By IANS
Mumbai : FLAG Telecom Group Ltd, a subsidiary of Anil Ambani-owned Reliance Communications Ltd, Friday inked a deal with US-based GlassHouse Technologies to offer digital storage space management services.
The firm said GlassHouse Technologies, an independent IT infrastructure consulting and services firm providing managed IT services directly to enterprise customers, will be expanding their infrastructure operation centre (IOC) to include the FLAG campus in India.
“The IOC will be continually staffed by FLAG employees in a managed service outsourcing relationship and provide significant operating cost reduction,” said FLAG Telecom chief strategy and marketing officer Jarret Appleby.
Speaking to IANS Friday, Appleby said: “What we are looking at is really part of the transformation of FLAG Telecom for the next generation network for global reach with GlassHouse to support global service delivery.”
“Now we have layered our global delivery platform in the specialised management IT services. It’s a different approach from Wipro or Infosys. We are leveraging our infrastructure and have initially specialised with GlassHouse with the global storage market, a $30-billion market.”
“We are going to focus on data protection, archiving, monitoring and management that is about a $8-billion market by 2009,” Appleby said.
“GlassHouse is the leader in the US and European markets'” he added.
“GlassHouse has a storage operational centre in the UK, which they are co-locating here in India'” he said.
Appleby said FLAG picked GlassHouse because they were a vendor-independent service provider and more cost-efficient.
FLAG, Appleby said is looking for about 200 customers globally in the first year, apart from GlassHouse’s about 300 customers today.
FLAG, which owns and operates a undersea cable network, was in the process of investing $1.4 billion to launch four new submarine cable systems in new markets in Africa, Mediterranean, South East Asia and the trans-Pacific regions.
“Once completed, it will make us the largest provider of submarine cable network provider,” Appleby maintained.