In this everything ‘as-a-service’ era, IT and business capabilities are made increasingly available on demand. Moreover, enterprises are moving ahead from one cloud option to hybrid or multi-cloud way to support different workloads and business requirements as in this cloud era, ‘no business process or workload’ is same as the traditional ones.
This logical evolution of IT in enterprises as a result, has led to successful digital transformation. The enablers of this digital transformation or the providers of this next phase of IT have to themselves stay one step ahead in the race of advancing technologies to actually help the enterprises meet their transformation and exceed their customer demands.
We sat down with Mr Prasenjit Roy, Senior Vice President & Chief Marketing Officer, Netmagic (An NTT Communications Company) to discuss the latest developments. Netmagic is one leader who is driving the DT wave – the number one data center service provider in India, to understand how it has managed to stay ahead of the competition. How its strategies of M&A help it offer solutions to address the modern customer challenges and what trends will drive the IT industry in next 5 years.
Let us know about Netmagic’s journey from being a data center and managed IT hosting services provider in 1998 to now becoming a wholly owned subsidiary of NTT Communications in 2017. What has been Netmagic’s strength that helped it sustain this transformation in today’s highly competitive landscape?
Netmagic, a wholly-owned subsidiary of NTT Communications, is India’s leading Managed Hosting and Multi-Cloud Hybrid IT solution provider with 9 carrier-neutral, state-of-the-art data centers and serving more than 2000 enterprises globally. Netmagic is uniquely positioned because it has a very strong base of managed services; it can provide its managed infrastructure services to customers across the world. We have a strong software team that is not only developing solutions for India, but also for NTT across the world. India is a very large market and the fastest growing economy for NTT.
What gave Netmagic Solutions a fillip was the investment from NTT Communications (NTT Com), a subsidiary of the Japanese telecom giant NTT Corporation. Headquartered in Mumbai, Netmagic also delivers Remote Infrastructure Management (RIM) services to various Enterprise customers globally including NTT Communication’s customers across Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific region. The Company was the first in India to launch services – Cloud Computing, Managed Security, Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) and Software-Defined Storage.
NTT Communications and Netmagic have been ranked 3rd and 5th respectively in Asia among the top global data center operators by Cloudscene in their Q1 & Q2 Leaderboard reports. This effectively makes Netmagic #1 data center service provider in India. Netmagic has been recognized with 3 awards at the CIO Choice Award 2018 and Frost & Sullivan India Digital Transformation Awards 2017.
Netmagic recently announced partnership with Nuage Networks, the Nokia venture, to enhance its Network as a Service (NaaS) portfolio and better its security services. Tell us about how this will help Indian and global enterprises derive maximum benefits from the cloud.
Under this recent partnership, enterprises will be able to automatically route and optimize network traffic and gain visibility of applications performance without spending more on bandwidth. We aim to deliver innovative and agile SD-WAN services to global and Indian enterprises, and also to global MNCs having their offices in India looking to connect their remote users quickly and securely to applications in private and public clouds.
NTT Com India–Netmagic SD-WAN solution solves the existing networking challenges of enterprises by enabling them to use the most feature-rich, easy-to-use and cost-effective form of connectivity. This will establish the Company as a pioneer in SD-WAN technology in India that provides next-generation Hybrid Network solutions to global and Indian enterprises with a significant value-addition.
Also, Netmagic announced launching multi-cloud hybrid IT services by acquiring Intellectual Property (IP) assets of ActOnMagic. How will this help customers centrally manage cross-cloud workloads and prevent vendor lock-in?
The adoption of cloud for mission-critical workloads is growing exponentially in India with different workloads requiring different types of cloud environments. All major cloud platforms and Communication Service Providers have a wide spectrum of services catering to different types of workloads. With a new generation of Multi-Cloud based Hybrid IT services, Netmagic enables the monitoring, provisioning and management of complex IT environments across multiple clouds.
