MUMBAI: While cloud computing practices are taking on the online ecosystem, neutral internet exchange operator DE-CIX India launched its DirectCloud Exchange service in the country recently.  It is looking forward to go beyond peering and aims to bring its customers more value for the service.

In an interaction with Indiantelevision.com, DE-CIX India vice-president and national head Sudhir Kunder spoke on the new cloud exchange service along with other industry-related issues.

Edited excerpts:

Which is your target market for the new service?

Geographically, four locations across India: Chennai, Kolkata, Delhi and Bombay being the hub. As for the target audience it would typically be the higher level of SMBs, SMEs and enterprises because this is where the cost optimisation is going to come. Once you have a larger picture emerging when companies would want to optimise their costs, you will see a lot of adoption in that category and if you see the kind of growth as India is concerned and the requirement of the enterprise to be on multi-cloud the solution we are probably going to catch up soon on the global trends where at least 22 per cent of the enterprises are already on a multi-cloud adoption.

Are you looking at the M&E sector?

What we intend to do going forward is to look at the enterprise from a verticalised standpoint. Create a use-case scenario for vertical saying how I am relevant to each vertically because, by being in the ICT space, one is aware of the kind of consumption models that you have across verticals. So there will be a proposition for BSFI, manufacturing and distribution, media and entertainment, etc. In media and entertainment, you will have the entire ISP and OTT segments.

How are you doing your service promotion?

When we are referring to the cloud business, what typically happens is the outreach to a minuscule extent will be through the existing ISP because some of them have a huge customer base already in the SMB and enterprise segment. They might not be the primary service providers, but from a redundancy factor, a lot of them are already entrenched in those accounts. So for them, it is already a plug and play kind of an affair, where with the right kind of digital marketing and outreach program, we will be in a position to reach out to the right decision-makers and he just has to know. Since he's already on my access port, all that he needs to do is an order for anything between as small as 10 Mb to as big as one gig or 10 gigs of cloud-connected. We have already generated a base, which is entrenched in the enterprise segment. So what that does for me is these organisations themselves have the reach. All we are trying to be doing with them is to help them monetise their relationship within the existing accountabilities that they have. And we will probably have one of the most lucrative distributions, margin setups and the entire programme; from an ecosystem point of view that the industry would have seen in terms of how much do they put in and what is it the work they get in response. Miniscule amount of inputs from their side is going to lead to a lot of direct and collateral benefits. So if you have to make it a very simplistic channel, which I call from our terminology point of view as a distribution model, that’s the way to go in terms of b2b distribution for cloud service.

How did you cope with the sudden spike during the Covid2019 period?

I don't know whether I should call it foresight or whatever but in January, we started looking at our traffic and our network in a microscopic manner. I would do complete slicing and dicing of anybody who's consuming more than 75 per cent of the subscribed port services. I knew what was happening as a real time basis, and this would get me into a review mode. So we already had a program going on whereby there was an outreach happening to my customer saying that, "Hey, guys, you know what you are at 80 per cent and this is what your current consumption is." During Covid2019, it was like a battlefield environment , initially, the fear was very high. Today, the capacity between data centre to data centre right at the onset of Covid2019, has been increased to a capacity level of about 400 odd gigs which can travel from any data centre to any data centre in the bar. This, along with the customer outreach program helped me to ensure that I was able to serve the traffic surge that I saw on my platform. So just to give you some numbers - for OTT traffic we have seen about 258 per cent growth since February, CDN traffic saw 54 per cent growth and gaming traffic increased by 150 per cent.