Zenith's 'Proud' is India's first private cloud

Mumbai: Zenith Infotech launched its latest computing platform-'Proud'. This single infrastructure can run all business computing needs. 'Proud' has been engineered by over 250 computer scientists, across Belgium, Germany, Mumbai and Bengaluru, working for more than four years, at a total cost of Rs 175 crore.

This single centralized computing system will replace the need to buy computing and network hardware as separate unmanageable components. Customers will be able to run their entire IT infrastructure within as virtual machines in the cloud environment.

Functionalities such as high-availability, continuous backups, predictive failure monitoring and granular capacity management, which traditionally have been expensive and separately paid for items, are an integral part of the 'Proud' platform. 'Proud''s scale-out approach to computing, will allow customers to add capacity when they need it without undergoing expensive rip and replace cycles.

Akash Saraf, CEO, Zenith Infotech said, “'Proud' is yet another breakthrough product created by Zenith InfoTech. Before 'Proud', Zenith has successfully built SAAZ, an IT infrastructure management system and ARCA/BDR, a backup and disaster recovery product that have been implemented at 27,000 customer sites in the US, Canada, UK and Australia and have generated over Rs 350 crore in sales for Zenith Infotech over the past two years. Our goal is to have at least 20,000 customers globally adopt the 'Proud' platform within the next two years.”

For businesses to run using 'Proud' no modifications will be required as their existing software and applications won't be changed. Traditionally, customers had to outsource their IT to a third-party data centre to avail of cloud computing. However with 'Proud' customers' host, control and manage their cloud themselves. It will grant businesses the flexibility of using both commercial and open source software through a unique concept called virtual appliances.

“Cloud computing is the classic disruptive technology. Within five years from now, IT departments will either be cloud consumers (use an externally hosted cloud) or a cloud operator (build and manage their own clouds). With 'Proud', we want to provide IT departments with the control and ownership, and yet at reliability levels that are higher than external clouds and yet costs levels that are lower,” added Saraf.