Investing in Infrastructure

The latest addition to state IT infrastructure is the launch of Infopark
Koratty, 45 km from Kochi, which is styled on the villa type buildings offering
a different look and feel. The Koratty park is a key spoke in the hub and spoke
model the Kerala IT mission has put. While main hubs are Kochi Infopark,
Technopark in Trivandrum, and Cyberpark in Kozhikodethese will be connected
with spokes like Koratty, and other areas like Kollam, Ambalapuzha, Cherthala,
Kannur, and Kasaragod. Dr Ajay Kumar, says What it means is IT parks would not
be concentrated on one area, and this hub and spoke model facilitates an
equitable distribution of IT infrastructures across the state.

The phase one of Koratty Infopark is spread across 40,000 sq ft with seven
villa styled buildings, and completed in a record eight months time. So far
thirteen companies have bought space in the park. The locations close proximity
to Kochi is also expected to serve as an ideal expansion site for IT companies
operating out of Kochi. The total area of the park is about 30 acres and on
completion of phase two, it will have a total of 70,000 sq ft of built up space.

Siddhartha Bhattacharya, CEO, Infopark, says, Infopark says Koratty is a key
addition to the states IT infrastructure, and it will only further foster new
companies to set-up operations, and existing companies can scale up leveraging
the state-of-the-art facilities. The factors that make Koratty Infopark a viable
investment opportunity is the access to cost-effective reliable infrastructure.

Powering eGov

In addition to building physical infrastructures, Kerala IT mission is
aggressively building computing infrastructure to accommodate various e-gov
services cutting across G2G and G2C services. Kerala is the first state to have
tier-3 data center with 150 servers housing various government applications. Dr
Ajay Kumar says, We are investing in high-end digital infrastructure for
powering various governance services, and the data centers play a vital role,
and we are aggressively scaling the computing infrastructure.

Observers see Kerala going in the right direction, given that under the
national e-governance plan (NeGP), state data center (SDC) has been identified
as one of the core infrastructure components to consolidate services,
applications, and infrastructure to provide efficient electronic delivery of
G2G, G2C, and G2B services. SDCs will act as mediator and convergence point
between open unsecured public domain and sensitive government environment, and
it will also provide services for governments own access.

Meanwhile, development of IT applications as part of Kerala gvernments e-gov
strategy is also paying off. For instance, apps like aasthi, an asset management
system for managing data has made aspects like managing lifecycle of software
and hardware a lot easier. This application has been successfully implemented in
Kerala state IT mission, and now rolled into more than 2,000 computers in the
government secretariat.

Another interesting project of the government is deployment of the content
management framework. This framework is for relevant update of content in all
government sites. About fifty sites have deployed this framework, and government
staff have been trained, and hence they can host and update the content in the
site. The states, e-gov strategy is more structured with three key
componentsstate data centers, KSWAN, and akshaya centers. While akshaya is
the citizen facing service, former two are for facilitation of akshaya as well
as for conducting various G2G services. Presently, there are 2,200 akshya
centers spread across the state.

Shrikanth G

shrikanthg@cybermedia.co.in