs are working towards creating satisfied
customers by emphasizing pre-design and planning services to provide
the optimal solutions to meet their clients' needs. Although most
of the end-customers are putting efforts in building their own
datacenters, outsourcing or co-location is one option if any of these
customers do not have enough space and resources to build their own
datacenters. Here, the opportunity for SPs is to help these customers
in migration. And since high availability or 24-hour services has
become synonym with IT infrastructure, this throws open a whole new
basket of opportunities in terms of providing consultancy to
end-users to migrate their datacenters to high availability
datacenters.

KV Jagannath, CEO and MD, Choice
Solutions, asserted, “Whether you are building a new datacenter or
optimizing/relocating an existing for better performance, we can help
you with the assessment, design, and deployment (relocation) of any
and all aspects of the physical infrastructure — power, cooling,
cabling, fire prevention and suppression, racking, tiling, physical
security, environmental and air quality. Our certified datacenter
consultants help clients bring industry standards and best practices
into their datacenters and DR centers.” According to Sujeet Narula,
CEO of Associated Business Computers, SPs have to lead with
consultative sales to leverage disasterrecovery and business
continuity opportunities. Datacenter services can be an entry ticket
to overall IT consultancy opportunity.
Once you are responsible for storing, managing and securing someone's
data, the customers also look up to you for consultancy in other
aspects as well. It definitely gives you an edge over others.
Datacenter solutions starts from consulting services in terms of
facility and IT facility consulting services include planning and
predesign, power and cooling system analysis, feasibility and project
cost budgeting, availability and risk assessment, technology
planning, business continuity and disaster recovery, energy usage and
energy efficiency assessment.

On the other hand IT consulting
services include virtualization assessment and consultancy, DR
assessment, optimization, consolidation evaluation and planning,
technology roadmap planning, switch, router and network security
planning, and storage and data protection planning. Here, SPs just
need to perform necessary modifications to adjust to new way of
operations and manage the change and, lastly, implement powers saving
ideas. This in itself has become a new growth area. “Sai InfoSystem
sees opportunities
for itself in the datacenter consultancy, as providing consultancy
for building datacenter is emerging as a big business opportunity. As
an IT and system integration company, we have been sort of giving
this service, so far, free of cost in terms of educating the customer
in order to get a deal. Maybe now, the time has come to start
charging for such services that could make a big impact to the
customer's future operations,” added Sunil Kakkad, CEO, Sai InfoSystem
India.

DEALING WITH THE ROADBLOCKS

Despite huge scope and endless
opportunities, development of datacenters in India faces a few major
obstacles including security concerns and data retention worries.
The biggest challenge is the concern about a lack of energy supplies
in the country. Even several tier-1 cities, such as Delhi, Mumbai and
Bengaluru, have experienced several power blackouts each year. This
can become a serious issue as datacenter energy requirements in
India continue to grow with the rapid implementation of highdensity
equipment. Pawan Khurana, CEO of QuantM Net Technologies, explains,
“Data growth is perhaps another datacenter hardware infrastructure
challenge for SPs. System performance, scalability, network
congestion and connectivity architecture are also adding to it.
Accurate modeling and quantification, implementing energy-monitoring
tools, accelerating consolidation and virtualization projects are the
measures that QuantM adopts to eliminate these issues. QuantM
incorporates innovative datacenter designs and adopt the concept of
green IT and virtualization technologies to overcome these
challenges.”

Additionally, the end-to-end datacenter
business requires taking care of aspects like roofing, fire control
and similar civil work. Normally, a solution provider doesn't
provide civil work. The main domain of SPs in the datacenter business
is IT. Overcoming these challenges is a prerequisite to delivering
prompt service and ensuring client's satisfaction. Generally, SPs
deal with such challenges by outsourcing. The industry experts also
feel that most of the customers plan to build datacenters in
traditional ways and expect SP to integrate the complete solutions
including physical securities. Customers also tend to decide on the
datacenter site and then discuss with SP to arrive at the solution.
However, in practice, this should work the other way around.
Customers should consult with SPs before deciding on the datacenter
site. “We face challenges when it comes to competition with the biggies
like TCS,
Wipro, HCL, and others. These large SIs are directly coming into the
picture and building the datacenters. Even the customers feel
comfortable working with big names. The challenge is giving comfort
level to the customers in terms of what we can really do. But having
said that, we are making our presence felt in the marketplace by
working with some of the large enterprises as well,” said Girish
Madhavan, Director, Quadsel Systems. Some of the other common
challenges include selection of right solution for a specific
customer, as the concept of 'One Size Fits all' is not true in
this business; convincing customer about the need to implement new
initiatives; moving customer from capex to opex model and the
management of change that is involved in this process; and
application monitoring and management.

Meanwhile, SPs are tackling these
challenges by building a team of cross domain expertise which focuses
on specific technologies and also a team, which knits all these to a
viable, efficient overall solution. Their contracts with customers
have discreet solutions and products which can be looked at as a part
of end- to-end datacenter. Private cloud is another strategy which
mitigates the challenge of customer's pain points.

MEETING THE CHALLENGING SLAs

The concept of SLAs is rather new in
the Indian context. Apparently, it is in its infancy in context of
datacenter services. Hence, it
becomes difficult to agree on SLAs with the customers. However, this
is not a consistent behavior. There are some IT matured customers
where agreeing on SLA becomes very easy. So, the challenge of setting
up SLAs depends on the IT maturity level of customers. And once the
SLAs have been set up, meeting those SLAs is really not a challenge.
This is the reason why SPs have the best practices, delivery frame
work and ITIL/ITSM framework in place. Besides, companies always seek
high availability and quick responsiveness for challenges like data
protection and disaster recovery. Entering an SLA is an easy game.
All it takes is a couple of meetings to fully understand the client's
requirements an further set up a SLA. However, following the SLA is a
challenge as there is a penalty clause included in it. SPs like
Targus Technologies always ensure that timely operation is
undertaken. It has various software and highly-skilled people to
monitor the progression as per the SLA. There are MIS reports (both
weekly and monthly) that are regularly sent to its clients to ensure
that the challenging SLAs are met. Most of the SPs also believe once
there is a state of art infrastructure in place and the necessary
tools to monitor and manage the infrastructure and its performance,
defining and delivering on SLAs is not at all a difficult task. This
also implies that the ability to be confident of committing and
delivering SLAs comes with its cost in infrastructure, monitoring
tools and well trained team of engineers managing the day to day
operations.

Moreover, it is not sufficient for
management to establish SLAs and then communicate them to the team
and the stakeholders. The SLAs need to be negotiated in a
collaborative way. This builds understanding and interest in the
system on the part of all stakeholders. This understanding and
interest, paired with the team successfully meeting the performance
goals, results in establishing/increasing trust in the team, in
context of the datacenter services. Hence, it becomes difficult to
agree on SLAs with the customers. However, this is not a consistent
behavior. There are some IT matured customers whose agreeing on SLA
becomes very easy. So, the challenge of setting up SLAs depends on
the IT maturity level of customers. And once SLAs have been set up,
meeting those SLAs is really not a challenge. This is the reason why
SPs have the best practices, delivery frame work and ITIL/ITSM
framework in place.