Dr A.S. Prasad, general manager, product management and marketing, Emerson Network Power India
The Indian data centre market is witnessing rapid evolution with the increasing adoption of cloud, mobility and virtualisation. To meet the growing requirements of this market, Emerson Network Power, a global provider of critical infrastructure services, offers a range of products and solutions. In the near term, the company plans to leverage its global experience to tap the opportunities created by government initiatives such as Digital India and Start-up India. Dr A.S. Prasad, general manager, product management and marketing, Emerson Network Power India, talks about the company’s key offerings, its performance in the past few years, the key issues and challenges, and the outlook for the Indian data centre market. Excerpts…
How has the company’s performance been over the past few years? What are the key focus areas?
With worldwide sales revenues of about $4.4 billion and an employee base of about 20,500 as of 2015, Emerson Network Power has shown consistent growth so far. We are looking to grow at an even faster rate through our innovative portfolio of state-of-the-art offerings. The telecom sector will be a key focus area for the company and will remain a crucial vertical driving business growth, given the sheer scale of projects undertaken in India. In addition, e-governance projects will be a big demand driver as they offer enormous potential for data centre infrastructure management (DCIM), which is a key area of specialisation for our business. Moreover, we will focus on sectors such as banking, financial services and insurance, IT-enabled services, manufacturing, education and health care. Small and medium enterprises will also be targeted considering the growing demand for cost-efficient IT solutions. From a growth perspective, we are looking at business opportunities in the smart solutions space as more industries now acknowledge the benefits of smarter and modular data centres, and 24×7 connectivity to drive business growth.
What are the key products and solutions offered by the company?
We provide an extensive portfolio of offerings comprising intelligent, rapidly deployable hardware and software solutions for power, thermal and infrastructure management, which can help organisations across sectors that are looking to upgrade their data centres as well as network and energy infrastructure.
How has the data centre market evolved in India over the years?
With technologies such as cloud, mobility and virtualisation being adopted rapidly in the country, the data centre market too has evolved over the years. We have seen a few prominent announcements recently, which are expected to expedite the demand for DCIM in India. Primarily driven by the government’s goal to create a digital India, initiatives like the Smart Cities Mission, Start-up India and Make in India will ensure that more companies veer towards investing in data centres. Cloud adoption and virtualisation in data centres are gaining momentum with prominent players like AWS, Netmagic and Microsoft announcing extensive plans to invest in state-of-the-art data centre facilities in the country. This is also expected to add millions of square feet to the data centre space. The rapid proliferation of smartphones and social media platforms has contributed greatly to the evolution of data centres in India.
What are the key challenges being faced by the company and how do you plan to address them?
As technology goes through a fundamental shift, businesses too will have to evolve and grow. In the coming years, companies will face new challenges as they juggle the huge amount of data and information being generated. Most importantly, companies will have to make sense of the data and ensure that it can be utilised for introducing new efficiencies into the business, thereby driving the next level of growth.
One of the biggest problems facing organisations today is the running of legacy applications that cannot be replaced quickly. Therefore, companies should conduct an application audit to see which applications users prefer. In addition, over the past few years, we have seen an explosion in web-connected mobile devices and businesses struggling to adapt to this new reality.
What is your outlook for the data centre market in India?
According to research carried out by Gartner, the value of the Indian data centre infrastructure and solutions market will witness a 5.2 per cent year-on-year increase, totalling $2 billion in 2016. Companies will increasingly look at migrating to hybrid and cloud-based solutions as they can be assembled on site. We expect organisations to request more efficiency inside data centres as well as a reduction in capital expenditure, which can be facilitated through modular and smart data centre solutions. As more organisations become confident about adopting hybrid and cloud-based solutions, we believe that 2016 is going to be a definitive year, with organisations looking at infrastructure-as-a-service to overcome their infrastructure issues.
