Reliance seeks partners for its data center offerings

Reliance Infocomm Ltd is seeking solution providers who can
take its data center offerings to enterprise customers. The group has four data
centers nationally-two in Mumbai and two at

Bangalore.

A relatively unknown facet of the group's business, the
Internet data center started its operations in 2001 hosting and managing mission
critical applications for enterprise customers. Its clients largely comprise
banking institutions and governmental agencies. "We currently have 12 banks
whose core banking applications are managed by us," says Sunil Gupta,
Head-Product Management and Business, Operations (IDC), Reliance Infocomm.

Now, the company wants to add corporate houses to this list,
as more and more organizations start delegating its application management to
third party players. It offers services like co-location, enterprise shared
hosting, managed media and streaming, shared database, managed system and
database administration, managed mail and security, managed load

balancing services, storage, disaster recovery, monitoring and reporting.

All these services are offered on pay-per-use as well as a
fully outsourced model, and Reliance wants solution providers who will extend
these offerings to their existing corporate

clients.

Presently, Reliance Infocomm has 475 customers of which 350 are its strategic
clients, serviced directly by the company's sales force. Six months ago, it
started a channel partner program and even appointed a channel manager who would
work towards building the partner network. "We have 60 solution providers
working with us now and want to take this number to 200 in the next five
months," said Sunil.

VINITA BHATIA