Cloud role in business management is as relevant for an SME as for a large organization, said Amit Singh, Managing Director for Zenlayer India, in an exclusive interview with SME Times.

1. Please tell our readers about Zenlayer India and its entrepreneurial journey.

Zenlayer offers on-demand edge cloud services in over 185 PoPs around the globe. Businesses benefit from Zenlayer’s global edge cloud platform to instantly improve the digital experiences for their users. Zenlayer provides fast and optimum connectivity on demand.

Founded in 2014, with offices in Los Angles and Shanghai, Zenlayer has quickly expanded its reach worldwide over the years delivering its expertise in swiftly emerging markets like China, South America, and now even India. It has offices in globally spread-out locations like Los Angeles, San Jose, Singapore, Beijing, Hangzhou, Hong Kong, Nantong, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Mumbai. The office in Mumbai is the newly opened one in 2020 and is also Zenlayer’s India headquarters. Zenlayer is looking forward to expanding its customer base in India, and having chosen Mumbai as India’s regional head-quarters has been an important business growth strategy for us. The city being India’s biggest hub for companies in telecom, media, and IT/ ITeS is the perfect location choice to support our business expansion plans.

2. What are the products/services you provide and how it helps enterprises?

Zenlayer provides a range of on-demand edge cloud services and on-demand connectivity worldwide. The services and products that we provide fall under seven categories - Bare metal cloud, Content delivery network, Cloud WAN, Cloud networking, Edge data center services, IP transit, Edge Acceleration Services.

We help enhance the speed at which data can be accessed over the internet and ensure high connectivity and security at all times. With rising content on the web and fast-growing data consumption, there is a need for better connectivity and content delivery. With Zenlayer, it is all covered. So, the enterprises can stay assured that their users will have an overwhelming user experience.

3. How can these solutions help MSMEs?

During the pandemic with precautionary lockdown restrictions, industries like online gaming, e-commerce, and online learning have witnessed a sharp increase in web traffic. To maintain social distancing, people engaged with friends and family over online games and shopped online for all their needs. And children used apps for online education videos and other fun activities. Subsequently, many small start-ups have come up with more apps for gaming, learning, and online delivery services of vegetables, fruits, groceries, etc. Thus a remarkable steep in-demand for fast, reliable, and secure online interactions has been observed. And the upcoming companies are now seeking services to improve the digital experiences for their users.

4. What is the Cloud adoption rate among Indian MSMEs?

While it is challenging for me to quote a percent of the adoption rate amongst MSME, as things have been both volatile & dynamic in the last year, cloud’s role in business management is as relevant for an SME as for a large organization. By joining the cloud adoption bandwagon, SMEs have made their operations more agile and services accessible to their partners and customers. For these companies, the three main 'as-a-service' cloud service offerings around Infrastructure, Platform, and Software, makes operations extremely easy as all they need is internet access.

5. Please share future plans of Zenlayer India with our readers.

In the last few years, India has experienced a large increase in data consumption. And the pandemic has added to it. With the growing popularity of OTT platforms for entertainment, sports, news, and with almost every family member owning a smartphone, an enormous amount of data is delivered and consumed over the internet. I believe that India will soon rise to be one of the top digital markets in the world. And with 5G availability, data consumption and the demand for faster content delivery are expected to swell up even more. With such a rising market in India, Zenlayer hopes to expand its business further and have a satisfying customer base.