From datacentres to virtualisation to cloud computing, enterprises today have a much wider choice in the way they want to use and deploy IT infrastructure. Cloud computing is a relatively new concept and despite the numerous benefits it offers to companies, cloud computing can be a confusing for those who are yet to comprehend its true potential. ?Many service providers pretend to be cloud players and take advantage of the ignorance of the market,? says Sharad Sanghi, CEO & MD of Netmagic Solutions, a company that he founded in July 1998. Sharad is an industry veteran with 20 years of experience in developing internet backbone infrastructure and providing internet services. He is one of the few Indians to have worked as a backbone engineer of the first major backbone of the Internet?NSFNet in the US. In a recent interaction with Sudhir Chowdhary, he predicts that cloud computing is set to grow, albeit through innovation and evolution. Excerpts:

We have heard that many service providers pretend to be cloud players and take advantage of ignorance in the market…

That?s true. Virtual private server (VPS) providers typically virtualise a single physical box into far too many virtual private servers, which translates into one physical host machine running far too many customers and this turns into a resource allocation nightmare causing server crashes or poor performance (or both).

An orchestration layer is present in the portal of a cloud system that enables customers to provision and scale up or scale down resources?servers, networks and storage instantly. The orchestration layer allows customers to manage their cloud infrastructure in real-time. None of this is possible in VPS, because a VPS has no orchestration layer or self-provisioning portal.

You recently opened a datacentre in Noida. Aren?t you late to the party?

In fact, it is our customers who have requested us to start a datacentre here. The demand is already there. We are India?s largest pure-play carrier-neutral datacentre service provider. Businesses in Delhi will now have the choice of a datacentre service provider who has the expertise and experience of managing mission critical IT infrastructure for over 1,000 global and domestic enterprises over the last 13 years.

We now have more than 2,00,000 sq ft of datacentre space across Noida, Mumbai, Bangalore and Chennai. Enterprises in Delhi NCR can partner with us for hosting their primary as well as disaster recovery sites at any of our datacentre facilities.

As per our research, in Delhi NCR the demand far outstrips the supply. Given the environment, we will offer both better and wider range of services as well as a huge hosting capacity.

What is the competitive advantage that Netmagic has over its rivals?

Netmagic?s strengths have been our focus on providing the most comprehensive managed services portfolio that customers can choose from, our customer service and support which is acknowledged by all our customers and partners, nimbleness in responding to our customer?s business needs and carrier neutrality of our datacentres.

We are India?s largest pure-play managed IT hosting services company and one of the most innovative datacentre business in India. We were the first ones to launch a cloud service offering in India. Today, Netmagic dominates the India e-commerce and internet landscape with its customer base which includes 15 of the top 20 broking firms in India, 5 of the top 10 media companies, top 3 travel companies in India, 90% of mobile VAS providers, leading international players from the BFSI sector and a strong presence in the manufacturing sector.

You have witnessed the growth of the internet business over the last decade. How has the internet datacentre (IDC) business changed in these years?

When we entered this industry 13 years ago, the dotcom boom was in play and people expected the adoption of internet to go through the roof. IDCs then were the flavour of the season and this business saw a lot of players who didn?t quite understand the nuances of this business. The focus then was only on making available real estate for servers and ensuring a 99.99% uptime.

We realised early on that the emphasis needs to be on providing managed services and engineered our business model accordingly. Today, there is a more realistic view to the market, e-commerce businesses have just started becoming viable and are here to stay. The focus for most serious datacentre players is services?managed services and cloud services are the big growth areas for an IDC. Clients don?t ask us for uptime anymore, but ask for service level agreements on parameters like number of transactions the infrastructure can handle and how can we improve the end user experience.

How is the cloud changing your business model? What initiatives are you taking in this space?

Cloud is our fastest growing business. It is growing at more than 100% year-on-year though it is from a smaller revenue base. We have invested heavily in developing our own cloud service through our R&D labs in Pune. This gives us and our customers the opportunity to completely customise it to our customers? requirement?an option not available with other infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) providers who are using plug and play cloud solutions built by others.

We are also investing heavily in building our cloud partner ecosystem.