BSNL Announces SAP Certification for its Internet Data Centers

Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL), India's largest telecommunications service provider, announced that its six Internet Data Centers, built and operated by Dimension Data have successfully passed the certification audit called "SAP Certified in Hosting Services for India". For organizations planning to outsource the hosting of their environments running SAP® solutions, they now have the option of hosting services provided by BSNL IDCs.

BSNL had earlier entered into a strategic alliance with Dimension Data, the region's leading provider of IT services and solutions, to provide data center services in India. This resulted in building of six strategic data centres across the country which feature world class facilities, connectivity and manageability and provide a comprehensive portfolio of highly secure, scalable and green data centre solutions. Covering a vast raised floor area of 66,000 square feet, these six data centres are inter-connected with point-to-point Ethernet tunnels that can deliver unprecedented levels of high speed connectivity and low latency. The data centres are strategically located in Jaipur, Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Ludhiana, Ghaziabad and Faridabad. From these data centers, BSNL at present provides Colocation, Managed Hosting and Cloud Services to Central and State Government departments as well as Public and Private enterprises in India.

To achieve this Hosting certification, BSNL's hosting infrastructures were subject to extensive testing and audit by SAP to validate that its offerings conformed to SAP's high standards and were suitable to host mission-critical SAP applications. The assessment included the entire service offering from the physical infrastructure to policies and procedures and overall ability to deliver a mission critical service backed by Service Level Agreements (SLAs). As a SAP certified provider of hosting services, BSNL IDC can perform a range of IT services related to SAP applications, from initial proof of concepts to full deployments for clients of SAP solutions.

"We are proud to have achieved this certification from SAP, and we're excited to set a high standard for how to deliver enterprise class data center services to host SAP applications for our valued customers among large Government departments as well as Private and Public enterprises in India," said Shri A N Rai, Chairman and Managing Director at BSNL. "The certification also validates the commitment by our technology partner, Dimension Data, in ensuring world class systems and processes in our data centers which could pass the rigorous audit done for this certification."

"This certification is in line with our strategy to provide differentiated and unique data center services in the Indian market. This will strengthen our position us as the leader in data center services in India - with a comprehensive range of cloud and hosted services particularly suited for hosting mission critical applications for the government and public sectors. Our cloud platform is also certified by SAP for Cloud Services globally," said Shri Kiran Bhagwanani, Chief Executive Officer at Dimension Data India.

To further ensure on-going high standards for the hosting infrastructure of SAP solutions, as a certified provider of hosting services for SAP solutions, BSNL IDC will undergo a rigorous assessment of their delivery and support capabilities every two years by SAP's outsourcing partner certification group.