HostingCon 2007-Interview with Sandip Gupta

Sandip Gupta is a person we've met and interviewed for online features and WHIR TV segments quite a few times over the past couple of years and since his exit from Ensim, we hadn't really heard from him or knew much about his situation. But at this year's HostingCon 2007, Sandip was back representing NetMagic Solutions, a managed service provider from India, which he's been heading as president and placed responsible for the company's international expansion and corporate strategy.

Placing great value in his past relations with people, he contacted us for an interview (which I was quite happy to oblige to, by the way, because of how incredibly pleasant he is) and gave us a rundown on the company he's been representing, it's unique service to the industry and what he's been up to for the past year.

We unfortunately ran into some technical issues with the audio, so we'll be sharing transcribes of our interviews with you instead. Sorry for any inconvenience.

WHIR TV: You're a familiar face on WHIR TV, but we haven't seen you in a while, really since your Ensim days. What have you been up to since leaving that position?

SG: About a year back, I left Ensim and using my experience in the hosting industry and the enterprise virtualization space I worked with about a dozen companies, advising them about different strategies of how to market, how to raise money and so on and so forth. So, I was getting a wide variety of experience but I was looking for the right opportunity and then I came across NetMagic, which I joined about two months back.

WHIR TV: What drew you to this company in particular?

SG: NetMagic is in a unique position. It's an India-based managed service provider, so we offer hosting as well as managed services in India. We have four data centers in India and we host about 500 medium-to-large sized customers that are multinational corporations. The business was incubated by the founders of Exodus and I knew the founders, the investors and the board members. Anyway, I found it intriguing that their business could be extended to other parts of the world, not for hosting or for managed services but for remote infrastructure management. What that is, is that remotely on a 24-by-seven basis, we can offer management and monitoring of various IT assets that run a data center, whether it is a commercial or enterprise data center. So anything from networks to servers to OS to applications, we can collectively monitor that and provide the right set of alerts and reports to the IT operations team so they can go and do high-value stuff and provide the right SLAs to their customers.

WHIR TV: How big of an issue is this idea of infrastructure management? Is it something that you've found is in particular demand?

SG: If you look at the present, there is a four percent unemployment rate in the US and in the high-tech space. What that means is that it's very difficult to hire people that provide that level of expertise you need to run streamlined operations and management. And each of these service providers are looking to offer more and more managed services because that gives them a high-margin revenue. For them, to be able to accomplish that, they have to be able to hire a lot of these highly trained, highly skilled people and to be able to do that and to scale their business, it's just very challenging. That's where we see this opportunity where we can supplement the IT operations of such providers and such enterprises, where they can outsource their level 1, level 2 and level 3 support to us and provide the SLA that they're promising to their end-customer.

WHIR TV: What kind of solutions do you actually offer to these service providers?

SG: Just to give you an example, we have a global VPN provider that runs in 40 different countries and we have a dedicated NOC, where we add a virtual NOC to their NOC and have 40 dedicated reps focused on the provisioning, monitoring and management of their solutions. Then we have a data center operator in Texas where we're able to put together a 20 people team for them and we manage all their server infrastructure. So, a lot of these service providers are looking for a combination of offerings. It can be time slicing where they can do it during the day in their location and we do it during the night in India. Or they're looking to do it from a price-point perspective where they want to see it per device, for example. And they also want to do it based on stack, where they want to deal with the servers and we do the applications and the OS. So there are a number of different combinations that we can work with the service provider to offer these services. Because we are a services company, we like to work with each service provider customer to come up with a customized solution that targets their SLA and the customer satisfaction methods that they want to provide.

WHIR TV: So, what were your goals with HostingCon and what are some strategies you've used to fulfill these goals?

SG: The audience here is a key vertical for our business where the service providers are not only customers to us but also channel partners. A lot of these service providers are offering managed services to the end-customer, which we can private-label with them behind the scenes and enable them to provide.

Also, I've been in this industry for almost 10 years now and I know the dynamics and the players in the industry and one of my key strategies is to do the best that you know, and some people may go against that, but I believe in my relationships so this is the first vertical that we're targeting. We've also launched an office in southern California and we're planning on expanding to other areas across the US to not only cover the geography but also the verticals of the industry. Slowly we'll also expand to Europe and Asia to provide these services.

WHIR TV: What's your overall vision for NetMagic Solutions?

SG: Our vision is that we want to marry our data center management expertise and offer that worldwide to really dissipate our knowledge and provide the value to the end customer and in the process, of course, make a lot of money.

TAGS: HostingCon, "NetMagic Solutions"