The increase in the demand for data centres and the adoption of the latest technologies is resulting in an increased demand for hyperscale data centres to meet these demands.
W.Media’s ‘South Asia Cloud & Data Centre Awards Summit’ panel discussion on ‘Building Hyperscale data centres to meet South Asia’s digital economy demands’ discussed aspects such as demand drivers, data laws, and infrastructure which is needed to power the growth of this industry. The session was moderated by Mukesh Jain, Chief Technology & Innovation Officer, Capgemini. The panellists included Rahul Dhar, Country Director – Data Centers, Microsoft. Ramaiy Kapoor, Head of Investment & Commercials – Data Centre Group, CapitaLand India. Johnson Tan, Managing Director – APAC, Yondr Group, and Kapil Makhija, Head – Technology Cloud Business, Oracle India.
Read Part 1 of this 3 part series.
Post-COVID challenges
The growth of cloud adoption has been exponential in the last 15 months. “In Oracle, we call it a hockey stick growth. There has been steep growth in what we have seen. A lot of customers are migrating to cloud on a daily basis. I have not met a single customer in the recent past who does not have a road map to cloud or who does not want to embark on the journey of cloud.
All market analysts, be it IDC, Gartner and others are talking highly about this market. Their estimate is that the Indian market is going to reach US$9.5 billion dollars by 2025 and growing at a CAGR of more than 20 percent on a yearly basis. So, cloud is no more choice for customers today and customers are increasingly realising that they can defer it to some extent, but they cannot obviously avoid it or reject it.
One of our hospitality customers during the pandemic could stay afloat because they could trim down all the resources and switch to cloud. And now when the business is coming back to normal, they are ramping up resources instantaneously to serve their customers like before”, said Kapil Makhija, Head- Technology Cloud Business, Oracle India.
He further added that very similar to that biggest footwear retail company in the country could optimise on the cost and switch to online channels seamlessly leveraging cloud which otherwise would have been quite difficult.
Another large banking customer actually moved and managed their spike in the workload of the UPI unified payment interface. A lot of customers across verticals are embracing cloud quite effectively.
“Expectations from Cloud sector are a bit more after the pandemic, I think we have seen that just 20 percent of the workloads today are moved to cloud and in industry, we always blamed our customers to be sort of conservative in moving to cloud. But I think the onus is on us, onus is on cloud players to instil confidence in our customers, the onus is on us to understand our customer’s needs, the challenges we have been facing, their fear, their apprehension, and then providing the solution. In fact, we work with a lot of banks in the country. And today almost every bank in the country runs on Oracle,” added Makhija.
He further underlined that customers have reached out to companies such as Oracle to move the lock stock barrel to cloud. And the biggest challenge they face is moving their core banking application to cloud, and we are in touch with a lot of banks out here in the country, be it banks running their core banking on financials. Banks are showing a lot of interest in moving to cloud.
“We are working with insurance companies who want to move their core insurance applications and cloud and similarly in the telecom sector. And I think if we can move some of these regulated players on the cloud journey, I think it is going to be a big game-changer. And if we can help solve these challenges for our customers, cloud is well placed to address the post-pandemic economic storm in the country,” said Makhija.
Future of Cloud adoption, hyperscalers and colocation providers
In the past several months, aggressively developing a vaccine for this pandemic could not have been done without the connectivity, cloud solutions, and everything that has been going on behind the scenes by the engineers, cloud solution providers, designers, construction managers.
“I think from simple things like ordering groceries online, and booking a taxi to remote healthcare services, the basic staff is able to carry on because of this industry.
They’re not to steal any credit from the researchers and scientists. I’ve seen over the past 18 months, right the amount of growth is happening in India, which far exceeds the combination of the past 10 years,” said Johnson Tan, MD, Asia Pacific, Yondr Group.
He further pointed out that enormous opportunity is growing in India, where we are seeing just a few key clients that we are speaking to. Google is now using the second site in Mumbai and Delhi.
“AWS similarly is announcing the second cloud infrastructure in Hyderabad after Mumbai, Microsoft probably is way ahead. They already have three in Chennai and Mumbai. The fourth one, I think in Hyderabad. Oracle probably is very advanced in terms of developing your second-generation cloud DC and announcing I think the second one in Hyderabad by overall is really exciting and positive from the outside looking at how in the US or is going to grow so for yonder, I think, we have been looking in Asia for coming to two years now. And we are going to be investing heavily in India over the next couple of months, we have been in discussion with some of the players to go in there and start building some good quality data centers to support the growth.
But in a nutshell, I think an answer to the question is going to be one of the top five in five years’ time based on a projection globally, in terms of megawatts that are going to grow”, added Tan.
“The impact of cloud adoption and hyperscale investment has been enormous. We at Oracle have seen huge potential in the Indian market.
We have actually launched 30 data centers across the globe to serve our customers, out of which two are in India one in Mumbai and one in Hyderabad, both in different seismic zones.
Both are made to serve the public sector and government customers as well. And the important part is that we have expanded our data center thrice in the last few years as this has exceeded our initial estimates.
So cloud adoption in India is much faster than our expectation. And this has really affected our organization Oracle also in a positive way.
We have moved from a sales-centric organization to a consumption-centric organization, and actually going out of the way to help our customers adopt cloud just to share with you that one of the biggest pain points of cloud adoption is the cost and effort of migration,” said Makhija.
He further added that Oracle is actually giving cloud lift services to their customers. Without any additional cost, that means you’re providing technical tools and cloud engineering resources to get the workloads in production. And Oracle does the hand holding till the workload goes into production.
And not only that, we go a step further and train the staff of our customers to ensure that they run it. Beyond that, a lot of action is happening in that segment from our side, we are offering our customers and cloud rewards in terms of incentivising them to move to cloud and making their license support cost almost nil. They are offering financially backed SLA not only on availability but on the performance of the service.
“We know that in the cloud, it doesn’t really matter whether the service is available or not. All that matters is that the business should be able to get that performance, which is really critical to run.
Similarly choice of deployment is in the public sector in the public data center or in their own premises, their own firewall, because of regulatory requirements. So these are a few of these several changes we are implementing to accelerate customer success in our cloud and customers seeing great value in it,” added Makhija.
