According to Bala Vasireddi, SVP & GM- India Operations SunGard Availability Services disaster recovery (DR) has moved away from just having back-up of data in a data centre and India Inc. that so far looked at DR and business continuity plan as a tick on the box of must have IT systems, are maturing too.
“India is no different than any other market when it comes to adoption of disaster recovery systems and services. We think it is now at the cusp of maturity and we will see companies adopting DR services in a more planned manner,” added Vasireddi. RaaS offering will be key offering for the small and medium enterprise segment.
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SunGard’s today launch builds upon the company’s launch within India in 2011, since when it has been serving its global customers’ India operations. With the newly launched RaaS, SunGard will be able to offer India’s medium and large enterprises SLA-driven recovery time-frames for their mission critical IT operations, on a pay-as-you-go service model.
SunGard has over 400 employees in India, with majority working from its centre in Pune. The RaaS product has seen a good amount of collaboration from its India team along with the global centres. SunGard Availability Services, is part of the SunGard Data Systems, which recently split its business into two. SunGard is a $4 billion entity and SunGard Availability Services is a $1.4 billion business unit.
Aman Munglani, research director, Gartner corroborates Vasireddi’s point. “The realization that DR is important is on the rise. Especially among large enterprise who have huge IT systems. For instance, top banks in India have always had DR. But in some cases the kind of rigour that they have put is not up to mark. The change however now is that the maturity level among organizations has gone up. And majority are taking informed decisions,” added Munglani.
The size of Indian market opportunity is while not known, Vasireddy believes that there are about 1,000 companies that are sizeable enough and have a growing and complex IT requirements and where DR becomes a necessity. “I cannot give a market size, but DR is almost 20-25 per cent of the critical IT Budget spends in India,” he added.
According to Markets&Markets research global DRaaS and cloud based business continuity is forecasted to grow from $640.8 million in 2013 to $5.77 billion by 2018, at a CAGR of 55.2 per cent.
So far SunGard was using its India presence to service its global clients as well as their Indian entities. The company’s Work Area Recovery Centres are in three metros—Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai. Vasireddi believes that the company plans to have three more centres in the other three metros, but the expansion will be based on customer expansion plans.