BSNL enters cloud services with six internet data centres

Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) has launched six internet data centres to grab a bigger slice of growing demand for hosted and cloud services from government organisations and private enterprises in the country.

The centres would be managed and operated by IT solutions provider Dimension Data under a 10-year revenue share deal.  Located in Mumbai, Faridabad, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Ludhiana and Ghaziabad at BSNL properties, the centres will offer managed co-location, managed hosting and cloud services.  

The centres are India’s first Uptime Institute certified Tier III level data centres and take the total number of BSNL data centres to 10.

Dimension Data said it has invested Rs200 crore on the venture—Rs120 crore for the set-up and Rs80 crore on IT equipment and employees. BSNL is hoping to generate Rs300 crore revenues in the first year — Rs100 crore from data centre and cloud services (the revenue of which will be split with Dimension Data) and Rs200 crore from bandwidth and telecom offerings.

The telecom provider said the services it offered like managed video, secure email for government organisations cater to current demand in India. Besides, the services are being offered on a utility — pay-as-you-go — model, which ensures lower capex spends. The centres have also been tested through five levels of security and certified on international security standards.

RK Upadhyay, chairman and managing director, BSNL, said, “With the launch of our data centres, we can offer secure hosted and cloud services to support various government initiatives as well as to our enterprise clients.”

The data centres were conceptualised by BSNL two years ago as it was looking to utilise vacant space it had at its erstwhile telephone exchanges equipped with optical fibre bandwidth.
Kiran Bhagwanani, chief executive officer, Dimension Data, told DNA Money, “We have signed three clients—Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation, Indian Oil Corporation and Punjab Treasuries. We will focus on BSNL’s existing top 500 enterprise clients, and in the first year we are targeting 25-30 of them. Out target would be government sector firms, banks, insurance companies and SMEs.” The centre were inaugurated by Union communications and information technology minister Kapil Sibal and minister of state Sachin Pilot.

Sibal said the intention was also to host and utilise government information by integrating it with different departments and make it freely available to the public.