Following the advent of the Internet, then e-commerce and the eventual large scale digital adoption in the early 2000s, Sridhar Pinnapureddy founded CtrlS Datacenters in 2007, which has gone on to become the world’s largest TierIV Data Center. In this segment of “Faces of the Industry” InterGlobix Magazine’s Editor-in-Chief Jasmine Bedi starts at the genesis of CtrlS in her interview with the Founder & CEO Pinnapureddy, who also holds the same titles for Cloud4C, the world’s leading cloud managed services provider for Fortune 500 clients.
A pioneer in the information and communications industries, Pinnapureddy has spent the last two decades building innovative technology solutions for many market sectors. He has been credited with launching several industry firsts, including DR as a Service (DRaaS) and the world’s first Community Cloud for Banks. In addition to the many accolades he has earned throughout his career, he gives back with his involvement in TiE (The Indus Entrepreneurs), a nonprofit organization devoted to empowering entrepreneurs in all industries and at all stages.
Can you tell us about the genesis of CtrlS Datacenters and Cloud4C?
In 2005, I had this intuition that data centers—then largely used to host websites—would be the future powerhouses of the economy. In February 2008, CtrlS built India’s first TierIV data center in Hyderabad. It was a first-of-its-kind experience for the customers. Since the first one, we’ve gone on to become the world’s largest rated-4 datacenter company, with a laser-sharp focus on sustainability. We have more than one million square feet in operation and another five million in development.
Today, CtrlS is trusted by Fortune 500 Global Multinationals, including three of the top five banks in the World, two of the top five global car manufacturers, two of the top five pharma companies, two of the top five media companies and some of the world’s largest cloud service providers.
Innovation is at the core of CtrlS’ organizational DNA. This led to the founding of Cloud4C in 2014, as India’s first four copy public cloud. Soon after, we launched community clouds for different verticals, such as banking, healthcare and insurance, with a core offering around compliance as a service.
Since 2017, we’ve been offering managed services using public cloud platforms like Azure, AWS, GCP and Oracle. Now, we are an Azure Expert MSP holding Advanced Specialization in seven core areas, an AWS Advanced Consulting partner and a chosen partner for GCP and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure across many regions. Additionally, we are the launch partners for AWS Outposts in India.
Cloud4C now is present in 25 countries and 52 locations worldwide.
How do you see the Asian market overall, and India especially, in terms of growth opportunities in the data center and Cloud services market?
With the rising demand for cloud, the global data center market investments are expected to reach around US$200 billion per annum by 2025. India is expected to account for 2.3 percent (around US$4.6 billion) of these total investments, according to the National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM). In the Asia Pacific (APAC) region, Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia and Japan are established data center hubs, while India and Indonesia are upcoming markets that are expected to experience strong growth in the next four-to-five years.
In the past five years, India’s total data traffic has increased by approximately 60 times, with a 36 percent year-on-year growth in 2020. Internet penetration has made its way from urban to rural areas. By 2025, there is predicted to be more Internet users in rural India than in urban India. With the surge in per capita data usage, India is now the world’s most intensive data consumer.
