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INDIAN IDCs Coming of age
By A Business Correspondent
Procts Monitor
The bursting of the dot-com bubble has turned investors extra-cautious before taking on exposure into IT projects. However, manufacturing companies or enterprises which had been eclipsed over the last 18 months by the information technology service providers are only now realising the potential of going in for IT for improving their functionalities. IT enabled services are increasingly being used for improving their working. However, enterprises are still not technologically as savvy as their IT counterparts. And fears of obsolescence, security of data-transfer, vulnerability of systems still prevent them from committing funds into computer hardware. Even existing companies, which have ventured into the field of IT and created their own electronic data processing divisions, are finding it difficult to grow given the constraints of space, manpower and huge capital costs entailed.
It is precisely these fears which has led to the birth of Internet data centers (IDC) in India.
A typical IDC would offer space for keeping servers, hosting, monitoring users and ensuring safety and timely delivery of contents. The advantages for an enterprise to go to an IDC would be manifold. For one he would have to incur only operational charges compared to the capital costs involved in setting up his own systems. As against the loss of depreciation, which he would be entitled to claim in case of capital invested, he would be paying only a fraction of his charges to the IDC. The IDC in turn would ensure safety of delivery, seamless hosting, space and host of other value added services.
But with the dot-com meltdown are there enough takers of these services? Says Jitendra Israni, Chief Technical Officer at Cyequator Technologies Ltd, a Mumbai-based IDC: "Last two months things have started looking good. Enterprise hosting has become a major source of revenue for IDC."
A typical Internet service provider also provides what is termed as rack, stack and ping in IT parlance-space for storing, stacking and fitting computers servers etc. In addition to basic and monitoring services IDC offers other value-added services like messaging, disaster recovery, security services, transaction analysis, user performance, vulnerability analysis etc. It is these value-based services which are the real factors differentiating ISPs from IDCs.
(16/7/01)
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