Manoj Paul,
Managing Director,
Equinix India
Manoj Paul, currently managing director at Equinix India, began his professional career in the early 1990s. Since then, he has achieved significant milestones, including being a part of the first telco-led digital subscriber line (DSL) broadband service roll-out in India while working with Bharti Airtel. “With the subsequent roll-out of Wi-Fi DSL broadband at home and in public spaces, we experienced tremendous success and were able to quickly reach the first 10,000 customers spread across three metros,” he fondly remembers.
Paul worked with Bharti Airtel in the past as the head of the banking, finance and insurance (BFSI) vertical, and later as chief operating officer (B2B) for the western region, before joining Equinix. He considers building a motivated and experienced team at Equinix India as the most significant achievement of his career. “We worked on creating a profitable data centre business in India, which was well received by the customers,” he says.
In his current role, Paul is directly responsible for Equinix’s business and strategies in India. He focuses on expanding Platform Equinix and business ecosystems in India, while ensuring customer success in digital transformation. He prefers to lead from the front while keeping an eye on the details.
Currently, Equinix is expanding its data centre footprint and opening its third data centre in Chandivali, Mumbai, with a capacity of 24 MW. This will be followed by another data centre, currently under construction in Chennai, with a capacity of 22 MW. Further, the company has plans to launch a full range of interconnections and digital infrastructure services, including Equinix Fabric, which is an on-demand interconnection service that allows companies to connect with multiple cloud and service providers and its own infrastructure across Platform Equinix.
According to Paul, the key trends to watch out for in the ICT/IT space include hybrid multi-cloud model deployment for future-proofing businesses, quantum computing, anything as a service model, cloud migration and sustainability in data centres.
Paul is an electronics and telecommunications engineer from Jabalpur Engineering College. He also holds an MBA degree from IIM Ahmedabad.
His family comprises his wife and two children. He enjoys music, particularly the songs of Kishore Kumar, Mukesh, Queen and Bryan Adams. He is also an avid cricket enthusiast, and enjoys reading and exploring new destinations with his family. “I am a big foodie too and believe in ‘live to eat’,” he shares.
