Today, the way infrastructure is being set up, there is a total lack of connectivity in India."

—BV Jagdeesh

Co-founder and CTO, Exodus

Communications ,As Co-Founder and CTO, Exodus Communications, BV Jagdeesh is not just

providing technology direction to the company. He is also actively involved in business

development and merger and acquisitions. Prior to this, he co-founded Fouress Technologies

and has also worked for Novell. Jagdeesh served as Chairman, Networld+Interop’s

Engineer’s conference during 1994-95. In an interview to DATAQUEST, Jagdeesh spoke

about the plans of his company and the significance of infrastructure in the growth of

internet. Excerpts:

Exodus is basically an

internet data center company. What it means is that we provide mission-critical internet

infrastructure for companies like Yahoo! Hotmail, Geo Cities, Sony Online and 1,300 other

such content providers who want their internet operations to be up and running for 24

hours. We manage their servers and detect any failures ahead of time. On the network end,

when people come in and open their sites, they have no idea of the number of hits they are

going to have. We provide them the ability to instantly scale from where they come to

where they want to go.

• Are there any specific
  
  web servers that you use?

You know, interestingly, we

don’t buy any web servers. The customers bring them to us. If you look at our data

centers, 65% of the web servers are typically Sun servers, the remaining 35% are

distributed primarily among NT, HP, Silicon Graphics and Unix.

• Apart from this, do
  
  you have any technology tie-ups?

There are lot of exchange

points in the US and a lot of infrastructure has been built up. What we do is called

‘peering,’ which means we peer with all the internet service providers, who

bring in the end-users. We have 14 data centers in seven locations. When the end-user

comes in, he just gets into the data center.

•   color="#000080" size="2" face="Arial">If you look at India, what is the kind of business
  
  model that you will be following?

Today, the way the

infrastructure is being set up, there is a total lack of connectivity in India. The first

thing that we need is that metropolitan cities must get connected through some high-speed

link straightaway or through wireless technology. In each of these metropolitan cities,

you need to have local exchange points, where traffic gets exchanged.

•  You mentioned
  
  some alternate plan that companies can follow to tackle the infrastructure limitations?

Knowing the infrastructure

bottlenecks that exists in countries like India, what many of the e-commerce companies are

doing is bringing their servers to the US. They are then given the level of scalability

and reliability that is needed to reach the global market at a very nominal fee or maybe

even cheaper.

•   color="#000080" size="2" face="Arial">What, in your opinion, are the factors that will
  
  drive the growth of internet and e-commerce in the country?

I think India is the best country to do

e-commerce because you have a lot of issues like traffic and pollution. People don’t

want to move out of their houses once they come back from work. They are looking for

convenience. If we can provide the infrastructure that is needed through cable modems,

wireless connectivity or through dial-up access to get connected to the web, then

automatically you will see people using e-commerce applications.