NxtGen Smart Infrastructure Forum Highlights Enterprise Cloud Services Benefits

NxtGen Datacenters and Cloud Services, one of India's leading data center services solution providers, emphasized on the advantages of an On-Premise Data Center (OPDC) to an audience of more than 25 partners and 125 enterprises during the Smart Infrastructure Forum in Pune.

OPDC is a plug and play self-contained data center on the organization's own premises without the associated capex. Reduced power consumption and cooling requirements and no AMCs help organizations achieve this and maintain a low opex as well.

NxtGen also elaborated on its offerings of Enterprise Cloud Services. Private clouds will also be offered along with OPDC for increased capacities for computing and storage. Satish Vishwanathan, head products, NxtGen suggested enterprises could go for a combination of private clouds for their core applications while their non-core applications like HR, payroll could move into a public cloud. Both the solution partners and enterprises from Pune who attended the Smart Infrastructure Forum were excited by the NxtGen offerings. Some of the partners expressed their interests to go with NxtGen in the near future. "There is a shift amongst smaller enterprises in moving from server rooms to data centers. Something like an OPDC could serve as a smart solution in an attractive cost benefit package for them," said Prem Keswani of Unikaihatsu Software.

Keswani had one more interesting insight. There are nearly 200 small companies-auto ancillaries, manufacturing units-in Pune of Japanese lineage that are looking at having their own data centers and the NxtGen OPDC could be an ideal fit for many of them. A Balsara, MD, Leading Networks, though currently an APC by Schneider partner was impressed by NxtGen and its technology partner Emerson. While Leading Networks is currently looking after structured cabling and switching for auto majors in Pune like Bajaj Auto, Volkswagon and Tata Motors, he was keen to work with NxtGen and Emerson for the datacenter projects he is now embarking on both for automobile as well as IT companies.

Nilesh Phatak of Accutech Power Solutions, while agreeing with the advantages of both OPDC and Enterprise Cloud Services, had two important suggestions for NxtGen. "As channel partners, we have always been comfortable with box pushing kind of deals and whatever happens this will remain so for sometime in the near future. NxtGen's modular plug-and play solutions retains the flavor of box selling; this will definitely be an advantage for us a we will be able to sell solutions in a box selling mode we are comfortable in."

He also emphasized the need for vendors like NxtGen to present some showcase deals for partners which would help them making faster and easier inroads into newer customers. Viral Thakar, Regional Head, NxtGen indeed highlighted some of the existing showcase deals like BigFlix and Zapak which could add to the confidence of the partners. According to Shilpa Bokhad of Powertechnics Infosolutions, since small customers rely largely on system integrators, vendors like NxtGen should embark more on educating and training these SI partners. "Most of our customers are now looking at migrating from server rooms to data centers and it would really help us evangelize these solutions better," she added.

The business values from OPDC and Enterprise Cloud Services particularly in a BFSI environment were also emphasized during a panel discussion attended by SatishVishwanathan, head products, NxtGen, Nilesh Yawalkar from Microsoft, Rajesh Korde of Sungard Global Services and Sudin Baraokar, Head-Global Innovation Platform, Barclays Technology Center.

Like in other cities, Pune enterprises also lapped upNxtGen's announcement to enterprises to sponsor one project for setting up a live application on cloud for six months. As part of the sponsorship, NxtGen would set up a virtual data center at its own facilities and work with CIOs to make the project successful. The private dedicated VDC will replicate the required infrastructure virtually complete with multiple service provider access, custom security configurations as well as virtual provisioning for compute, storage and networking resources.