It is the right time to invest in India

A recent study by the US Environment Protection Agency (EPA) shows that there
are more than 15 million servers deployed in the world. These servers are spread
across various departments, which means that 80 percent of the IT infrastructure
sits idle at any given point of time. Though the IT infrastructure is blamed for
contributing to the carbon footprint, the same can be utilized efficiently to
bring down the carbon footprint and help save money. Taylor explains how the
cloud allows sharing of IT infrastructure and reduces carbon footprint of IT.
Excerpts

What prompted Akamai to go with the Indian expansion plan during this
downtime?

The latest 'Akamai State of the Internet Report' has brought out some
interesting facts about India and the Internet usage in particular. We have seen
a 43 percent growth in the number of IP addresses registered during 2008-09
compared to the previous year. So, that represents the number of citizens coming
online.

However, unfortunately, there is limited capacity as average connection speed
in India is 772Kbps. That ranks India 115th in the average connection speed. The
US is number 17 with a connection speed of 3.9Mbps and South Korea tops the
chart with 15Mbps. The average connection speed around the world is 1.5Mbps.

Kieran Taylor Sr Director Akamai Technologies

So it makes sense to invest in India at this right time to bridge the gap
between demand and speed. How exactly is Akamai planning the expansion?

Akamai solutions is to bring the content closer to the users. Akamai has
installed about 45,000 servers in seventy countries across more than 1,100
networks. Our Indian business in particular has witnessed an impressive ten-fold
growth since 2005.

Today, our India center handles all departments starting from marketing to
research and development with 350-plus headcount.

During 2009, we will be expanding our server deployment into different
networks in India so that people get better connection speeds and more reliable
connections to websites.

What is Akamai's strategy toward cloud initiatives?

We at Akamai see cloud computing in three layers-infrastructure as a
service, platform as a service and SaaS, and we have solutions for all these.

The infrastructure as a service is sought for simple storage services or data
center services. The platform as a service, which is represented by computing
services like Amazon EC 2 etc, helps companies in basic application processing
on our platform to reduce the number of application servers and server license
that is needed in a data center. This kind of service is more sought after by
online commerce companies.

With regard to SaaS, we are seeing a great demand from SaaS companies who
want 'pay-as-you-go' or utility-based models. A lot of companies come to Akamai
for this type of solutions.

Sharath Kumar

(Source: CIOL)