 Hi, everyone, and welcome to JSA TV, ITW Extra, powered by JSA, coming to you live today from the floor of ITW in National Harbor. I am excited to introduce you to Sunil Gupta, co-founder and CEO of Yoda Data Services. Thanks for joining us. Thank you. Malpello. Yeah, it's great we were just saying it's been a little while since we've chatted and we're excited to hear more about some of the developments with Yoda, but for some of our viewers who may have missed you the first time or two we chatted with you, tell us a little bit about your company. Sure. Yoda is a managed data center hosting cloud and IT services provider from India. We are headquarters in Mumbai and we have campuses in Navi Mumbai, we have a campus in Noida which is near Delhi, and we have upcoming campuses in other cities in India like Chennai, like Calcutta, like Pune, like Gujarat, like in proper Mumbai city, and also a campus coming up in Dhaka in Bangladesh. Wow, so I mean it's just hearing all of these different places that you currently exist and are expanding. I mean the the market I know in India is just taking off. So can you tell us a little bit about what's going on in the data center industry in India? I tell you the whole industry in India started somewhere in late 90s or early 2000, that is when India you know internet came in our lives and the industry was growing slowly because most of the customers were enterprise customers who were migrating from their captive data centers to third party data centers for obvious reasons. Somewhere around 2009-10 cloud started coming in our lives, people started getting familiar with cloud, we also started getting 4G broadband in India, and that is something which started a start-up way with India, we started getting a lot of e-commerce companies and we started getting content companies in India, and I think that was the time when cloud, you know the CSP cloud service operators decided Amazon, Azure, Google that if they want to serve this big market called India, they can no more serve it from APEC node or a Europe node, they will have to come and set up their nodes in India and only then they can serve Indian better and that's what happened, so this is a big change over which has happened in the Indian market 2013-14 they started searching out for you know hosting options in India and 2015 when you know Amazon first went live and within within six months later Azure went live and within six months later Google went live and of course you had Chinese operators like Tencent, Alibaba, all that all that came in and by the time you know we delivered capacity to Amazon I knew that you know and to others you know the first one came up with the revised you know they're extra you know requirement of capacity and this is something which the market is going through today every single day from a market of just about 200 megawatt which it was in 2014 today the market already has a built-up capacity of 800 megawatt we've already exceeded some of the very mature markets in terms of their absolute capacity and all the projections based on various tailwinds and based on you know many other factors we see that the Indian market is going to go about 3000 megawatt in the next five years so whether it is the demand side factors in terms of you know the enterprise demand in terms of the hyperskiller demand in terms of the content being pushed because of the 5G introduction in India because of the e-commerce wave the fantastic startup ecosystem because of a lot of use cases of AI, ML and IoT's because of so much of drive from the Indian government which itself is not only pushing the policy narrative for data centers and cloud but also it itself is a big consumer variety all these things are leading to I would say huge crazy growth ecosystem in India and that is where this supply provider the supply ecosystems in terms of not only the existing operators like a entity CFE Controllers who were the existing providers who are scaling up but you have now more than 10 new operators the global operators who have come either they're trying to build up organically by acquiring land or they're trying to acquire the small Indian providers and then trying to grow up so it's all happening at the same time we as Yota also you know I grew up from the same system I was like running Reliance's business for 10 years then I ran entities business in India for 10 years and then because of this growth I somewhere felt that if you really want to capture this big exciting market around India the only way you can do it is when you have resources in your hand you know you know resources and you need skill sets you need to have a combination of both and so the promoter of Yota is a big real estate company in India called Hiranandanis it's their own equity which they're put in and so what it has given to us is that we have access to huge land parcels in the right markets we have in-house capabilities to do all the approvals and permitting and licensing we have you know construction capabilities we do our own MEP design and engineering we do our own project management and then we run our own operations and because I had a 20 years background on handling enterprises besides hyperscalers so instead of just focusing on wholesalers you know the either a built-to-suit or a wholesale co-location we have gone into retail co-location so I serve enterprises as much as I serve hyperscalers and we have expanded right from day one into managed services so I have run my own public cloud I deliver public private clouds I do federated cloud services where I give a solution around hyperscale clouds as well as my own cloud I provide cyber security and you know network services and I provide application services so essentially what I'm to do in nutshell in a competitive market like there's a growing market like this you can see opportunities one is towards hyperscalers to give them bulk capacity scalable capacity through your campuses but the same time you see a vast ecosystem of enterprises who want to consume the things on a as-a-service model so I'm trying to address both the markets right and so specific I mean wow you've given us a great overview on first of