Netmagic scouting of large land parcels to expand facilities

Data centre-hosting company Netmagic, owned by Japan’s NTT Communications, will soon embark upon its next level of growth by buying over 30 acres of land to set up new campuses in Mumbai, Chennai and Bengaluru.

But unlike in the past, when Netmagic invested in buildings to set up data centres, the company will now build large campuses with at least 10 acres of land in each of the cities, to ensure future expansion can happen much faster.

The firm is due to open two data centres in Mumbai and Bengaluru , which was part of its ₹1,200-crore expansion plan. With the new data centres, Netmagic will be adding 5 lakh sqft, capacity to its gross data centre footprint in India, taking it to 1.1 million sqft.

The next set of expansion could go beyond an additional ₹1,000 crore, including the cost of land and the data centre buildings that’ll be constructed over the next few years. Even as the company is scouting for the land parcels in major metros, it is planning another data centre in Mumbai, which could break ground by early next year.

“We have been growing at 34 per cent CAGR for the past five years, which means we will be running short of capacity much sooner than we anticipated,” Sharad Sanghi, MD and CEO, Netmagic, told BusinessLine . “With further expansion of data centrr footprint and addition of international data network services to our service portfolio, we aim to meet the growing market needs for mobility, e-commerce, Internet of Things (IoT), cloud and big data.”

According to a Gartner study, India became the second fastest-growing data centre market in Asia-Pacific last year. The data centre market in the country is valued at $2.2 billion, and is expected to cross $4.5 billion by 2018.

Netmagic offers public cloud, co-location and managed services. While global cloud players such as Google, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure are disrupting the public cloud space in India, the impact on Netmagic’s business has been positive, the firm claims.

“Some of the global cloud providers rent data centre space from us. So, they are our customers. Moreover, as more players enter the cloud computing space, it only helps create more awareness and marketing around the technology,” Sanghi said.

Migration to SAP HANA from older SAP ERP deployments could also fuel a massive demand for data centrr co-location services and public cloud, as currently almost all the older SAP deployments are done within enterprise data centres.

“In the next two years, around 3,000 enterprises will move to SAP HANA. Many of them will opt for co-location services,” he said, adding that the company already has 72 customers hosting their SAP HANA infrastructure in Netmagic data centres.

Sanghi said the firm will also expand its data centres in Delhi-NCR. But given the power supply issues in the region, the company will look at setting up individual data centres as need arises, instead of investing in a large campus that could hold multiple centres.

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