DigitalOcean data centre in Bengaluru, making cloud computing simpler for startups, software devs

DigitalOcean, a cloud computing platform, brings its first data centre in Bangalore, India. Headquartered in New York City,  DigitalOcean offers simple on demand cloud computing resources to more than 700,000 registered customers across the globe. Bangalore becomes DigitalOcean’s eighth region globally, following New York, San Francisco, Amsterdam, Singapore, London, Frankfurt, and Toronto. More than 700,000 developers around the world have launched over 14 million cloud servers on Digital Ocean’s platform in just four years.

In a conversation with Tech2, Prabhakar Jayakumar, Country Manager, DigitalOcean said that the Bangalore datacenter will feature DigitalOcean’s latest servers and network architecture aimed at offering a consistent and seamless experience for users everywhere regardless of which region they select. “The datacenter will enable local service delivery to over a billion people in India alone and improve performance for neighbouring users,” he added.

Jayakumar adds that the cloud platform will continue to offer a single pricing plan across all datacentres worldwide, including Bangalore, with SSD cloud servers starting at $5 per month that translates to approximately Rs 335.

The company that calls itself “the startup for startups” aims to further support the startup ecosystem in India. Talking about the Nasscom partnership, Jayakumar adds, “Having been through the process ourselves, we know exactly what scaling companies’ needs are. Through such partnerships, we enable entrepreneurs in India to create companies and chase their dreams, by lowering cloud infrastructure’s barrier of entry. Through this association, we plan to assist startups—on both technical and non-technical aspects—through one-on-one interactions, workshops, boot camps and mentorship programs.”

He further added that the company aims to make things easier for startups and software developers from India, and also around the world, to further help them deploy and scale their applications. “India is home to the fastest growing ecosystem of startups and entrepreneurs, with approximately 4,000 startups launching this past year. With the number of software developers throughout India expected to grow to over 5 million by the year 2018, this region is poised to unleash a tremendous amount of innovation in the next decade. We want to be there to support every startup to grow and succeed,” he explained.

On asking about the competition and how the space is dominated by biggies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google, Jayakumar adds that the focus has been on keeping products simple. Moreover, it seems to have features at par to help customers such an extensive customer support. “The major cloud providers have to focus their energy on large enterprise and legacy companies; we’ve streamlined our platform for next generation companies built in the cloud. We have also focused on building a true community of developers to help foster the industry and support them as they build the products of the future. Our community site provides extensive tutorials and guides for developers learning to work with Linux and developers seeking to create complex setups within their infrastructure. Along with this, we offer 24X7 support to all of our customers free of charge,” he explained.