PUNE: Mumbai-headquartered data centre operator Web Werks plans to expand operations in India significantly to keep pace with the increase in local demand.
The company, which has three centres in India—one each in Pune and Delhi and its largest of 30,000-sq ft in Mumbai—plans to expand to 200,000 sq ft across the major metros by 2022. The Pune facility functions as a near disaster recovery site.
Web Werks CEO Nikhil Rathi told ET that the company would start by expanding its presence in Delhi and Chennai by 2020 with an investment of close to Rs 400 crore.
“We will be adding 70,000 sq ft and 30,000 sq ft in Delhi and Chennai, respectively. In terms of capacity, we will go from 2mw in Mumbai and 1mw in Pune to 60mw across India over the next few years,” Rathi said. This would include 10mw in Bengaluru, Chennnai and Hyderabad and a 20 mw capacity in Mumbai for a hyperscale set up.
The company will also set up a 2mw facility in Kolkata to serve the eastern part of the country.
Web Werks started out 20 years ago as a web-hosting facility, focused on serving the US and Middle East, before turning to the data centre space in India. The company still runs data centres at multiple locations in these regions.
Rathi said he expects the expansion from a Mumbai-focused company to a national player will help it grow by 40% within a year. Once the larger set up is in place, the company plans to get into the wholesale colocation and hyperscale data centre space, he said.
The company offers cloud and managed services to clients across enterprise segments, as well as startups and the government. It is one of the ten MEITY-empanelled cloud providers to the government.
The last few months have seen a number of Indian data centre operators announce expansion plans. Government initiatives like Smart City, a push toward digitization across sectors, the rise in internet traffic and local data storage norms are all contributing towards the increased demand for data centres in India.