VueNow Group
NITIN SRIVASTAVA
Director of the VueNow Group
Sixth Element has engaged in an exclusive interview with Nitin Srivastava , a founding member and Director of the VueNow Group, where his leadership has helped the company make rapid strides in the Indian digital infrastructure provider.
Tell us about your journey to date? How did you join VueNow? I started my career as a Television Journalist and worked in this field for almost 15 years. I have been part of the launching team of a few news channels. In 2015, I joined VueNow as an operations head and last year became the Director of the company. The journey has been wonderful, and I have seen its growth up close. What are the challenges you face? How do you overcome them? In a startup, you have to face many challenges in the beginning and sometimes, you have to play multiple roles from the operations to the marketing executive. Having worked closely on the launch of news channels, I know how challenging it can be. However, my 22 years of work experience has helped me overcome these challenges. With VueNow, I got the opportunity to learn from industry experts across the globe so, all the challenges I faced initially helped me gain a better understanding of the Datacenter industry
Viewing your role in VueNow, what sort of operations do you take care of? How hard or easy your job is? Even though I was a part of the operations team initially, it was not my only role. Since working in a start-up allows you to multi-task, from sales to marketing it has been a wonderful and enriching journey so far. In terms of how hard or easy my job is, I believe that every job has its own challenges and rewards. My varied work experience has taught me many things - and I'm still learning. VueNow, in addition to storage sales is now building EDGE data centers across the country, particularly in tier 1 and tier 2 cities and is inching towards its way to becoming India’s largest and fastest growing digital infrastructure provider.
How has the data center market in India grown over the last decade or so? - Over the past decade, the data centre industry has undergone significant transformation. Businesses are transitioning from maintaining captive data centres to colocation facility (rental DC space) driven by better security and cost efficiencies. Colocation data centers now account for nearly 45% of all data centers in the country, up from 20% in 2018. The business of setting up large data centers, trudging along nicely over the years, has picked up
the pace lately, with at least three major business groups entering into the data center industry with announcement of approx. 2L CR of investment and, established players going ahead with aggressive expansion plans of their own. Digitalization and cloud adoption have driven doubledigit growth in India's data center industry over the last few years and this robust progress is anticipated to continue over next five years as well. According to a report, India is witnessing investment from both local and international players that is expected to touch $4.6 billion per annum by 2025. Even the Indian Government is driving favorable policies encouraging investments into set up of hyperscale datacenters in India and PSU’s like rail tell is also planning to establish edge data centers in every railway station.
How are companies which are moving from captive data centers to cloud computing affecting the data center business in India? In the era of virtualization and cloud computing, the Indian Datacenter market is experiencing consistent growth. From 2019 to 2024, India's Datacenter market is projected to grow at a 12% compound annual growth rate (CAGR). Rapid digital transformation due to covid has forced corporates to move to third-party providers instead of having to manage the complexities associated with on-premise and owned data centres. As we continue our journey through the extended new normal of the pandemic, it is clear that to survive and thrive, companies will have to adapt to be able to respond to the ever-evolving needs of today’s digital consumers. It is not an exaggeration to say that today a successful business needs to be responsive, scalable, secure, and resilient. In this context, one of the most vital strategic decisions that can be made by most organizations is the accelerated shift of their legacy IT infrastructure to ‘Cloud Technology’.
However, in this race of cloud adoption we should not underestimate the challenges involved in cloud migration and have a well- designed roadmap for the transition. Today, the business reality is that cloud adoption is the need of the hour not only in India but across the post pandemic world where business scalability, resiliency, smarter integrations, and easier accessibility to critical functionalities are imperative for business growth and sustainability. It is important that the Businesses need to understand their requirements and map the cloud offerings against them to get a best-fit solution to be able to keep up amidst the competitive landscape.
What are the larger goals for VueNow in the coming future? What is the roadmap and what do you plan to accomplish? By providing Data warehousing and IT services for seamless business operations, we aim to bridge the gap between businesses and their digital infrastructure requirements. Our Datacenters help to facilitate faster and more efficient functioning, delivering results and growth opportunities to industries worldwide.
Our focus is to establish 150,000 EDGE Datacentres across the globe in the coming decade. We joined hands with the Bulgarian government where we will develop one Master Hub Location with 100 rack tier 4 Datacentre in Plovdiv and six EDCs in the initial phase which will help Bulgaria to have Data Security as per EU compliance, Data localization, Robust network infrastructure, enabling efficient Public Administration, High Technology employment opportunities, Innovative solutions to emerging business scenarios and Local employment spread across the country. Recently we have also joined hands with the Government of Himachal Pradesh to build 31 Datacenters in Himachal Pradesh as well as a film city in the state. We also plan to build 31 skill development centers to train youth in IT skills thus, generating employment in the state. VueNow is well on the way to establishing the largest edge compute network by 2025. We are also in talks with various state and central government departments to create highly robust, efficient, and balanced data management networks for them. Our goal is to make India the largest hub for the Datacenter industry in the future