News
BSNL crafts a DC strategy
The Onecloud offering, a joint foray with Datacraft, is aimed at tapping the vast data center transformation services market By Pratap Vikram Singh
B
harat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL), the state owned telecom service provider has forayed into IT-enabled services, in partnership with Datacraft Asia, to jointly provide data centre services to both government and private-sector enterprises. With an initial investment of `200 crore, BSNL will provide the infrastructure, while Datacraft will offer the IT services. More than 300 people would be working on this joint initiative, of which 200 will be from Datacraft and 100 from BSNL. Marketing the services together under the umbrella brand Onecloud, BSNL and
Datacraft will initially present the offerings for the enterprise segment and will later foray into retail. While BSNL will be pushing the services into the government and public sector, Datacraft will be marketing it to the global and multinational organisations. “Our clients from the government, public sector and banks can now undertake data centre transformation services, using our flex-
While BSNL will be pushing the services into the government and public sector, Datacraft will be marketing it to the enterprises
ible sourcing options or simply host their entire IT assets within our secure data centres with complete peace of mind at a very competitive cost,” Gopal Das, Chairman and Managing Director, BSNL said. The data centres will come up at six locations across the country, with the first one scheduled for Jaipur, to get operational in the next six months. Other locations will be Mumbai, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Ghaziabad, Faridabad and Ludhiana. The partnership has initially been signed for seven years, and could be further extended by three years. Viewing a lucrative market for the data centre services, Das said, “The requirement for the data centres is going to be huge. By the time you create the infrastructure and offer services, you might need to scale it up.” “You have seen expansion of voice services and now it’s going to be data,” he added Rajesh Wadhwa, Director—CFA, BSNL Board said the availability of BSNL data centres “will speed up the implementation of their [government] social programmes where IT and data centres are required. Government departments can outsource their entire data centre needs to BSNL.” The telecom major will in turn manage their IT requirements so that departments can focus more on field activities rather than having to deal with managing data centres, which requires specialised skill sets. “BSNL evaluated a number of companies before choosing Datacraft for our differentiated and unique data centre optimisation services to offer business continuity, disaster recovery and secure remote access services. This strategic alliance will position us as the leader in secure hosted and cloud data centre facilities in India, with a comprehensive range of cloud and hosted services particularly for the government and public sectors,” Dilip Kumar, COO, Datacraft Asia said. Terming the agreement as a transformational deal between the two organisations, Kumar opined the partnership was absolutely symbiotic with one offering the connectivity and the infrastructure and the other offering IT services. The Onecloud hosted and cloud services will be rolled out in several phases, and the offering will include BSNL managed co-location services, BSNL dedicated hosting services and cloud services. November 2010 / www.egovonline.net / egov
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