Reliance plans more knowledge cities

After Mumbai, campuses lined up for other metros.

Reliance Infocomm, the information technology and communication initiative of the Rs 99,000 crore Reliance group, is planning to replicate a smaller version of the Dhirubhai Ambani Knowledge City (DAKC) outside Mumbai to other metros. The company is planning to invest Rs 1,200 crore to set up these knowledge cities across the country.

The mini-DAKCs will house Internet data centres, call centres, application development laboratories, network operations centres and auxiliary facilities. Reliance Infocomm has bought land in Chennai, Kolkata and Hyderabad to house these mini-DAKCs and is using land owned by its associate company, Indian Petrochemicals Corporation Ltd (IPCL), in Delhi, for its campus there.

Sanjay Mashruwala, president, Reliance Infocomm, told Business Standard: "It will be a repeat engineering of what we see in the case of DAKC, although the campuses will be smaller. They are expected to be ready in a year. By doing this, we are decentralising activities of the data centres and reaching out into smaller regional complexes." Once these centres are set up, the company will be in a position to offer 70-80 per cent of the total infrastructure that is required for business process outsourcing activities across the country.

Reliance Infocomm is planning to offer connectivity infrastructure where enterprises, including portals, financial institutions and banks, can outsource their entire networking and back office operations to Reliance's Internet data centres (IDCs). Reliance Infocomm's IDCs are offering carrier-neutral facilities to international telecom operators like Sprint and MCI WorldCom. ESPN-STAR, which was outsourcing its back office operations from the US, UK and Hong Kong till recently, has now shifted to Reliance Infocomm's IDC on a "fully managed" basis.

The company is in the process of making its fourth IDC operational in Bangalore by raising the net floor space to 123,000 square feet. In contrast, other players in the arena like VSNL-Tata-Dishnet's IDC has a net floor space of around 60,000-65,000 square feet and Satyam, around 35,000 square feet.

With plans for data centres in Delhi, Chennai, Hyderabad and Kolkata, the company proposes to establish a total capacity of over 205,000 square feet.

Reliance Infocomm's IDCs have 250 customers, of which 26 are banks and financial institutions, including Bank of Baroda, Union Bank of India, Syndicate Bank and the Bombay Stock Exchange.

Besides, it also has servers of various government offices, including the education department of Maharashtra and e-mail accounts of the Mumbai police department. FMCG major Hindustan Lever is also its client.