Back in 1998, it was thanks to Sify, India’s first Indian private ISP, that people experienced the internet for the first time. Then in 2005, serial technology entrepreneur Raju Vegesna bought Sify Technologies from erstwhile promoters Satyam Computer Services. Since then, Sify has grown into a ₹4,000 crore ICT services & solutions provider with business lines across data centres, networking and digital services. The company now plans to invest $5 billion in the next five years, primarily on data centres .
Data centre is not just real estate, but a technology play and competition only makes it better, he told businessline after Sify inaugurated its new Data centre campus in Chennai on Thursday.Excerpts:
Your big move was in 2005 through the Sify acquisition. What’s been Sify’s journey in the last two decades?
When I took over Sify, it was consumer centric with broadband to home and cyber cafes. It was a great initiative. Sify was India’s first private internet service provider. Ever five years, every company should have a change and look at it at next five or six years. That’s what we did by starting our own private cloud and then got in to the data centre business, which is big for the company now.
Competition is heavy in the data centre sector, right?
No doubt there are other people building data centres . I do not think I can supply myself for India. Competition is healthy and is good for consumers. If you look at most of the data centre players, they are thinking of it as a real estate game. But, data centre is not a real estate but a technology. When we build the Siruseri data centre , we are not building one more data centre but AI-ready centre from day one.
How much has been invested in the new data centre ?
This facility we started with ₹2,500 crores. But as AI workloads are increasing, the company and partners are going to build the whole ecosystem. Together, we will bring over ₹10,000 crores of investment in this campus over the next five years. The partners could be hyperscalers, enterprise customers or public sector companies.
Will you have a data centre in each State?
That is what we are going to do. We have already started in Lucknow and Chandigarh and are in a discussion with other States.
In the next five years, what sort of investment can we expect in data centres ?
In data centres alone, we will probably invest $5 billion.
How will you fund?
There is plenty of money available globally. Funding can be raised tomorrow. It’s a question of when do you need it.
On the company’s financials, while the revenue has been improving, profitability is still an issue, isn’t it?
It is because I am spending all the money. For me, profit is not important. You have to continuously invest. A person who does not know how to invest his money, only gets a profit by putting it in the bank. If I know how to invest my money and grow my business, why do I care about profit? I want to expand in a country like India and scale the business.
What could be Sify’s revenue in the next five years?
It should be ₹20,000 to ₹25,000 crores from ₹4,000 crore plus now. We are now having around 5,000 employees. In the next five years, directly and indirectly we may have 30,000 to 40,000 people.