Last week Savvis announced a partnership with Indian mobile and telecoms operator Bharti airtel which will see Savvis sell its cloud services into the Indian market through airtel's data centers.  

DCDF: What impressed you about Bharti airtel?

Jim Ouseley, CEO Savvis: We’ve been looking to get into India for a while – approximately one year – and looking at possible partnerships. We were impressed with their data center operations. We know that they have multi–national customers, demanding customers who need consistent telecoms services. They have Tier III level data centers and are definitely up the standards of anything available elsewhere. They have quality in their data center teams and well trained staff.

DCDF: Is the India market ready for cloud services and is the infrastructure stability there to support it?

JO: Managed hosting and  cloud services is very embryonic in India  it should be a billion dollar opportunity. We’ve looked at their [Bharti Airtel’s] records - clearly there are power issues throughout India – and they ‘ve built infrastructure to match their customer needs. They’ve been able to get network infrastructure in place to meet international needs- and we believe their data centers will also match and are capable of delivering these services.

DCDF: How will the roll out happen?

JO: We are starting in Bangalore – we are currently installing equipment, hiring staff in India and transferring US based staff to Bangalore – and we starting the training of people in their organization, next we’ll look at New Deli and Mumbai. The roll out will start elsewhere in early next year but we expect to see business start in the third or fourth quarter of this year. They have an enterprise sales and support organization – they need new services to sell into their customer base. [Under the agreement Bharti airtel will resell Savvis’ portfolio such as its Symphony range of cloud services.]

DCDF: Which verticals are you targeting first?

JO: The first vertical market we expect to see business from is the financial sector – we’re already a major partner of Thomson Reuters and for both themselves and their customers, we see significant opportunity. After that it gets fairly horizontal, either multi-nationals who are looking to enter the India market or Indian companies looking to take advantage of cloud services and managed hosting.

DCDF: Do you have any experience of partnerships such as this?

JO: We’ve used channels but in general this is the first major market that we’ve gone into through a partnership like this. We’re looking at similar relationships in China – in order to get into markets such as China, India or South America it makes sense to partner with an established player in that market and when you need a data center, telecoms companies are the logical target.  

DCDF: What about further consolidation: Do you foresee telecoms companies buying more data center players.

JO: It is a relatively small sector – really only three or four companies of scale – with over a billion dollars in business. If you look at network and cloud services, either the Telcos will do it themselves or consider acquisitions. Companies like ourselves have solid business plans and we are not in a position where we need them. However they do bring capital. Telecoms do need to get into the market [for cloud.]