The Hindu Business Line : ITI foraying into IT services, setting up data centre

New Delhi, March 15 In a bid to make use of its surplus land, Indian Telephone Industries (ITI), the telecom manufacturing arm of the Government, is setting up the country’s largest data centre through a public-private partnership model with an investment of nearly Rs 400 crore.

The centre, to be spread over on 1 lakh sq ft, will be offered to companies wanting backup data recovery facility.

“We have invited bids from private and public companies for a strategic partnership with ITI for this major project. Several companies have applied and they are under evaluation at present.

The selected partner will get a share of the revenue in return for setting up the date centre with ITI,” said a senior official in Department of Telecom. The move is part of ITI’s strategy to generate additional revenues by foraying into the IT services segment in a bid to lessen its dependence on Government funding.

The Centre will be used for Web hosting, server co-location and for data storage and repository.

Land, manpower

While ITI will provide the land, the strategic partner will have to put in the entire investment required to set up the infrastructure. ITI will also bring on board manpower for maintaining and managing the services with appropriate training.

The revenue share formula will be negotiated with the partner once the applications are scrutinised. “The selected bidder will be initially provided with 20,000 to 40,000 sq ft which can be scaled up to 1 lakh sq ft of the existing building space by ITI. Services may be offered to potential customers for a period of 5 years and this arrangement can be renewed for another 5 years on mutual consent. The total project cost is likely to be Rs 400 crore within 2 years based on current estimates,” said the DoT official.

As the Indian outsourcing story gains momentum the demand for data centres will increase. The need for third-party IDCs is felt more strongly than before since all players are into serious e-business and want to have the best infrastructure, connectivity, expertise and managed services for their applications.

The biggest adopters are enterprises, banks and financial institutions which want to outsource the hosting and management of their mission-critical applications to specialised providers.

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