India one of most profitable markets: Akamai

BANGALORE, INDIA: Committed to the philosophy that 'deployment of solution is not the end of it', Akamai Technologies has been focused on providing faster and reliable services. With rapid changes in bandwidth scenario and growing number of devices, the company is using the new trends to its benefit and is all set to expand its customer base in India.

Rahul Arora, country manager, India Akamai Technologies, in an interaction with Deepa Damodaran of CIOL talks about challenges in India enterprise segment, the growing e-commerce trend and much more. Excerpts:

CIOL: What are the challenges that you see in the enterprise segment?

Rahul Arora: In the last three years, we have managed to get about 100 plus customers, out of which around 30 are enterprise customers. What we see today is that even enterprises want to go mobile.

They have employees all over the world who are working at the customer side, but also want to access applications posted in data bank here. This is a challenge considering bandwidth and security of such files.

 

Another challenge is adoption of internet. Large enterprises, banks and IT leaders are slow on this front because of many reasons such as bandwidth, security etc.

Security was the main reason why large enterprises did not adopt cloud when SMBs went for it. However, today cloud is becoming more and more popular because it helps them to do business effectively as it allows them to concentrate on the core business objectives. However, the pace of large enterprises moving from the traditional MDS DSL networks onto adopting internet is slow.

Financial businesses built their own infrastructure and they never thought that someday they will have to use internet. The shift is happening, but there are certain regulatory concerns. However, it gives better ROI because the cost of running applications over internet by DSL networks, like MDS etc., is around 70 per cent less.

CIOL: Akamai is expensive than its competitors. Why?

Rahul Arora: Our philosophy is not about a solution that ends with its deployment. It goes beyond that. That is why we have presence in 1,100 plus sites, and are growing every year. It is an everyday process.

 

Our network today is capable of 4 terabytes per second of data traffic. The reason for this philosophy is that we want to cater to all users. They maybe having an MDS connection, they maybe putting in database, you may be regular or may be not. So our philosophy is to give customers the best end user experience that lets them do things faster and better.

CIOL: What are some of the trends that you see in Indian market?

Rahul Arora: With regards to media industry, a couple of years back there were several websites where one could go and watch news or read newspaper. Today, it has paved way for live telecast.

Bandwidth scenario is changing rapidly. In the last three years, I have upgraded my home network more than 50 times. There was a time when I used to get 256 kbps speed on Internet, whereas, today I get 8 Mbps. In the next couple of years, the speed will further improve.

Bandwidth is still a challenge and will remain so for some more time. However, it is improving with time. Today, price and reach of bandwidth are getting better. There was a time when we had only 2G on our mobile phones, today many of us have 3G. And now with LTE the overall bandwidth situation of the country will improve in the next 12 months.

 

Today media companies disseminate more content than an user can use. Content is growing, devices are growing, so there are several new initiatives that are coming up.

We are also seeing a growing shift towards e-commerce. The credit card market is one of the most lucrative market here, unlike before causing the slow growth in e-commerce industry. However, in the last couple of years e-commerce has caught fire with introduction of concepts such as pay on delivery. More and more companies are entering this industry. Such websites are content rich.

CIOL: Akamai concentrates more on the US and European markets. What is India's contribution to the company's revenue?

Rahul Arora: India is a profitable market for us. From revenue perspective we are growing at 40 per cent year-over-year. It translates roughly to five per cent of the total revenue. We expect it to be seven-eight per cent by the year end. We are growing around 150 more people year-by-year. We are hopeful of adding at least 30 more customers towards the end of this year

CIOL: Akamai has 1,00,000 machines, how many of them are in India?

Rahu Arora: Those are confidential matters as that is what our business is about. So we do not disclose it. All I can say is, it is growing on a rapid pace. Akamai had about 45,000 servers a couple of years back and today we have 1,05,000.