Bangalore-based IT product company Sanovi Technologies, which works on business continuity and IT recovery, has been on an expansion mode and has ventured into the US market recently. Chandra Sekhar Pulamarasetti, co-founder & CEO of Sanovi, is now planning to expand its service offerings on cloud platform. In a conversation with Anand J, Pulamarasetti talks about the need of business continuity as cyber attacks increase and threaten many companies with data protection and recovery. Excerpts:
How do you see the business continuity and IT recovery market?
Every organisation requires to ensure that business continues to be running even when there are outages. The worldwide market is estimated to grow to $60 billion by 2018, including hardware, software and services. On an average enterprises have 3-6% expenditure on IT recovery budget. Banks and financial institutions allocate a higher percentage of their revenue for IT recovery. Indian companies do allocate lesser though the pie is rapidly growing. Financial sector, telecom, retail and manufacturing apart from the government sectors are the leading sectors that invest in IT recovery. Healthcare is getting bigger in Europe and USA. And these sectors spending in IT recovery mirrors their IT spending.
What is the criteria for the companies for investing in IT recovery?
It depends on the sector?s sensitivity to business outages and the impact it will have on their business. Revenue, brand reputation, legal issues and employee productivity are the things companies consider for investing in business continuity. For financial sector firms, there is also a regulatory concern of protecting user transaction information. According to Gartner, $42,000 per hour is the average business lost due to outages and upwards of $100,000 for financial sector. The credit card banking, ATM banking, internet banking are all critical functions that cannot afford outages.
What are the major causes of outages?
Outages result in server and applications going down and data to be corrupted. On an average outage time is around 8-16 hours. Power outages, which contributes to 30% of all outages, or fluctuations happen even when you have generators. There are large grid outages in US. Those might be once in three or six months but companies can?t afford to not investing in business continuity. Second biggest reason is human error and the resultant power loss to the data centre. For instance if that company is a cloud service provider, hundreds of dependent companies will also be affected. Natural disasters and cyber attacks also cause outages, with the instances of latter increasingly becoming common. It could also be because the software upgrade does not work and the application was down or network connectivity was lost. You need to have an alternate centre where the application can be run until the service is restored.
Do you provide the service on cloud as well?
We work with third party companies that provide our services on cloud. We usually sell the software to companies. We sell and get licence charges as well as annual maintenance charges. It is usually deployed by our partners, Wipro and HP. The challenge is that business continuity is a manual process and one needs to have an alternate infrastructure to run it and then you can migrate it to the new infrastructure. There are lot of smaller cloud-based players emerging in the sector of late. Most of our current investment is to deliver this as a cloud service.
Would not a general banking software have business continuity built in?
One business continuity solution might work for 20 applications run by a company. Because it is a separate infrastructure solution a general software would not have this built in to the system as this is a very expensive proposition. And the IT group and infrastructure group are usually different departments and the solutions are not common either for different companies and their requirements. An application meant for production usually cannot be used for business continuity while some stock exchange software tend to have that built in.
Which are your big markets?
Around 90% of our revenue come from India and Asia Pacific markets. We have gone to US market late last year and are on expansion phase now. The government is investing a lot in e-governance and hence there is a great opportunity here in India as well. We are working on cloud based solution for US market and there is a huge demand for business continuity after the Sandy storm. We have sales offices in Delhi, Mumbai, Dubai and now in US.
