ESDS To Launch Own Data Center In Bengaluru

-Swaminathan Balasubramanian

While starting his company in 2005, Piyush Somani, a son of a banker and a first-time entrepreneur would have not imagined even in the wildest dream his company ESDS would connect with close to 300 million Indian citizens.

Nasik based ESDS, with humble beginning started its journey initially from cooperative Banks. When the RBI mandated core-banking for all the cooperative Banks, many banks were not able to deploy core banking solution. Many Banks approached them to learn the alphabets of building a data center and how to do the connectivity. With a one-stop solution of bringing an ISV partner for CBS software along with cloud, that too on a pay-per-user and pay-per-branch billing model,Piyush not only did took his organization to the next leap but transformed the unorganized segment of the Indian banking sector.

According to Piyush, overall, the perception towards the cloud has changed and business of cloud transformed positively in the last five years. “Prior to that, enterprises were not comfortable with Cloud at all. In fact, earlier, analysts were downsizing the projections towards Cloud and only in the last three years, they are correcting their projections on the higher side,  which means that the need for cloud has actually grown up pretty well.  I don’t think there are any other services  that are growing at a 50 percent CAGR in India.” Piyush also says that public cloud or infrastructure as a service is growing at 50 percent year-on-year and this will further accelerate. From 35 percent this has now come to 50 percent and I believe that this will cross 65 percent next year. “There are many factors why Cloud is picking up, there is a demand for Cloud coming from banks, government, and enterprises. In fact, there is a concept called  G2C (Government to Citizen) where e-governance for the citizens is getting hosted on Cloud.  Large scale Government initiatives for Hundreds of Millions of Citizens “, he concluded.

Banking Community Cloud:

ESDS has its own solution ‘Banking community Cloud’ where everything is given to them on a software as a service model and their connectivity partners took care of the last mile connectivity for the branches of these banks. This way, the banks never had to invest anything upfront and that is how we managed to bring many co-operative Banks, NBFC’s and some PSUs on our Cloud. Many of the initiatives of the finance ministry like mudra yojana, startup India, Stand-up India are hosted on our Cloud.

Government and Cloud:

ESDS believes that Governments has started understanding the importance of Cloud and they are ready to deploy Cloud in their key projects. “Kerala and Tamil Nadu state public distribution systems are running from our Cloud. Through various government initiatives on our Cloud close to 300 million Indian citizens, some or the other way get connected to our Cloud every day. We now have more than 90 Government organizations hosted on our Government Community Cloud, which is certified by the Government of India.”, Piyush avers.

In the past,  governments were coming with five years plan. However, now that governance model is not acceptable to people and they want results in 5 months.  If the IT team of an organization takes a decision today, the very next day they start collecting quotations and we have many customers, where the entire solution is delivered in less than 72 hours.

BFSI Sector and Cloud Predictions:

According to Piyush, asked why large banks are still reluctant to prefer a 100% Cloud, he replied, “ BFSI smaller Banks and NBFCs are on Cloud. In fact, all the recent NBFCs are born in Cloud. The large PSU Banks and large private sector Banks are not on Cloud. But they have started testing their peripheral applications and their channels are now being deployed on Cloud.”

“If you ask me, if the 100% Cloud is possible in the banking sector, PSU Banks and large private banks may not come 100 percent on Cloud even for the next five years. However, remaining banks and other financial institutions would be there completely on Cloud very soon. “

Channel partner Model:

ESDS has both direct and channel. ESDS envisages that in the next three years the revenue coming from channel business will be more than 70 percent. At present they have around 800 registered channel partners across India as of now and hoping to add 1000 more in the new year 2019.

Concluding his organization plans in terms of new data centers, he said, “ We are launching our owned data center at Bengaluru soon. The Data Center will not only be our third  in India but the most modern Data Center in India where the uptime guarantee will be more than 99.97%. in comparision to our Nashik and Mumbai DC, we have few add ons in Bengaluru which will help us to deliver much better service to our customers with world class security and scalability on the network level.”, he concluded.