Bharat Sanchar Nigam (BSNL), the Indian telco, has acheived SAP certification for hosting its services in India in its data centers. The assessment includes the entire service offering from physical infrastructure to policies and procedures and overal ability to deliver a mission-critical service backed by good service level agreements (SLAs), the company claimed in a statement.

As a SAP certified provider of hosting services the BSNL data center can perform a range of IT services related to SAP applications, from initial proof of concepts to full deployment of SAP solutions for clients.

BSNL has a strategic alliance with Dimension Data which provides data center services in India. This resulted in the building of data centres across the country.

BSNL announced that all of its six Internet data centers have been successfully passed the certification audit.

The data centres are strategically located in Jaipur, Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Ludhiana, Ghaziabad and Faridabad. From these data centers, BSNL provides colocation, managed hosting and cloud Services to central and state government departments as well as Public and Private enterprises in India.

Mr A N Rai, interim chairman and managing director of BSNL said: "The certification also validates the commitment by our technology partner, Dimension Data, in ensuring world class systems and processes in our data centers which could pass the rigorous audit done for this certification."

He continued: "This certification is in line with our strategy to provide differentiated and unique data center services in the Indian market. This will strengthen our position us as the leader in data center services in India - with a comprehensive range of cloud and hosted services particularly suited for hosting mission critical applications for the government and public sectors."

Kiran Bhagwanani, Chief Executive Officer at Dimension Data India said: "Our cloud platform is also certified by SAP for Cloud Services globally.