With a fledgling cloud computing market in the country, both international and Indian cloud players are scaling up capacity to meet the increasing demand. According to the recent report by garter, the public cloud market alone in the country will treble to $1.9 billion (about rs 12,000 crore) by 2018.It has grown to over $638 million in 2014 from $470 million in 2013. According to Gartner, increased Internet penetration and the rise of ecommerce are the main reasons for continued growth of the data centre co-location and hosting market in India.

“Early Web content and ecommerce companies have used data centres in the US to address their primary requirements,” said Naveen Mishra, research director at Gartner.

“However, as the number of Internet users has swelled in India, Web technology companies have increasingly shifted their servers to data centers in India, leading to significant demand for Indian data centre service providers.”
Reliance, one of the largest Indian data centre companies, is building a 650,000 sq. ft data centre in India — its 10th data centre in the country – with a combined capacity of about 1 million sq ft and an overall investment of $200 million. The company is now expanding its focus to building cloud capabilities, both internally as well as through partnerships.

Similarly, Netmagic, an NTT Communications subsidiary, is building its ninth data centre in Mumbai – the company’s largest – with 280,000 sq ft capacity. “We are also exploring options in the NCR region because by the time this goes live, we will be running short of space in Noida,” Sharad Sanghi, CEO at Netmagic, told ET.

Instead of being threatened by the entry of larger global players, Indian data centre providers feel this will help expand the market for them. “The entry of global players in the market will increase awareness about cloud computing in India and will benefit everyone,” said Sridhar Pinnapureddy, CEO of CrtlS DataCenters.