Nxtra Data, the enterprise communication business subsidiary of Bharti Airtel, has done a deal with Hewlett Packard for rolling out the country’s first public cloud service aimed at small and medium businesses.

The partnership will see Nxtra deliver private, public and hybrid cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (Iaas) solution. The entire network platform and the services will be managed from India, which means enterprise customers need not worry about data being taken out to data centres outside the country. Nxtra currently manages 1.60 lakh sq ft space across seven data centres and plans to add another 1 lakh sq ft over the next couple of years. HP has done similar deals with operators in Hong Kong and Singapore.

Cloud solution

Cloud has become a greater enabler of business growth for start-ups, medium enterprise and large businesses. According to Gartner, the public cloud services market in India is expected to grow by 32.2 per cent in 2014 to a total $556.8 million from the 2013 revenue of $421 million. It is further expected to reach $1.7 billion in 2018.

Prior to forming the new subsidiary, Airtel was focussing primarily on the top 2000 large corporates. The new solution will help Nxtra make inroads into a wider market base. There are six million small and medium businesses in India of which 30,000-50,000 are medium enterprises. The cloud partnership with HP puts Nxtra in position to take a big share of that market by offering specific solutions to their specific demands.

Nxtra will offer hosted IaaS and enable customers to access services with no initial capital expenditure. The model allows organisations to dynamically select services they want on a pay-as-you-go model.

The request for resources can be made through an online portal. Since the entire infrastructure is based in India, Nxtra will be able to offer them at a lower cost.

Beta platform

While Nxtra data declined to comment, sources said the Beta platform has already been rolled out to select customers for testing. The platform is built on an open stack allowing developers to build applications and making it inter-operable with other solutions in the market.

According to sources, Nxtra is in talks with other telecom companies and cloud solutions providers to white label the service. Nxtra will also rope in distribution channel to market the service.

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