0" src="../images/Na2.jpg" align="left" hspace="5" vspace="5" alt=""As businesses become more data-centric, the availability of data will become more mission-critical. It would then be imperative that the data is handled by specialists." Sivakumar Ramamurthy, Director, Intel India Technology Center" width="62" height="96">Content
and hosting are two key parameters that make the difference between success and
failure of a site. While network architecture and the global traffic flow has
reduced the facilities of a traditional ISP to merely an ‘edge’ for hosting
players, the core is served by the server farm or data center.
With ebusiness gaining ground,
hosting and maintaining a site has become the key concern. It has brought in a
paradigm shift in the outsourcing requirements of content providers. These are
different from the services provided by a typical ISP. A single facility is just
not suitable for both hosting and connectivity most of the time. This is more
evident in India as the internet spreads further and bandwidth capacities of the
core grow by orders of magnitude in the next six to nine months. One needs
specialized facilities like data centers for all backend operations like
designing, hosting, security, interconnectivity and bandwidth.
Spread across an area of
approximately 20,000sq ft, a data center is typically a server farm that
requires $10-20 million as investment. It provides its customers hosting and
co-location services and round-the-clock technical support. It guarantees a
secure, reliable connection with improved bandwidth and acts like a hub
interconnecting major ISPs in the region of its location.
Datacenters in India
India too has its share of data
centers. Many are coming up with minimum basic infrastructure to support new
applications. Some of the leading names setting up data centers in India include
Intel, Global Electronic Commerce (GEC), iAsiaWorks and Enron India.
The importance of a data center
comes from the fact that the internet is more than just about browsing. It is
more about ebusiness today. According to Sivakumar Ramamurthy, Director, Intel
India Technology Center, data centers will play a crucial role in the growth and
maturity of the internet economy. "As businesses become more data-centric,
the availability of data will become more mission-critical. It would then be
imperative that the data is handled by specialists and this will be done via
data centers," says Ramamurthy.
for setting up its own data center in India. First, it is in discussion with a
number of companies across India for hosting their websites and ecommerce
transactions from its large data centers in the US. Second, it plans to set up a
local data center in India that would help contain the traffic that emerges from
India and goes to Indian sites, thus improving response times from those sites.
Similar are the plans of US-based
iAsiaWorks, which runs 15 data centers in Silicon Valley, California. iAsiaWorks
has among its clientele BPL and DBS Internet. It hosts
and manages their sites located at its data center in the US. Presently it is
scouting for a partner to set up data centers in India. Talking about the need
of a data center by an ISP, Sanjay Dani, VP, Hosting Division, iAsiaWorks,
explains, "Ecommerce brought a paradigm shift in internet hosting from that
of shared servers to dedicated ones. Today we have ‘beyond-brochure’ sites
which require dedicated servers and lots of database applications."
Kumar Chakravarthy, Director,
Marketing, GEC, has a similar belief. He says, "Over the last six months
there has been a massive shift with more and more dynamic sites coming up. Since
they are dynamic in nature, there are issues of support, updation and
integration. In this case it is useful that the site is hosted in an Indian data
center."
The concept of data centers is
truer for a country like India than for any other if ecommerce has to become a
reality. The marketplace here is much more complex, with such barriers to doing
business as infrastructure, culture, language, regulations and currency. Even
more significant is the latency issue like transmission delays that can
interfere with conducting business online. Says Sanjay Bhatnagar, CEO, Enron
South Asia, "Till the time the latency factor is reduced within the country
ecommerce will remain a distant dream."
Therefore, a data center required
to offer a portfolio of India-specific services–translation,
project-management, and cultural and regulatory consulting–to enable MNCs ‘port’
their businesses seamlessly with Indian markets and vice versa.
successful, availability of the bandwidth and local content is a key issue.
While bandwidth still remains a premium commodity, most of the Indian content
besides being in English continues to reside on servers based in the US. Though
operators like GEC are setting up their own gateways, how effective it would be
is yet be seen. Says Sanjay Dani, "Access to international bandwidth is the
key issue in India for successfully running the data center applications. Though
private gateways are now being allowed, the structure
remains the same as the cable landing rights to Indian shores are still with
only one operator–VSNL."
Till the time content is brought
back to India one cannot expect internet traffic to flow in here. And the
question of requiring such specialized centers to manage content does not arise.
"As many as 90% of Indian websites are hosted in the US today. India’s
share of ecommerce will continue to be minuscule till the time we do not have
our websites hosted in India," says Sanjay Bhatnagar.
Data centers can bring to India
an opportunity to earn revenue from ecommerce transactions. Given the fact that
Asian ecommerce will grow from, according to IDC, $720 million today to $32
billion by 2003 and India being a reservoir of 50 million English-speaking
people, data centers can actually enable India to become the Asian hub for
ecommerce transactions. But Bhatnagar warns that Singapore is trying hard to
become the ecommerce hub for Asia. He says, "India can challenge that only
if it creates valid infrastructure within the country." Such encouragement
and initiatives from the government to reduce bandwidth bottlenecks is absent.
And India might lose the opportunity to become the key player in hosting and
ecommerce in Asia.
Puneet
Kumar
in New Delhi