all the all of the amazing development that's being that we're witnessing in India and the the growth in general of the market and what's driving that but not only that how you're supporting it through your services at Yoda so you know just to sort of hone in on one of those elements I know that that recently you have a project that Yoda did one yeah in Greater Noida yeah I went live in October can you tell us about that and how that's that's an important thing that you're doing specifically to serve yes yes I started you know your operations in 2020 at the peak of covid with our campus in Navi Mumbai and that campus is live for two and a half years and I've got a lot of enterprise customers besides the mid-rung cloud operators who are running from there and I provide Kolo and managed services there and frankly speaking my my next growth path and the next campus would have been Chennai because that is the next city which is where the international fiber cables land in India but I got an opportunity from a large hyperscale cloud operators who wanted to grow in north of India in Delhi and an option was given to me that Sunil while you're working in Mumbai in other cities but can you expedite your plans for Delhi and if you do that and if everything is okay we possibly can come in as an anchor customer and that is what exactly happened so we right at the peak of covid I can tell you and this is like a fable story I'll be telling to my kids in future that I nobody might have purchased a large land parcel without even physically visiting the land even once because it was a peak of covid and we just got a drone shooting done from a local cameraman and we saw it looked all okay thankfully there was a whole lot of support from the local state government because they wanted a project like ours to come into their state and we bought the land it was a fantastic land you won't believe the way our guys have delivered in the peak of covid despite a lot of lockdowns in 18 months sharp from the time the land was allocated to us to all the governmental approvals to all the feasibilities to getting two power express feeders to getting fiber routes to making one large 30 megawatt building with the supporting utility building a substation a administrative building all this we had done 18 months in early october 2022 we went live with our first building and right now anchor customer is live there they've already occupied almost 60 percent of the capacity and they have got a rofr for the balance capacity I'm also serving enterprises from there so it's true to our philosophy we serve hyperscalers and enterprises so a lot of enterprises have come and delivering cloud and manage service also from there and as we speak my second building is already under construction there because the same anchor customer wants to have more and more and as enterprise ecosystem start getting build up even they will keep on growing and keep on demanding more and more scalability so this campus just to introduce the again I took a campus approach instead of just going for one building so I can build in this campus six data center buildings each building roughly about 30 megawatt so this campus when it's totally fully constructed and live will have about 180 megawatt of load with the with the a mix of wholesale hyperscale customers as well as enterprise customers so as we sit here I mean you mentioned a few times just you know having services and connectivity to to support US organizations and of course hyperscalers yeah you know I think it goes without saying that you're set up to service that the market in India is set up to do that as well just maybe final words on that and and then of course since we're sitting here in the United States if anyone of the organizations that are are here today or this week or beyond if they want to connect with you and find more information how will you do that sure sure so so you can be in touch with me my name is Sunil Gupta my email id is sgupta at your dot com my mobile number is plus 91 double seven three eight one four eight seven eight seven my website is www.yotta.com all the information is available on website we are very very active on linkedin we are available on instagram we're available on facebook we're available on twitter and yes my Mumbai data center is in a special economic zone which essentially means that I can I can handle all the global customers including US customers and you can pay me contract with me in dollars you don't have to pay any custom duties you don't have to pay any GST there's a whole lot of other commercial benefits available and that actually makes me a very large economies of scale provider who can give you a price points which is at least 15 to 20% lesser than the normal markets available because of again the taxation benefits as well as the economies of scale repeating I am not only giving you a whole sale co-location or a bill to suit co-location options I gave retail co-location we have gone through the most stringent parameters of whether it is hyperscalers or the largest US based or global based commercial large banks or other banking services companies I have got certifications not only I'm by the way uptime tier four the only company and possibly rare companies in the world who are running a data center which is uptime designed constructed as well as I also have tcox which is the gold operation certification of uptime for my data centers so we are extremely quality conscious we are providing huge scalability in our campuses we are not only offering wholesale colo and bts but we are also offering a full suite of managed services including cloud and cyber security and application services so for anything you want in India Yota is available I'll be more than happy to be in touch with you fantastic thank you thank you so great to to hear from you and and learn a little bit more about Yota and I know that many of our viewers will be looking to connect and I hope you have a really great and successful week here at ITW thank you so much and thank you viewers for tuning in to this latest episode of JSA TV brought to you live today from the floor of ITW at National Harbor until next time