Data centre start-up Pi eyes smart city projects

Company CEO says data centres form key infrastructure for providing services to smart cities

Data centre and enterprise cloud start-up, Pi Datacenters, is developing an Internet of Things (IoT) framework in a data centre standpoint, and is contemplating giving proofs-of-concept to various state governments to participate in their smart city projects, said its founder and Chief Executive Officer Kalyan Muppaneni.

"Data centres form the key infrastructure for providing services to smart cities. We will also be in a position to host the governments on our cloud solutions within the next one year," he told Business Standard.

Stating that IoT is still an evolutionary technology which has reached only 30% of its full potential, Muppaneni said the company was currently piloting the intellectual property-based IoT framework with three edge data centres in India. The frame work will be released in the market in a couple of months from now.

Pi Datacenters is setting up its first Tier-IV data centre at Amaravati, the new capital of Andhra Pradesh, with an incremental investment of Rs 600 crore over the next four years. Muppaneni said Phase-I of the 500,000-sft data centre, which involved an investment of Rs 60 crore, would be operational by July 2016.

The company had, in March 2015, announced its intent to raise Rs 540 crore from institutional venture capitalists to fund the data centre. Muppaneni, however, said the fund-raising plan was put on the backburner.

"The project will be self-funded as internal revenues will start kicking in from the third quarter of this year. We are also sharpening our focus on catering to customer-premise data centres for which we already have about 15 clients in the pipeline. This will be another source of revenues for us," he said.

Pi Datacenters has recently entered into a strategic partnership with Arista Networks, a US-based software-driven cloud networking solutions. Under the MoU, Arista and Pi will collaborate to leverage each other in delivering software-defined compute to customers in the Indian market.

Quoting a Gartner report, Muppaneni said the Indian data centre infrastructure market, comprising server, storage and networking equipment, is currently pegged at $3.7 billion. According to him, the company is looking for a suitable location for setting up a disaster recovery centre (DRC), which would be up and running by the end of 2016.