In order to make the company’s multi-cloud strategy more robust and diverse, Netmagic has acquired the Intellectual Property (IP) assets of ActOnMagic, an intelligent cloud management platform company. This empowers customers to seamlessly monitor, provision, manage all the workloads of cross-multiple clouds in addition to comparing cost of running multi-tier application on any cloud. ActOnMagic’s ActOnCloud offers a SaaS-based Multi-Cloud Management and optimization service to help customer manage, provision and optimize their cloud resource on multiple clouds. ActOnMagic’s Cloudureka offers a simple SaaS service to discover cost of running multi-tier application on any cloud.
What is Netmagic’s roadmap to bolster its multi-cloud strategy? Any Research & Development (R&D) in the wings?
Netmagic is now a super specialist in the multi-cloud based Hybrid IT services – involving design, delivery, hosting, migration, consolidation and management of IT infrastructure solutions involving multiple public clouds, Private clouds, captive data centers and third-party colocation.
We have increased the impetus on R&D by opening a third center in Bangalore. This is in addition to our existing R&D centers in Pune and Mumbai to build next-generation multi-cloud platforms.
Security is today one of the major concerns among enterprise customers. Let us know how Netmagic security services help customers get their peace of mind.
Security is one of the most crucial factors for any outsourcing decision. Despite business cases of reduced cost and higher performance, some primary reasons for Public cloud to materialize were security and compliance. We at Netmagic have a strong security stance, stronger than what a customer can afford in his own environment. For large cloud operators like us dealing with a scale of million customers, our brand name and business depends on security. When implementing security on such a large scale, the unit cost becomes much less compared to an organization deploying all the security solutions and captive layers in their environment. Each of Netmagic’s Public Cloud, DC or managed hosting layers has its own set of security services right from basic firewalls to preventive services and also customer-centric security like DDoS layers for e-commerce clients. Netmagic runs a full-fledged SOC out of Mumbai which delivers security services remotely to all its data centers.
What are the things that make Netmagic customers prefer it over its competition? How its offerings are different from its competitors?
Netmagic is a one-stop-shop vendor assuring a customer of combating all these challenges. By adding multi-cloud management and migrations capabilities, we are taking the bar even further. Enterprises are seeking to enter newer business models and drive innovative services. Netmagic offers 24*7 management of all infrastructure elements underlying the applications including hypervisors, operating systems, databases, storage, backup, and security. At Netmagic, we leverage the company’s heritage and extensive skills in data center managed services to help enterprises develop roadmaps and blueprints. We also align the data center architecture with the business objectives of enterprises. Our ability to assess, design, and implement these capabilities utilizing deep knowledge in technology, process, and industry with the goal of ensuring effective transformation, uninterrupted business operations, and operational excellence is what differentiates us.
You have been in the IT industry for over two decades. Tell five things or trends to our readers that you think will reshape the IT industry in the next 5 years.
The IT market has opportunities galore and is ready to be utilized by players focused on innovation and growth. The following trends are likely to reshape the IT industry in the coming years.
Telematics Telematic based systems will offer many smart and safe solutions in the future. Some advantages of such systems include navigation, wireless network connectivity, diagnostics/remote data management, and safety and security against theft.
Artificial Intelligence This has been the buzzword for some years now and is only likely to branch out more. From problem solving and reasoning to analytics, this technology is set to transform the IT sector in years to come.
Virtual Reality By combining physical spaces with simulated environments, it can transport users to a hyper-realistic environment. It has relevance in various fields and is being developed further.
Intelligent things This combines aspects of artificial intelligence and Internet of Things (IoT). Intelligent things is a reference to any object which can predict actions based on its use by humans.
Apps Apps are the norm today. From responding to voice commands to making processed more efficient, apps will be a major force in transforming the IT industry in the next few years.
To know more about multi-cloud based hybrid IT services, see this video of Mr.Sunil Gupta – Executive Director, President & COO – Netmagic – an NTT Communications Company.
