Intel is betting big on India for the growth of its data centre business, driven by increasing adoption of technologies such as cloud, data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI), a senior company official said.
“India has always been a tremendously important part of our workforce but increasingly it is becoming the market accelerator or the proving grounds for new capabilities… we see a tremendous scope for that continuing to happen for the coming years as India accelerates on digital transformation,” said Rajeeb Hazra, corporate vice president, data centre group and general manager, enterprise and government group, Intel Corporation.
Global revenue from data centre business in the third quarter of 2018 stood at about $6 billion for the technology firm, a growth of 26% year-on-year. While Mr. Hazra did not comment on India-specific numbers, he said that in the first three quarters of 2018 (January-September), India has been on the “fastest side of growth in the overall growth of our business.” He added that India — with so much talent — is an integral part of Intel’s worldwide R&D workforce. “We are a technology company driven by innovation and India is a key part of our innovation pipeline. It is contributing to some of our core businesses.”
Digital transformation
“We also look at India as an increasingly growing market for digital transformation. If you look at the size of the population and the scale of the problems to be solved, and the connectivity that creates more and more data… the opportunities for some of these new advances in data-centric technologies is almost limitless,” Mr. Hazra added.
He said the fundamental drivers needed for growth of businesses are positive in India. “The first thing we see is the growth of public cloud…we think the cloud phenomenon is only going to continue to accelerate in India and we are really well engaged with the cloud service provider ecosystem here.
“Second is growth of AI and data analytics. That is across the board, be it telecom service providers or AI as a service,” he said.
Asked about localisation of data, he said, “It is every country’s sovereign right to decide what is the best data localisation policy.”
