At a time when India witnesses rapid growth of datacentre services – including colocation and cloud services – Bharti Airtel’s Nxtra Data gets a substantial investment to the tune of $235 million from Comfort Investments II, an affiliated entity of CAP V Mauritius. Nxtra Data would make use of this investment in expanding its operations in India and beyond.
Of late, demand for cloud services has gone up as more and more enterprises & organizations adopt cloud elements in their information infrastructure. But, the growing appetites of SMEs and start-ups for cloud services have accelerated this market even further. Therefore, a number of cloud service providers –both foreign MNCs and the Indian ones – have intensified their operations in the country. This scenario has led to the setting up of new datacentres with existing ones undergoing further expansion. Also, the gradual prevalence of colocation services – where enterprises & organizations get their own servers, storage, networking paraphernalia deployed – has also expanded the datacentre market in India.
While, most of the cloud service providers also offer colocation services to enterprises & organizations, there are dedicated datacentres being run for offering collocation services. The other reason behind the growth of the datacentre market in India lies in the fact that the Central Government of India strongly pushes for data localization, something the Apex Court of the country has been advocating for.
Airtel’s Nxtra Data
While, the datacentre and cloud service market in India has been dominated by foreign MNCs including AWS and Microsoft, a slew of Indian companies have emerged as major players in this space. Bharti Airtel’s Nxtra Data is one of such datacentre firms that have made its presence felt in the country. The company maintains multiple datacentres in the country, and has got significant number of customers.
But then, Nxtra Data has always striven to expand its operations further. And for that it has longed for suitable investment partners as well. Interestingly, quite recently, Bharti Airtel has approached by Comfort Investments II, an affiliated entity of CAP V Mauritius Limited – an investment fund managed and advised by affiliated entities of The Carlyle Group – for putting in investment of the order of $235 million in Nxtra Data.
Headquartered in New Delhi, Nxtra offers secure data centre services to Indian and global enterprises, hyperscalers, start-ups, SMEs and governments. Nxtra’s nation-wide portfolio of 10 large data centres and more than 120 edge data centres provides customers with co-location services, cloud infrastructure, managed hosting, data backup, disaster recovery, and remote infrastructure management.
Last year, the Company commissioned a state-of-the-art datacentre in Pune and is building more across Chennai, Mumbai and Kolkata. Nxtra will use the proceeds from this transaction to continue scaling up its infrastructure and offerings across the country. “At Airtel, we’ve built a robust datacentre portfolio that is future ready and scalable. For us, the security and data privacy requirements of our customers are our top priorities, which we’ve established as a key differentiator for our data centre offerings. Rapid digitization has opened up a massive growth opportunity for datacentres in India and we plan to accelerate our investments to become a major player in this segment. We’re delighted to have Carlyle as a strategic partner in this exciting journey, particularly given their experience in this industry, and look forward to working with them”, said Gopal Vittal, MD & CEO (India & South-Asia), Bharti Airtel.
Neeraj Bharadwaj, Managing Director of the Carlyle Asia Partners advisory team, viewed, “India is set to become one of the largest markets in the world for digital services. Airtel, with its proven track record of solid execution and customer focus, is well positioned to leverage the potential growth of datacentres in India. We look forward to collaborating with Airtel to unlock the full potential of Nxtra.”
Greg Zeluck, Co-Head, Carlyle Asia Partners advisory team, opined, “Airtel is a high quality partner in India with whom Carlyle executives have built a strong and constructive relationship with over many years. We’re delighted to be collaborating on this together, and believe Airtel’s nation-wide network and strong governance coupled with Carlyle’s datacentre experience and operational capabilities creates a compelling partnership that will help Nxtra to capture the growing demand as data usage continues to surge”.
This investment agreement is quite significant for the country as a whole during the ongoing COVID pandemic – this would surely add confidence to the soggy market sentiment.
Qaisar
