BSNL to setup 10 data centres across India including Jaipur

Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) announced its partnership with Datacraft Asia Ltd on Friday to set up 10 data centres across India. Under the tie up, the companies will create close to 1.10-lakh sqft of data centre space with about Rs 200-crore investment for the first phase. "Initially we will be setting up six data centres over about 66,000 sqft across Jaipur, Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Ludhiana, Ghaziabad and Faridabad. We plan to start offering enterprise services including application hosting, server, storage and cloud services within six to 10 months," said Gopal Das, chairman and managing director of BSNL. "The other four locations would be Tiruchirapally, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Ranchi. While Datacraft will provide the IT infrastructure for the project, BSNL will take care of arranging physical infrastructure including space and power."
During the initial period, BSNL plans to offer the said services to government and public sector organisations and then move on to private enterprises and small businesses. The data centre business will open up opportunities for BSNL so that it can become an end-to-end service provider offering broadband connections to application services, Das said. The partnership under a revenue share model is for seven years with option to extend to additional three years. The choice of cities to set up the data centres was based on their high growth potential, Das said. Though geography is not a barrier to offer these internet-based services, BSNL will set up more data centres across the country in the future on the basis of demand, he added. The partnership is BSNL’s major initiative towards getting a stronghold in the enterprise segment. The company is looking at various streams of revenue including value-added services on mobile, broadband and fixed-line segments as voice has become a commodity service, Das said.