“NxtGen Powering Digital Enterprises”

A S Rajgopal
A S Rajgopal
MD and CEO
NxtGen

NxtGen Datacenter & Cloud Technologies Pvt Ltd is an emerging leader in data centre and cloud-based services that help poweringbusiensses to grow by cutting through complexity and saving on cost. The Bengaluru-based company, which has set up 10 data centers in India since its inception in 2012, is serving today over 2,000 customers, including 226 in public sector. A S Rajgopal, MD and CEO of NxtGen, shares the company’s business vision, its ongoing strategy and future approach for the Public Sector market, in an interview with T Radhakrishna of Elets News Network (ENN).

How does NxtGen power a business through its solutions? Kindly explain strategic direction of your business.

A S Rajgopal
A S Rajgopal
MD and CEO,
NxtGen

At NxtGen, we understand both the business of technology and the technology of business. We have explored the newest products, the latest technologies and the most insightful studies to bring customers the best machines for their IT infrastructure needs across brands. But what actually matters is how we work for customers. Making a clear and purposeful departure from the data centre service industry it, our business is driven by efficiency – in how we operate and how we help customers operate.

 

NxtGen’s vision is to be a market leader in data centre industry through clear differentiators in our operating style andcompany ethos, along with providing our customers as per real time solutions need. We believe that truly efficient technology is that which saves time, energy and cost. We want our customers to pay for what they use and configure the best solution to fit their need.

Today, NxtGen has multiple data centre facilities (10) – two each in Mumbai, Delhi NCR, Bengaluru and one each in Ahmedabad, Ludhiana, and Jaipur and one in Singapore. We serve around 2,000 customers in India, including 226 in public sector. We are a growing company and NxtGen has as many as 265 employees. We have expanded our capabilities through a strategic partnership with Nutanix a next generation enterprise cloud platform company.

We are happy to know that NxtGen has outperformed Amazon Web Services and Rackspace in the priceperformance metric for cloud servers, according to an i n d e p e n d e n t benchmarking report by Cloud Spectator, a leading US – based industry consultant in performance and pricing analysis for the IaaS marketplace. According to the latest Cloud Spectator report, NxtGen Enterprise Cloud Services has displayed strong price-performance metric, providing the most value across all five use cases examined in the study.

What are the benefits customers expect from your solutions? How are your solutions are different?

We offer solutions such as Infinite Datacenter; On Premise Data Centre; Enterprise Cloud Services; and High Density Data Centre.

Infinite Datacenter: NxtGen works with customers in their journey into the hyper-converged hybrid computer infrastructure, building a digital enterprise without owning IT infrastructure. Our approach considers customer’s existing investments in IT infrastructure, specific requirements such as compliance and enabling elasticity (grow and shrink) in IT infrastructure in sync with dynamic business requirements. NxtGen provides infrastructure-as-a-service from its own data centers and/or on customer premises, allowing customers to plug their existing infrastructure. The infrastructure is managed centrally from Bengaluru and Mumbai facilities. Customers leverage NxtGen’s model to create additional capacities for new or existing applications, create Disaster Recovery and in the long-run leverage the model to focus only on applications and depend on NxtGen to deliver expected performance and availability at the infrastructure layer.

On Premise Data Centre Model: NxtGen offers advanced cloud solutions at customers’ doorstep. Armed with the latest infrastructure technology, NxtGen allows customers to take on the dynamic business environment by reducing running costs and enabling growth.

Enterprise Cloud Services: With the global business scenario becoming increasingly volatile, enterprises are inclined towards heavy capital expenditure on IT infrastructure. If the IT projects do not take off as expected, enterprises will be left with expensive IT infrastructure without making complete use of them. On the other hand if they need to commission infrastructure in short notice, they will not have enough time to evaluate all the alternatives and may end up spending more than required. Hence enterprises are looking at ways to scale their IT infrastructure up or down in short notice based on the business needs. Apart from the hardware infrastructure, enterprises often end up spending huge sums on procuring expensive software with perpetual licenses. They will end up being locked-in and incur expenses to upgrade to newer and better software when they are available. Thus, enterprises also are in need of latest software available on a pay-per-use model. NxtGen offers Enterprise Cloud Services (ECS) to address these exact needs of enterprises. NxtGen ECS enable seamless growth for companies by avoiding IT infrastructure lock-in. NxtGen ECS lets enterprises get their applications up and running without having to lose time in procuring hardware and investing in CAPEX.

