Singapore-based strategic investor ST Telemedia, Bharti Airtel’s subsidiary NxtraData and Mumbai-based Netmagic have emerged the top players in the Indian multi-tenant data centre market.

According to a new report by 451 Research, a US-based information technology research and advisory company, the revenue for cloud computing in India is expected to have a 25 per cent CAGR (compound annual growth rate) between 2016 and 2021, reaching $1.02 billion, a major boon for data centre providers.

The report said Amazon Web Services is said to maintain the edge nodes in as many as five facilities in Mumbai alone, and has even moved some workloads from Singapore and Hong Kong in recent years. Microsoft Azure, for its part, has placed at least one major deployment with a dedicated substation, also in Mumbai, along with other edge nodes.

Other top public cloud firms, such as IBM’s SoftLayer, Google, Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent, also maintain a presence in the market by establishing partnerships with local colocation providers.

Colocation

“Almost one-third of the colocation market resides in the country’s top commercial and financial centre and international subsea cable destination, Mumbai. Significant portions of the rest of the market (together 31 per cent of the total operational square footage) lie in New Delhi... and Bengaluru...,” the report said, adding that 84 per cent of India’s data centre supply is concentrated in the country’s five largest markets — Mumbai, Chennai, New Delhi, Bengaluru and Pune.

For a sense of just how compact India’s data-centre market is, only about 60 per cent of China’s much larger footprint is located within its top-five markets (Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Chengdu). Technically, with just under 5,00,000 operational square feet, Chennai is the second-largest data-centre city in India, well behind Mumbai.

The report also predicts that the country’s colocation and managed-hosting market could reach almost $2 billion in revenue by 2019, up from $1.3 billion in 2016.

“Most data centre investment is focussed on these five cities, reflecting India’s booming economic growth in dense urban areas,” said Teddy Miller, Associate Analyst at 451 Research, and the report’s author.

“Providers in the country must overcome an array of obstacles, though, including lack of infrastructure, socio-economic inequality, government bureaucracy and hesitation on the part of local businesses to adopt colocation services.”

The writer is an intern with the BusinessLine Mumbai bureau.

comment COMMENT NOW