Global communications and enterprise service provider Tata Communications said the company expects to lead the data centre business in India with around 26 per cent market share right now.

According to the company, it tops the data centre market right now and it is growing at around 22 per cent year on year. The company plans to invest more than $200 million towards doubling capacity in India from five-lakh square feet to 10-lakh square feet over a period of three years.

The data centre business is primarily driven by the market trends such as social media, mobility and cloud.

“Therefore, the amount of data that needs to be stored is a huge challenge and also opportunity for companies like us to handle those data. We expect this market will grow significantly over the next five years and one of fastest growing sectors because of data explosion,” Rangu Salgame, Chief Executive Officer - Growth Ventures, Tata Communications, told BusinessLine .

New data centre Looking at such opportunities, the company on Wednesday opened a new data centre here, which is 12{+t}{+h} in India and 44{+t}{+h} in the world. The company now has two data centres in New Delhi, three in Mumbai, two each in Bangalore and Chennai and one each in Hyderabad, Pune and Kolkata.

Globally, it has data centres in places such as Montreal, New York, Los Angeles, Paris and London, Salgame said.

As part of its global expansion initiative, the company recently also entered into strategic partnerships with NEXTDC in Australia, Interxion in Germany and Austria, as well as Pacific Link Telecom in Malaysia.

However, while the market for data centres has already grown big globally, India still needs more investments from companies such as Tata Communications.

Though, there is no data available on the market size right, analysts said the data centre market is growing well at around 12-15 per cent year-on-year.

Other players “Lot of enterprises are now transferring their data on cloud and ‘on premise’ data centres are now falling over last two years because of such reasons. And, that is fuelling the growth of data centre business,” Naveen Mishra, Research Director, at Gartner India, said. He said because of such reasons, not only Tata Communications, other players such as Sify, Wipro and Netmagic Solutions are also growing.

Therefore, Tata Communications has to work hard on getting better businesses from its clients. “It had earlier launched InstaCompute, which only received a marginal success. This time around it needs to be aggressive in partnering with various independent software vendors, which will ensure its success,” Sanchit Vir Gogia, Chief Analyst and Group CEO at Greyhound Research, said.

comment COMMENT NOW