Amid the growing demand among companies to leverage digital technology through cloud solutions, Airtel-owned Nxtra Data, which offers data centre solutions, is confident of growing faster than the market and taking its enterprise consumer base to 1,000 from 450 in the next two-three years.
Apart from the increase in demand for data storage infrastructure from the enterprises, the company is banking on its parent Bharti Airtel’s over 1 million enterprise base to penetrate the market.
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Simply put, a data centre is a dedicated space or building that houses a company’s IT equipment and servers, which is used by the respective companies to carry out their operations digitally like data processing, etc.
“We have more than 3,000 large enterprises, which are already using services of Airtel. We are engaging with all of them as they keep moving towards co-location services, we would be a natural partner for them,” Ashish Arora, CEO, Nxtra, told FE in an interaction. “Given all the infrastructure that we are investing in and all the new capacities we are creating, we will definitely be able to grow faster than the market,” Arora added.
Apart from large consumers like OTTs and banking, Nxtra also sees penetration of data centres from smaller enterprises that are now digital and using digital technologies.
“They (small companies) may not buy a large capacity but they are large in numbers,” Arora said. The Indian data centre market is expected to grow to $10 billion in 2027 from $4 billion, according to the company.
Among the enterprises, the company is bullish about co-location services, using which a large enterprise takes rack space on rent to put their servers.
Nxtra currently has 12 large data centres and 120 edge data centres, with over 200 MW of power capacity. The company is coming up with seven new hyperscale campuses across the metro cities of Mumbai, Pune, Kolkata, Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Delhi, and targets to grow its capacity to 400 MW in the next three years. The company will launch the Mumbai campus that will be live this year, and campuses in Kolkata and Pune will come up next year.
Hyperscale data centres are required to cater to vast data processing and storage requirements of large companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft
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The company is bullish on the government’s data embassy policy announced in the Budget, as part of which, companies globally that want to move their data processing units to India can do so.
“It’s an interesting concept. We are closely tracking it. We believe it will be beneficial for the industry because other countries will be able to host their data within Indian territories,” said Rajesh Tapadia, chief operating officer at Nxtra.
“The current understanding is that we will not be talking to these countries right now. There will be zones which will be allocated by the government. We will be setting up our infrastructure, which will be leased by the government,” Tapadia added.
When asked about the update on the investment target of Rs 5,000 crore by 2025, Tapadia said the company is on track to achieve the target and has been achieving the yearly targets.
In FY22, Nxtra’s revenue from operations rose 20% YoY to Rs 1,333 crore, whereas its net profit rose 33% to Rs 238 crore. The company aims to become net zero by 2031.
When asked about the competition from large technology companies like Microsoft and Amazon
“Currently a very marginal amount of their capacity is owned by them. Everything else is through data centre players. They do plan to do some of it themselves, but it won’t be a very large percentage. So we definitely feel that there’s enough and more growth available through hyperscale centres,” he added.
(The correspondent was in Bengaluru at the invitation of Bharti Airtel