Reliance Infocomm Ltd is seeking solution providers who can take its data center offerings to enterprise customers. The group has four data centers nationally-two in Mumbai and two at Bangalore. 

A relatively unknown facet of the group's business, the Internet data center started its operations in 2001 hosting and managing mission critical applications for enterprise customers. Its clients largely comprise banking institutions and governmental agencies. “We currently have 12 banks whose core banking applications are managed by us,” says Sunil Gupta, Head-Product Management and Business, Operations (IDC), Reliance Infocomm. 

Now, the company wants to add corporate houses to this list, as more and more organizations start delegating its application management to third party players. It offers services like co-location, enterprise shared hosting, managed media and streaming, shared database, managed system and database administration, managed mail and security, managed load balancing services, storage, disaster recovery, monitoring and reporting. 

All these services are offered on pay-per-use as well as a fully outsourced model, and Reliance wants solution providers who will extend these offerings to their existing corporate clients.

Presently, Reliance Infocomm has 475 customers of which 350 are its strategic clients, serviced directly by the company's sales force. Six months ago, it started a channel partner program and even appointed a channel manager who would work towards building the partner network. “We have 60 solution providers working with us now and want to take this number to 200 in the next five months,” said Sunil.

60% of Reliance's data center clients are from the metros and the company wants to get a larger share from the smaller cities. This is where it plans to leverage on its channel network, once it builds it up.

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