Spotlight

Outsourcing data centers

The operational costs of Indian data centers are increasing and businesses are facing power, cooling and security issues which are leading them to outsource their data center requirements. NetMagic is capitalizing on this opportunity says Mohd Shariff PA

Mumbai based managed service provider, NetMagic Solutions has specialized in managed hosting and remote infrastructure management services. The company manages data centers for businesses that want to reduce their data center operations costs and free up their internal resources. This trend has helped NetMagic Solutions to quickly ramp up its customer list in the recent past. Its 400 odd customers include big names such as Moneycontrol, IBN Live, Johnson Tiles, World Space Radio, and Indiainfoline, Telco, Travel Guru and Yatra and many more. Shard Sanghi, Group CEO, NetMagic Solutions, said, “We ensure high availability, seamless performance and security of a customer’s mission critical hosted applications. These are being delivered through efficient Internet data and network operation centers in India and the US.”

The company was founded in July 1998 and it initially focused on offering network-design and implementation-related professional services to Indian ISPs and large corporate clients. NetMagic transformed into a leading managed hosting service provider in November 2000 by setting up its first Internet data center in Mumbai. Today the company has three data centers, two located in Mumbai and one at Bangalore. Sanghi said, “We have over 3,000 servers hosted at our data centers in India and virtual data center in the US and a development center in Pune where we focus on the development of monitoring tools that can be used as third-party solutions.”

End-to-end MSP

Looking at the Indian market, where companies are embracing business outsourcing in huge way, the company has kept its focus on all verticals. At the moment its customers include market leaders from industry verticals of banking and financial services, e-commerce, education, hospitality, healthcare, IT & ITES, logistics, manufacturing and media.

It renders services on the form of hosting services, managed services, bandwidth connectivity, remote management, mail & messaging, professional services and disaster recovery.

Its Internet Data centers provide a hosting environment for its clients, irrespective of the size of the organization involved. Sanghi said, “We offer diverse Web hosting packages ranging from Shared hosting on Windows and Linux platforms to large-scale multiple-rack servers or Cage Hosting for mission-critical applications sites that fit the needs of any major online business.” All hosting services are backed by NetMagic’s industry leading SLA, and are supported by their proactive 24x7 NOC and helpdesk, available around the clock to swiftly resolve and attend to any calls.

The second major area of focus is the managed services business. The company’s exhaustive list of managed services is oriented toward availability, performance, and security. With expertise in managing the day-to-day Internet operations of its customers, its managed services are aimed at companies with requirements that are mission-critical, high-traffic, or resource-intensive and they help to eliminate expenditure on administration teams, security, equipment, bandwidth, data backups, and connectivity. Most importantly, one will have the freedom to concentrate on the success of the core business rather than worry about ensuring performance and mitigating downtime. This extends the market for NetMagic.

The company has redundant bandwidth connectivity to the Internet through fiber optic cable systems to ensure the maximum uptime and availability without business disruption. Comprehensive peering arrangements with other players in the industry ensure maximum redundancy and optimum traffic routing. Its customers enjoy the benefits of a global backbone, high-performance network architecture and industry-leading peering arrangements which together offer maximum site availability.

NetMagic provides advanced monitoring services to customers. Its Advanced Monitoring Services provides customers with failure and pre-failure notification, threshold alarms, and statistical trend-analyses. Sanghi said, “We use world-class technologies and tools to ensure a high-performance, reliable advanced monitoring services, including IBM’s Tivoli Monitoring Suite, Nagios, and various SNMP tools.” Its NOC is manned 24 hours a day, 7 days a week comprises of support staff, call analysts and senior technical staff monitoring all critical parameters related to the performance of the network and the servers hosted at the customer’s location over dedicated Internet links. “We honor each and every SLA agreed upon with our customers so that delivery of services is exactly as per the customer’s requirement,” asserted Sanghi.

India as a strategic market

The IT and ITES sectors are expected to be a major contributor to the company’s business in the future. It has reported a CAGR of 100% in 2007 vis-a-vis 2006. Though Sanghi did not disclose the total revenue of the company, he admitted that 80% of its revenue is coming from the domestic market.

Sanghi says that there were very few DCs that were operating between 2001 to 2006 in India and NetMagic stepped into this slot. Sanghi said, “Today specialized service providers are emerging and there has been a significant increase in DC maintenance cost. Moreover a rise in managed services outsourcing by the US services providers to India helped us in our growth.” Indian IDCs have now evolved to offer a broad spectrum of services to better serve the requirements of customers of all sizes across verticals. The challenges in managing in house data centers have forced them to give the work to MSPs. Adopting changing market dynamics and benchmarking the infrastructure space and increasing tight budget is been biggest challenges that Indian enterprise are facing. Sanghi believes that this new business trend would open new avenues for NetMagic.

NetMagic expects more outsourcing of IT infrastructure and DC to happen in the current year. There are several reasons for Indian companies to go in for these services including cost savings, access to advanced IT resources and freeing up internal resources. Sanghi concluded, “To make any decision and make things successful, taking the right approach at the right time is key—this would make success for both clients as well as service providers like us.”

mohammed.shariff@expressindia.com