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Sudhir Kunder, Sr. VP – Nation Head Sales, DE-CIX India explains the role played by an Internet Exchange especially in the COVID-19 situation with increasing Internet traffic.

How wide is your presence in India as an Internet exchange operator?

DE-CIX India runs carrier and datacenter-neutral Internet Exchanges (IX) in the cities of Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, and Chennai. We currently interconnect around 250 networks. These include ISPs, Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), DNS root servers, OTT players, as well as educational institutes.Our overall peak traffic is around 1 Tbit/s.

 

How many PoPs are there from DE-CIX?

DE-CIX India is present in 10 datacenters across Mumbai (5), Delhi (2), Chennai (2) and Kolkata (1).

 

How many ISPs, data center players and telcos do you partner with in India?

DE-CIX India serves around 250 networks in Datacentres of STT Telemedia, Netmagic DC (NTT), GPX, Nxtra (Bharti Airtel), Sify, and Web Werks DC. In addition, we are proud to say that all major telcos have presence in our IXs across the country.

 

What are the solutions and services offered in your portfolio?

DE-CIX is an interconnection platform, offering secure peering services and cloud connectivity for the Indian market. The standard product GlobePEER includes both Public Peering (Route Server Peering) and Direct Peering (Bilateral Peering or Multi-Lateral Peering over Exchange) services. With DirectCLOUD, our customers can offer their own customers a direct connection with a guaranteed bandwidth to cloud providers. Also, within the next year, the Indian locations will be interconnected.

 

What is the business and operating model of DirectCLOUD services?

DE-CIX India launched its DirectCLOUD service at the DE-CIX Mumbai location to enable customers to access the DE-CIX Cloud Exchange and connect to the global cloud services, provided by Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud, and Amazon Web Services. DE-CIX’s cloud ecosystem is a unique community of certified partners, working together to ensure a secure, resilient, and reliable access to the cloud. Within this ecosystem, the DirectCLOUD service is an interface connecting the infrastructure of a company via an ISP or data center with the selected cloud service provider. This makes the access to many different cloud service providers, from niches to hybrid solutions, very easy.

 

What has been the traction of DirectCLOUD in India?

We launched DirectCLOUD service during COVID19 in order to help the Indian enterprises, educational institutes and media houses by providing them a stable, reliable and secure cloud connectivity. Many companies and institutes have their content and processes stored in the cloud of service providers like Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud and Amazon Web Services. The response from the market was extremely positive and very much appreciated. We are working with Telcos and NLD providers to enable faster deployment.

 

How would you differentiate DirectCLOUD from other cloud services?

The recent development has clearly demonstrated, that more and more business-critical workloads are running in the cloud; thus, enterprises have an increasing need to get a robust, secure and private connection to these cloud infrastructures. To serve these customers, regardless of their cloud-strategies, we have started to build an extensive Indian cloud ecosystem, which in the near future will feature both global and local service providers.

DE-CIX is a cloud-neutral partner and for example in Europe, we currently have over 50 cloud partners available, including the big 5 (AWS, Google, Oracle, SAP, Alibaba) as well as many local and regional service providers. We want to make it easy for our customers around the world: through one connection, they can access multiple cloud providers, which means, that no direct partnerships with cloud providers are necessary. Furthermore, changes in service configuration and bandwidth are easy, quick and flexible. Fast and hassle-free adaptation, modification of existing configuration and connection to new cloud resources and providers is easy and always possible. As our Cloud Exchange grows, we encourage all enterprises to join our global ecosystem and to grow together with us.

 

The pattern of Net consumption has changed post COVID19. There has been an increasing OTT content consumption. Plus with WFH being prevalent we have witnessed more remote working. How have you seen the Internet traffic increasing and what are the trending patterns?

We noted a strong change in data traffic and also in Internet user behavior since before COVID-19 hit the globe, and particularly since it hit India, with all its public measures in the fight against the spreading virus. DE-CIX India has seen an increase in overall data traffic of more than 60% compared to the time before COVID-19 (end of February 2020). In addition to this, networks are facing challenges, since the entire business Internet traffic has shifted from business districts into residential areas, as people establish home offices and home schooling. Therefore, the use of collaboration tools has increased immensely. Furthermore, online video streaming has increased by 250%, and gaming by more than 285%. Data traffic and Internet usage during peak hours has continually experienced new record levels, with a 68% increase in ISP traffic.

 

What is the GTM model DE-CIX follows and how has this changed post COVID19?

DE-CIX GTM model is a proven mix of online and offline presence. Due to COVID-19, however, we were forced to focus on online and the virtual world. We had to cancel our major face-to-face meetings since March 2020 – as pretty much everybody – and we have also switched from physical events to virtual ones, both in India as well as globally. The safety of our employees, customers and partners is of utmost importance and to maintain this, we are happy to have made these changes.

The current situation, with Internet consumption being many times higher than before the pandemic, is keeping our teams busy. We are working hard to add new product features to help our customers – and to provide them with better interconnectivity, which is so much required today and tomorrow.

 

What are the dynamics of the partner program DE-CIX has for India?

When a partner joins DE-CIX India, he joins a global network.  We also work closely with our partners in training the teams and joining them in the meetings with their customers whenever needed. We are collaborating with partners who have the dual edge of Last mile reach as well as access to cloud consumption based customers.The SIs also play a very significant role in the Partner Program  with their ability to offer expansion of width and depth of market coverage as they are the ones who help achieve scale.

 

What are the key focus areas for the next 12-18 months?

Cloud will be clearly one of them. It is the fastest-growing IT sector worldwide and the positive trend is expected to continue. We offer an access to our Cloud Exchange – featuring our unique Cloud ecosystem – and this will open up game-changing opportunities for businesses across all industries.

Due to the extension we are doing with data centers, we are also extending our cloud footprint in India. We have for now started in Mumbai, but soon cloud connectivity will be available in all of our four locations. In the near future, our Cloud ecosystem will feature not only the big global service providers, but also local Indian ones.

Finally, we are launching something very interesting in India in the coming months: we will be introducing the great MAPS – service of Microsoft. But this is only a teaser for now, there will be more to come in the course of the year.

 

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