India an under-served market with growth of cloud adoption: Web Werks

Web Werks stands out as a data center that services an array of customers such as cloud content carrier, enterprise, SME, startup, government, etc. Nikhil Rathi, CEO and founder of WebWerks India, tells us more. Excerpts:

DQ: Give us a brief introduction on Web Werks, along with its future plans. 

Nikhil Rathi: Web Werks Data Centers have been leaders in India for the past two decades. We are located in more than three countries with more than six geographically located data centers, offering reliable hosting services on dedicated servers, cloud, virtualization, co-location, and disaster recovery services, along with 24×7 rapid action support and 99.995% uptime guarantee.

Web Werks has collaborated with more than 5,000+ organizations globally, that include Fortune 500 companies across various business verticals. These include, Microsoft, Canon, Godrej, TATA, Akamai, Netflix, and many more. Our client list also incorporates Government sectors, such as Mumbai Metro Rail Corp. Ltd, Maharashtra Pollution Control Board, Maharashtra Knowledge Corp., NABARD, NPCI, SIDBI, and so on.

Web Werks is a MeitY-empaneled cloud provider and is 1 of 10 cloud providers to the government (MeghRaj). Unlike most data centers that service only on a single customer type, Web Werks stands out as a data center that services an array of customers such as cloud content carrier, enterprise, SME, startup, government, etc.

• Web Werks plans to expand to all metro cities and fiber landing locations – 10MW Bangalore, 10MW Chennai, Hyderabad, 20MW in Mumbai for hyper-scale play, and a 2MW DC in Kolkata for serving the east.
• Web Werks will be investing Rs. 200 cr in Delhi and Rs. 200 cr in Chennai over the life of the project to build the DCs, apart from real estate costs.

DQ: What is the importance of the Cloudscene leader board and the key factors that helped Web Werks feature on it? 

Nikhil Rathi: Cloudscene is the world’s largest connectivity directory for co-location data centres, cloud service providers (CSPs), and network fabrics. With a database that consists of more than 6,500 data centres and 5,600 CSPs across 110 countries, Cloudscene is the industry’s go-to resource for independent data on co-location facilities.

Cloudscene collates this data for a specific period and based on parameters, such as data center density (total facilities in the region) and connectivity (total service providers across all data centers in the region) to determine an overall combined score for each region. It accordingly ranks the datacenters on the Data Center Ecosystem Leaderboard.

Cloudscene’s co-location operator leaderboard has confirmed Web Werks on the 5th rank as co-location provider in Asia and the 1st rank in India due to its combined score of network density and connectivity service providers, while also securing co-location contracts with some of the world’s most important and influential Internet companies.

Web Werks underlines it’s “truly neutral” carrier, content and cloud interconnect ecosystem with over 160 Internet Service Provider (ISP) networks and multiple Internet Exchanges available at its facilities.

DQ: Touch upon the launch of the Delhi data center and what it brings to the table.  

Nikhil Rathi: With the launch of the Delhi data center, Web Werks has introduced the first commercial “truly neutral” uptime certified data center in Delhi NCR to serve enterprises, carriers, content and cloud customers in the NCR region. The complete facility will be 10MW and 70,000 sq./ft in size when completed, having all major carriers, including Tata, Vodafone, Airtel, Jio, Reliance, BSNL and others available at the data center from the inception.

DQ:  What is the growth and future of data centers and cloud in India?

Nikhil Rathi: India is an under-served market with the growth of cloud adoption. Data center consumption is also booming.

India is already a large, established DC market. High-growth area, Mumbai, is under served, compared to mature markets. There is 79% utilization and 12% capacity, so, there is ample scope for growth. Mumbai offers efficient design with higher capacity per square foot. Mumbai and Chennai are the only ports with an international cable landing. Large DC owners in Mumbai include, STT, NTT and Sify.

Asia Pacific is the key DC growth market. The global co-location revenue forecast will increase by 35% in 2020. Apac will be the largest beneficiary. The Apac Internet penetration continues to rise, especially in India. India's data consumption will spike, requiring supporting infrastructure.

DQ: What are the data center trends around the world?

Nikhil: The data center industry continues to grow and change at a significant pace because of:

• The accelerating demands of big cloud operators for more data center capacity.
• Governments pushing for data residency driving further demands.
• An increase in drive towards edge data center deployments – to put compute and content closer to the eyeballs.
• High connectivity and data consumption driving demand for large network nodes and core data centers.
• The need for computing and storage with regards to AI, Big data, analytics, IoT and ML, which further accelerates the demand for data centers.

Nikhil Rathi, CEO and founder, WebWerks India