Netmagic, an NTT Communications company, is India’s leading Managed Hosting and Cloud Service Provider, with 9 carrier-neutral, state-of-the-art data centers and serving more than 1500 enterprises globally. A pioneer in the Indian IT Infrastructure services space – it was the first to launch services such as Cloud Computing, Managed Security, Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service and Software-Defined Storage.
Nitin Mishra of Netmagic shares here the company marker presence and its journey in this industry.
Please take us through the journey of Netmagic in the Indian business ecosystem.
Netmagic was formed in the year 1998 and its operation started in the year 2000 with the launch of its first data center. During this period, we crossed a few major milestones, which has attributed to the growth of the company. Till about 2006, we had been a single data-center company and this phase was more of building base for the organization. Due to the dot com crash that happened during this phase, the new age company and its business model took some time to take off. During this phase, we built on some basic services and invested in creating managed services. In the next phase that is between 2006 till 2012 we witnessed rapid growth in our business expansion.
We scaled up from one data-center to five data-centers by adding data-centers in Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai and Noida.
During this time, a lot of enterprises showed interested in putting their servers in third party data centers. Earlier, organizations were paranoid about putting their servers outside own premises, due to concerns about security; however this changed over the time and contributed to our growth.
The second aspect that contributed to growth was emergence of ecommerce business in the Indian market scenario. A lot of travel portals has emerged out to be new pillars in the economy. In contrast to the Dotcom phase earlier, this was different, as investors were able to build trust on internet for doing business. Besides, 3G got rolled out with mobile banking and internet banking being accepted by the mass. Thus, these were the factors which helped us grow rapidly during this phase. The third phase is what we call ‘post-NTT business phase’. During 2006 to 2012, whenever we had to raise fund to build our own private data-center, we had to visit a VC, or to raise funds. Today we have financial security of NTT to invest for tapping the market potential.
Today, we are able to build an enterprise base for almost 1500 enterprise customers. In fact, we also plan to expand our facilities further. New businesses are coming from NTT customers or global customers and we are also getting some more new contracts in the market.
As a premium service provider in data analytics and information management system, how do you perceive your market presence?
Precisely, we are not confined to data analytics, rather, we are expanding by providing a platform where people can get into to do data analytics. Today, our focus is more on providing the IT Infrastructure as a service to our customers, which they can use for multiple purposes like analytics, applications, SAP, etc.
Also, we focus on customers, who bring their servers and co-locate; typically targeted for customers who have a good IT team and can manage these frontiers. There are second set of customers, whom we provide our services with complete packaged solutions including storage, application, compute, security and also management of the whole infrastructure.
The third area is on the entire cloud computing, where we provide every service as a virtual infrastructure to our customers.
The way we differentiate from others is with the depth of skill-sets on the managed services and security to our customers.
Please elaborate on the USP of Netmagic over its competitors when it comes to convincing a prospective customer in this highly competitive market?
Firstly, we as an organization have a complete breadth of IT infrastructure services, which differentiates us from the rest of the crowd. We provide co-location, managed hosted infrastructure and cloud computing. There are organizations in the market like Amazon and Azure, which are purely on public cloud. Based on customer requirements, we can size it and distribute the work load required across available infra options based on performance requirements. Some of the work-loads require a lot of scale up and scale down so we place them on public cloud.
At times, when there is long-term requirements from customer, we provide Private Cloud with long-term contract. For enterprises today, compliances are very crucial, both from security and standards perspective. Thus, when we give an integrated solution, it becomes easy for them to comply. Besides this, we have good and strong financial organization that is backing us for our operations in the Indian market.
Which are the key sectors of operation that Netmagic is primarily serving to?
Honestly, eCommerce and media are one of the large and prime sectors of operations for us, which include companies like Flipkart, Myntra, BookMyShow, Hunagama, Business Standard and many more.
The second key focus area that Netmagic has set their eyes on, is the BFSI sector – precisely it is more of the Financial Services and Insurance sector. The third key sector for us is the manufacturing sector, which has been growing rapidly.
We are also involved in government sector, however, not much of significant share of our revenue is drawn from this sector. We focus more on the quality of our product than being competitive on price point.
Would you like to recount on your experience on the roadblocks faced by Netmagic during their initial days of operations?
Initially, the biggest challenge that we faced was the dot com crash. When we started off initially in the year 2000, we had limited investment. Companies hosting with us then, shut down on investors abhorred Internet Company. Also, it was a challenge for us to convince enterprises to adopt to third-party datacenters through this phase, that led to rapid growth.
How do you outline the roadmap of Netmagic for the coming few year
We are presently investing on cloud computing and other newer technologies. We have been growing at a CAGR of over 35 percent for the last 5 years and in the last twelve months, we have grown over 50 percent. We are confident to sustain this momentum going forward.
Also, we are soon to come up with our own datacenters in Mumbai and Bangalore. In fact, with the recent government’s keenness to adopt technologies at every level, we can see a steep growth in business from public sector as well.
