Customized managed services is our USP
Dataquest, October 15, 2007

By Sudesh Prasad

'Customized managed services is our USP' - Sharad Sanghi MD and CEO NetMagic

NetMagic started in the pre-Internet bubble era. How has been the journey?

Netmagic started its operations in 1998 after commercial Internet was allowed in India. We started providing managed hosting services, going beyond basic connectivity. We found a niche in the corporate space and started providing value added services. The original plan was to set up multiple data centers, provide hosting and managed services and other services like VPN, content distribution, and Content delivery. We took a conscious decision to provide services only to the corporate and not retail. We felt a need for leveraging Exodus' founder's expertise and managed to rope them in to invest in our company. Our first customer went live in Mumbai in November 2000. We were doing good but the entire sector collapsed and we suffered, and Exodus also went bust. We went through a bad phase, but things started getting back during 2005. Eying an opportunity, we also got into the remote infrastructure management business during that time.

What are your plans for expanding your data center business?

We started with Mumbai where we have set up another data center which has gone live. Our Bangalore center will also go live very soon. We have plans to set up one in Chennai for which we have already identified the space. It will be live before the end of 2007. Delhi is also on our radar. We also have a virtual data-center in San Francisco, the US.

What differentiates you from other data-center service providers?

Managed services is our USP. Most of the providers have good data center facilities and where we differentiate ourselves is in the depth and the customized managed services we provide. Managed services offerings include managed security, firewall, DS, load balancing, back-up and storage. The other thing that differentiates us from others is our carrier neutrality and it is up to the customers to choose the type of connectivity. Customers now do not have to send their engineers to data centers, they can just outsource and focus on their core business. Secondly, it increases the revenue per rack. We have seen a big shift in the industry towards outsourcing. In fact, three of our customers have outsourced their entire SAP to us.

What are some of the best practices that your data center has in place?

We had the first data center that was complete ISO 27000 Type-II certified. It is not just the data center, but the whole organization which has been certified. We are also SAS 70 certified, targeted primarily at the US customers. We follow the entire ITIL methodologies. We are also looking at ISO 20000 which has to do with the managed services.

This article in its complete form appeared in the October 15, 2007 issue of Dataquest. It also appeared on the periodical's online portal on the following URL. Click the following link to read the archived article in its full form as it was published.