Market Deep Dive

Read till the end for a little surprise

Akanksha and I were recently in Mysore to attend the inauguration of the Green Compute Foundation Center of Excellence at the JSS Science and Technical University, interact with data storage experts and visit the Vigyan Labs micro data center.

Image Desc: At Vigyan Lab’s sustainable micro data center

Here are some of our key takeaways:

1. Space and energy consumption of data centers are problems that companies care about for two reasons:
a) because it affects their bottom line
b) their clients (especially those in Europe) require it for scope-2 and scope-3 reporting

2. There is a barrage of software and software-hardware-integrated companies being built around helping other companies optimize their data center (and IT) costs, and they have a reasonable number of paying customers and order volume for their tools.

3. There is a reasonably big market in India for archival data storage.

We realized that all of the folks we have been talking to and leveraging to understand the demand for archival data storage have not been the real decision makers. We had eliminated research institutes and the likes from being potential customers, but we met companies selling to these customers and being paid for their services. We found some interesting leads to explore on these fronts.

4. An alternate movement for sustainable and locally built IT infrastructure is evolving in India, both from the technology and policy lens spearheaded by organizations like the Green Compute Foundation and micro data center providers like Vigyan Labs.

The storage and compute costs of big players like AWS and Azure are often too high for companies in India. Research institutes often cannot tap into these because funding agencies do not allow them to utilize grants from tax-payer money to pay private cloud providers. Hence, there are many opportunities to build compute architecture in India for India.

5. There are challenges to switching from established to local players in the data storage market
a. There are upfront switching costs that need to be paid if you are switching out of an Azure or an AWS
b. Even if a company wants to prioritize a local data center provider over an established player, the customers of the said company often don’t trust these local players. Hosting on AWS or Azure tag gives some degree of credibility to the company in the eyes of the customer. The reliability (or the perception of reliability) of local data center providers needs to be established for them to compete with AWS or Azure in India. I talk about perception because some of these local data centers have shorter downtimes than AWS or Azure servers do for a given amount of data.

The little (big?) surprise

That being said, we are currently signing up companies for early access to our DNA data storage.

If you are a company that currently does on-premises storage of archival data, or a data center service provider that wants to explore opportunities to replace your archival data storage systems with a more space and energy efficient one, hit us up. The first 5 companies to sign up with us gets a life-time special pricing offer.

Happy to share more details one-on-one.