Starting out late has the advantages of experience

“I believe you are never too young or never too old for anything,” says 56-year-old Shekhar Dasgupta. He should know. He turned an entrepreneur two years back, after nearly three decades of working for others. His last job was as President of a start-up, in the enterprise capital of the world — Silicon Valley.

“Entrepreneurs are typically in their 20s and 30s and I am in my 50s. But I think I have got the energy and the passion to do something out there. Starting late in life also has its advantages,” says Dasgupta, who is the Founder of Greenfield Software.

A graduate in economics from Presidency College, Kolkata, Dasgupta went on to do an MBA from IIM-Bangalore and then worked in industry body CII, before moving to the private sector, where he worked in the IT sector.

He was head of Oracle India before leaving for Silicon Valley in 2005. After six years in Silicon Valley, Dasgupta returned to India to start his own venture.

It is his more than two decades of working in the IT industry, where he got exposed to mainframe computers and data centres, and his specialisation in energy management during his management course that probably set the base for Dasgupta’s own venture. Greenfield Software, headquartered in Gurgaon and incubated in Kolkata, provides software for managing data centres.

“I had the experience of enterprise software in Oracle. Then we did storage management and I was visiting data centres in the US. That gave me… it is like connecting the dots. Why not I build an ERP (a software that integrates all the functions in a company and helps it run the business) for data centres,” says Dasgupta.

He looked at data centres as if they were manufacturing units. They had numerous assets in the form of machinery. There were servers, storage devices, networks, huge cooling requirements, switchgears, transformers, back-up power and the building itself.

Besides, data centres needed to have excess capacity that would be used only when there was a failure. The equipment had to be available all the time, but then their utilisation was low and there was high power consumption.

This is why, says Dasgupta, building a software for data centres made enormous business sense.

“How do I reduce the operating expenses by reducing power consumption and also help to mitigate the risks of a data centre failure. That was our primary goal to build this ERP. We developed the software. The category is called Data Centre Infrastructure Management,” he says.

According to him, data centres have got resources such as power, space, cooling, networks and IT assets. How does one optimise these resources. First, allocate and then optimise. That is what the software does. “We have got customers in India and are now looking at the global market.”

Dasgupta roped in a Kolkata-based engineering company Universal Dynamics as a partner in the venture. Universal has a history of incubating and mentoring start-ups and that is what it has done in this instance too. Together, the two invested about ₹3 crore in the venture, with Dasgupta holding the majority stake.

A data centre, according to him, has two parts to it. One is the IT part, which includes the servers, storage and networks. The other part is the facility itself, which includes the building, the cooling systems, power back-up and the like.

A data centre, he explains, is power intensive as the systems require intense cooling. Nearly half the energy consumed in a data centre goes into the cooling system and servers. Three components need to be continuously monitored in a data centre — cooling, server, and storage and network. Failure in any one will affect the centre’s availability and efficiency.

Greenfield’s software helps prevent such failures, according to Dasgupta. It monitors and tracks power consumption and recommends ways to reduce energy usage.

It provides a complete view of the assets in the centre with relationships, which means the centre operator knows the linkages of all the equipment. It helps prevent failure by monitoring all these data points.

Dasgupta says most companies in this segment are global players addressing large data centres, which are a handful in India. Greenfield targets data centres of 2,000 sq.ft to 50,000 sq.ft, with 30-40 employees, while the larger players look at providing their software to data centres spread over 200,000-400,000 sq.ft.

“Most of the bigger players are not addressing the segment we are in,” says Dasgupta.

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