NxtGen: India’s cloud powerhouse
When asked what enabled NxtGen to become the largest cloud services and solutions provider in India, A S Rajgopal, CEO, founder, and managing director, points to the pillars that guide the company’s operations: speed, security, simplicity, support, scalability, and sovereignty. He stresses that all are directly applicable to enterprises NxtGen serves in India and in its rapidly growing operations throughout Asia and the Middle East.
“NxtGen supports more than 900 enterprises across India alone, including small, midsized, and large organizations in both the private and public sectors,” says Rajgopal. “The pillars we base our operations on are applicable to all, whether it’s a leading hospital chain providing life-saving care or a government agency serving India’s citizens.”
On this last point, Rajgopal points to NxtGen’s recent success with its support of the Electoral Commission of India – a project that required the company to create the platform used to manage the nation’s election, a mission that required NxtGen to ensure complete sovereignty while simultaneously providing unprecedented speed, scalability, compute power, networking performance and storage capacity.
“The platform we created to manage and facilitate India’s elections needed not only to deliver 100% uptime all of the time, but it had to be completely sovereign,” he says. “As the only true sovereign cloud provider in India, and one with a significant track record of success in the cloud, NxtGen was the obvious choice. But sovereignty of course encompasses far more than where data centers are located – something we believe it is important for the market to understand.”
Although NxtGen operates data centers in Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Faridabad, and Mumbai, Rajgopal stresses that true sovereignty – something absolutely required in elections – requires data sovereignty, operational sovereignty, and technological sovereignty. NxtGen delivers all three.
“NxtGen is completely data sovereign because we are not subject to any foreign jurisdictions,” notes Rajgopal. “Not only do we offer complete data residency within India, but we are answerable solely to Indian jurisdictions. We also own our data centers and cloud, giving us the operational sovereignty to give our customers complete visibility of what is done with their data. And just as importantly, we are the primary cloud service provider, so every responsibility – from provisioning and maintaining the cloud rests with NxtGen – something that enables us to completely satisfy any and all needs for continuity and reliability.”
NxtGen drew on all of these attributes for the Electoral Commission of India. The platform, which performed flawlessly with 100% uptime, is all the more impressive for its extreme scale. The system handled elections for 544 constituencies, some 75o political parties, and 8,500 candidates.
Using the system, more than 1 billion citizens cast their votes on the web, via mobile apps, and at one million voting stations manned by nearly 15 million staff members. At its peak, the high-performance system handled almost 700,000 user sessions per second while simultaneously thwarting numerous cyberattacks, including warnings involving state-actor led attacks.
A singular platform based on VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF)
Notably, the entire NxtGen platform was based on VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF). Its comprehensive functionality is something Rajgopal notes is directly applicable to all organizations, including those in highly regulated industries like financial services and healthcare the company also serves – not just government entities.
“VMware Cloud Foundation is just that,” adds Rajgopal. “It’s a foundation and end-to-end cloud solution that allows us to leave no stone unturned and gives us solutions for every size and type of customer, as well as their unique requirements while reducing maintenance times, accelerating innovation like AI, and elevating security. Our cloud, powered by VMware by Broadcom technologies, enables us to not only provide a fully managed sovereign cloud but also to deliver any private, public, and hybrid cloud option the customer needs. And we can do all of this with a performance-to-cost ratio that beats the very largest hyperscalers while simultaneously providing a full range of services from Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service to Desktop-as-a-Service.”
But Rajgopal is quick to point out that success is not only defined by best-in-class technology. Other, less easily quantifiable qualities are also crucially important.
“Being a Broadcom Pinnacle Partner gives our customers a one-stop-shop for VMware-powered cloud,” he says. “We can offer a variety of deployment model options to choose from, integrated security, infinite scalability, and ironclad, low-latency infrastructure. But just as importantly, our customers gain the convenience only a partner that delivers the skills and experience needed to thrive in a hybrid cloud world delivers, and the peace of mind that is only possible when your workloads are securely running on trusted, proven technology overseen by a partner who is there 24/7/365.”
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