Infotech Lead America: SingleHop, which has three data centers in the U.S. and caters to clients in 114 countries, is planning expansion.
SingleHop’s new Amsterdam Data Center, scheduled to open this month, is a 2000 server facility that will cater to value-added resellers, hoisting providers and SMBs around the world. This latest addition expands the company’s server capacity by 20 percent.
In an interview with InfotechLead, SingleHop CMO Dan Ushman discussed the company’s outlook about virtualization, SingleHop’s expansion plans, future offerings and India as a market. Dan revealed that India is an emerging market and ranks 2 in terms of visits to the company’s website.
What are your expansion plans?
With our new Amsterdam data center presence we have expanded into the European, North Africa, and Middle Eastern markets. This is an excellent start; however we are looking to create a truly global experience for our customers. To this end we have built a data center playbook for rapidly deploying an entire data center rollout in a very efficient and meticulous manner. In short, once we find a location that provides the highest benefits to our current and future customers we can recreate our entire data center presence in weeks not months.
That being said, we are looking at a few locations that will service Asia, perhaps Latin America, but at the moment we have nothing concrete. Our Amsterdam launch and related promotions have been taking a lot of time.
What are your strategies to gain market share?
When it comes to cloud and dedicated servers, customers have quite a few providers to choose from. What sets SingleHop apart is our passion for automation and transparency. From its inception, SingleHop was built to provide a fully automated experience from a single control panel. This experience we call LEAP3 puts a customer’s entire account from provisioning and management to billing and support at their fingertips. For resellers, the entire control panel can be completely white labeled.
When it comes to support there are a variety of companies that offer high-grade service like we do. It’s common knowledge that in our space, it is a must to arm your customers with high-quality service and technical support. However, one related area where SingleHop differs is that we back up our service promises with transparency so that we can hold ourselves accountable in real-time to all of our customers. We specifically created a service-level agreement that was pro-customer. We call it our customer Bill of Rights and it, very clearly, explains what we provide, how long it will take, and what happens if we mess up.
Do you have any plans for the market in India?
Currently, 40 percent of our site’s traffic comes from countries outside of the US. Within that group, India ranks 2nd as far as visits to our website. We already service a lot of great customers from India and we want to expand that customer base. According to research by Zinnov last year, the Indian market for cloud services will reach $685 million by 2014. That is huge. India is in a prime position as an emerging market and we want to support that growth anyway we can.
What are the trends in Virtualization market?
Virtualization has proven its business worth time and time again as far as creating consistent efficiencies within the data center. Higher resource utilization rates are great for anyone’s bottom line. I envision that it will grow and become adopted as a data center standard. I believe, however, that virtualization will never be a household recognizable term and in fact I imagine the word virtualization, as a separate entity will die out. Instead, virtualization will be absorbed as a very basic operation in future waves of computing.
What are the key growth drivers in India?
Key growth drivers in India are online security and mobile consumption. Mobile consumption is a must in that it will help remove one of the larger obstacles to India’s online growth and that is Internet bandwidth. As mobile consumption grows (and it is growing rapidly), Internet broadband penetration will grow and as a result will help fuel more opportunities for growth across an incredible amount of markets.
Network security is already a huge growth market in India. If SMBs and enterprises want to move their in-house data centers to a hosted infrastructure provider, the provider has to prove that they can provide the same if not a more secure environment.
What are the new products in the pipeline?
We released a lot of products in the last few months from public and private cloud to hosted apps. Right now we are going to fine-tune our services and maybe offer some prepackaged data center configurations to make our customer’s lives easier.
Sangeeta Sudhakaran
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