Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu said Andhra Pradesh was far ahead of other States in harnessing the power of Information Technology (IT) and that it was geared up to make the best use of the fourth industrial revolution driven by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Internet-of-Things (IoT).
Inaugurating Pi Data Centre (PDC), the State’s first such facility, at the A.P. Industrial Infrastructure Corporation’s IT Park here on Friday, Mr. Naidu said he had been associated with IT and IT-Enabled Services for over three decades and played an instrumental role in the growth of Hyderabad (Cyberabad) into a global IT hub.
He said that A.P. had been a pioneer in deploying IT in the implementation of a variety of welfare schemes, and rued the fact that he lost the elections in 2004 due to the perception that he over-emphasised on advanced technologies, which are now helping A.P. in growing at a faster clip with a greater degree of transparency and accountability.
He exuded confidence that the establishment of PDC would encourage more companies in the IT space to enter Amaravati, the upcoming capital city of Andhra Pradesh. He claimed that the real-time governance architecture rolled out by the Government of A.P. (GoAP) facilitated speedy decisions, and corruption could be checked to a large extent.
Mr. Naidu said: “The GoAP took 100 racks in the PDC and would seek more storage and backup space as smartphones and other latest technologies reach the next levels of growth, where there would be a manifold growth in the generation of data and the need to process and analyse it for varied applications.”
PDC Chairman and CEO Kalyan Muppaneni said he was thankful to the GoAP for its support in setting up the data centre with an initial capacity of 500 racks that is scalable to 5,000. He observed that the loss of data would have serious repercussions for companies, which brings data centres like PDC into the picture.
Mr. Kalyan said: “A sum of ₹600 crore is being invested in phases in the PDC at Mangalagiri which is Tier-IV compliant and is the company’s global headquarters”.
Minister of IT and Panchayat Raj Nara Lokesh, Unique Identification Authority of India Chairman J. Satyanarayana, A.P. Principal Secretary (IT) K. Vijayanand, venture capitalists B.V. Jagadeesh and Sudheer Kuppam and Sridhar Vembu (Chairman, Zoho Corporation) were present.