High Density Data Centre (HDCC): Our model is designed to exceed Tier 3 specifications, hosting 2,000 high-density racks in four independent data centers. Situated on a 10 acre Data centre campus, ideally located for critical systems operations, purpose-built ground-up to deliver high efficiencies. NxtGen’s HDDC project was executed with “Server-Out” design, incorporating most modern technologies to deliver increased availability, energy efficiency and environmental responsibilities.The HDDC is designed to accommodate 15KW per rack and delivers five times more capacity per rack as compared to traditional data centers.

Managed Services: NxtGen’s managed services solutions are designed to allow enterprises to ensure performance and sustainability of business operations. The solutions are responsible for the alignment of service management practices and strategies towards value delivery to clients. Our managed services include: management of Platform/OS, Database, Network, Storage, Security, DRaaS, etc.

How significant is your strategic partnership with Nutanix?

The partnership between NxtGen and Nutanix aims to enhance cost efficiency, scalability and control for customers. Apart from others, the partnership aims to develop market and sell hosted private cloud services and an enterprise class cloud based disaster recovery model from NxtGen’s nine data centers located across India. These services can be leveraged by enterprises on an on demand, elastic and pay- as-you- grow model. It enables cost efficiency by up to 60% reduction from licensing, enhanced scalability, fastest time to value. It allows enterprise IT innovation without compromising on the security and control of onpremises IT infrastructure.

NxtGen Datacenter & Cloud Technologies is planning to set up four new data centers, including one each in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh.

The Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform will enable NxtGen to build and support more scalability by combining hyperconverged and webscale technologies with enterprise-class capabilities. Nutanix will help provide high performance that NxtGen customers’ need, at as much as a 50% reduction in IT footprint. NxtGen leverages DR capabilities of the Nutanix platform to offer disaster recovery as a service for enterprises. The platform is agile, allowing deployments in as little as a few hours compared to a few months of planning and implementation earlier. This fully managed services portfolio allows enterprise IT to focus on building and managing their enterprise applications, rather than building and managing complex infrastructure.

Give us an overview on NxtGen’s cloud video conferencing?

NxtGen is targeting to sign-in at least 5,000 virtual conferencing rooms for its payas- you-use video conferencing service. VCEverywhere, as it aims to make video conferencing more affordable to small and large companies by paying monthly subscription rather than investing in such equipments. In February 2016, we launched VCEverywhere, a video conferencing service using cloud technology. It enables enterprises and their employees connect through any device from anywhere. NxtGen has tied up with Avaya to use the latter’s Scopia video collaboration platform. Users can connect on a virtual meeting room using their smartphones, tablet or laptop computers and any other internet connected device, irrespective of the internet bandwidth speeds they have. NxtGen will provide the virtual video conferencing facility for a monthly subscription fee of Rs 3,199 for 10-users to enterprises, and would charge Rs 2,499 for every additional 10-users.

The pay-as-you-use model will save costs for companies as they would not need to buy video conferencing equipments, which often run into few lakhs of rupees and it will reduce the 6-8 weeks time taken for installations, and maintaining it. This is why very few organisations use video conference since it is cumbersome. The VCEverywhere launch comes at a time when internet usage is increasing in the country, thanks to the falling prices of smartphones and declining subscription fee for high-speed internet services on 3G, and 4G technology.

What is your strategy for the public sector market in India? How important is the Government business for NxtGen?

We closely work with BSNL for serving the public sector market in India. BSNL provides connectivity and data centre services, which are managed by NxtGen. Today, we work with 226 public sector organisations, including Election Commission of India, Employee Provident Fund Organisation, Air India, etc. More and more public sector organisations are going for cloud services. For NxtGen, the public sector market is very important. Going forward, we see good opportunities for analytics in public sector market.

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