“Our Teams Ensure CIOs Enjoy Peace of Mind and a Good Night’s Sleep While our Teams Work 24X7”: CTRLS

Sridhar Pinnapureddy, Founder, and CEO, CtrlS Datacenters Ltd, in an exclusive interview to Dataquest talk about his entrepreneurial journey and the making of CtrlS into a leading force in the Data Center space. Excerpts:

The defining moments in your business?

Launching India’s 1st Tier-4 data center has been one of my most satisfying and defining moments in business. All-in-All there are just about 27 Tier-4 data centers across the Globe and CtrlS today owns four of them – that too in India. Our Mumbai facility is Asia’s largest Tier-4 datacenter. Besides this, our innovations such as Disaster Recovery as a Service, Cloud4C – World’s 1st Tier-4 Cloud and our latest service offering Community cloud roll-out has been a very defining moment for our business. All our services help address the CIOs challenges.

For example, our Noida datacentre addresses the challenges of air pollution, power issues, and earthquakes, the facility is equipped with an air filtration plant that eliminates air pollutants such as sulphur which corrode (rust) the hardware – thereby safeguarding the data. It is my firm belief that solutions should be built to make life easy for the CIOs and help them focus on their core businesses.

What is happening in the DC space right now and how are you approaching the market?

Large Enterprises with in-house datacentre facilities were initially shy of outsourcing, but they have now realized the benefits and have begun moving their infrastructure to data centers. Government and Banks too are following their footsteps, but its slower than the private enterprises. While India still has around five to six million square feet of captive on-premise datacentre facilities, a mere two million is outsourced. There is huge room for Indian datacentre provides to witness growth. This apart, the large global players such as Amazon, Microsoft, Google have established their facilities in India. This apart the growth of IoT, Cloud, Analytics, Social Media will drive the growth of data centre business by over 70% in the next eighteen to twenty-four months and India’s traditional data center (end user) outsourcing is expected to reach $693 million by 2021.

Your overall play in the DC market?

As India’s largest Tier-4 Datacenter services provider, our focus is to help the CIOs address their need for zero downtime of infrastructure and applications. We partner with them by supporting them with Industry uptime best SLA of 99.995%, lowest PUE of 1.42, provide the lowest latency through carrier neutral and comprehensive ecosystem, lowest total cost of ownership. We also provide managed services to ensure while the data center is outsourced, the CIOs focus on their core business. We have 16 centers of excellence (CoEs) and they act as an extended team of CIOs through our managed services portfolio working round the clock by monitoring and managing both their infrastructure and applications. Our teams ensure CIOs enjoy peace of mind and a good night’s sleep while our teams work 24X7.

Work Area Recovery services are provided for those customers who experience a disaster or an outage. We have over 1,000 WAR seats across India. Several of our customers who faced outage relocate their employees to our datacentre and are back to business in just about a few hours. This is a part of BCP/DR portfolio.We will be owning close to 1 million square feet of data center space in the next twelve to eighteen months.

Can you give a sense of the unique capabilities of CtrlS in this space?

Tier-4 is a major differentiator which helps provide an uptime SLA of 99.995%, power savings through low PUE of 1.42. Some of our customers have witnessed power savings of over 20%, Quake Proof, Pollution Free facility (Noida), Carrier neutrality, low total cost of ownership (TCO), low latency at our datacentre due to the presence of banks, eCommerce players, payment gateways, insurance companies. Most importantly the principles with which we run our business – Customer fist philosophy, Total ownership – owning the customer issues and being proactive differentiate us in delivering value to our customers.

Key innovations you have pioneered?

We have had over 200 innovations since the last nine years, 80 of those innovations have been in the energy efficiency space. Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), Cloud4C – World’s 1st Tier4 Cloud based on 4 Copy architecture, Community Cloud for Banks, Insurance, Government, ERP (Manufacturing) are noteworthy innovations transforming the way businesses embrace technology.

Top priorities for the next 12 months?

Our Top priority is our Customer. All our investments, innovations are being driven to help the customers overcome their technology and business challenges. Over the next twelve to eighteen months, we plan to launch three new data center facilities across India. This apart our Cloud4C services have been rolled out in 15 countries and by 2019 we shall be operational in 40 countries. An investment of Rs. 1,200 crore is being planned to augment our expansion plans.