Mindlance thinks big about cloud

BANGALORE, INDIA: After successfully adding 100 new clients in India within last seven months, US-based IT infrastructure service provider Mindlance is planning to go in a big way in cloud and it is soon entering networking business as well.

“It is a great accomplishment that we achieved our target of adding 100 clients ahead of the schedule,” said Mindlance CIO Kamal Sharma, who is probably the youngest CIO in India, and one of the most successful youngest global CIOs, at the age of 30.

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He said the success has given the company the confidence to enter new arenas such as cloud and networking.

It was last week that the IT infrastructure service provider announced the new achievement, nearly six months ahead of the target of December 2011.

Some of the recent customer acquisitions include Bharat IT Services (a SPICE Group venture), Knowledge Global Limited, GTL Limited, UST Global, Just Dial and Piramal Healthcare.

Mindlance provides services ranging from data storage to voice telephony to its customers dealing in different of verticals. With this, it has evolved into a major Tier-2 Systems Integrator in India with focus on verticals like IT, BFSI, manufacturing, government, life sciences and education, claimed Mindlance.

The addition of new clients in the country has naturally added up to the company’s expansion plans also.

“In the last four months, we opened facilities in Chennai, Thiruvananthapuram, Gurgaon, Kolkata, Hyderabad and this year we are planning to open three more centres,” he added.

While two centres would come up in Ahmedabad and Bhuvaneshvar, the third one will, most probably, be in Uttar Pradesh or Madhya Pradesh.

Though Mindlance is not averse to business from SMBs, Kamal Sharma said their major chunk of business comes from enterprise segment.

“There is huge response to our service from big enterprises, since the business volume is huge,” said Kamal adding, “That does not mean that we won’t accept business from SMBs.”

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Betting big on cloud, networking

Even as cloud has become the in-thing of the new times, Mindlance is also betting big on the potential of cloud. But the company is aware of the apprehensions pertaining to cloud security. That is why it decided to implement cloud within the organization before going in a big way to the clients.

“Right since the beginning I had the feeling that before going to the customers in a big way, we should implement cloud within our organization, and two months back we successfully implemented cloud in Mindlance,” he said.

He said the cloud implementation is done after conducting all due diligence and this ensures the security of even the most sensitive data on cloud, which has also added confidence among the clients.

“As a CIO I am well aware of the apprehensions over security, so the implementation of cloud within the organization helped us overcome that apprehension of the clients as well as ourselves. Actually some of our clients were asking whether we are on cloud and now we can confidently say that, 'yes, we are!',” explained Kamal.

Within six months of embarking on cloud business, Mindlance is also planning to expand into data centre and networking business as well. Also it is entering Microsoft Consulting and Support.

New hiring plans

As the business expands in India, the company, which has around 1000 employees in the country, is also planning to increase its headcount. 

“Yes, we are planning to hire in a big way and this year, would recruit 500 more across the different locations,” he said.

Also, Mindlance is giving shape to the plan of opening a training centre for the newcomers.

“We are planning to recruit freshers as well as people with around six months’ experience and provide them training for three to six months,” said Kamal.

In tune with the policy of not restricting the business operations to metropolitan cities alone, Mindlance gives enough importance to the tier-2 cities as well and the training centre would also be opened in some tier-2 city, though it has not yet identified the location, said Kamal Sharma.