With a leadership position in emerging markets, Tata Communications is a  global provider of cloud and other managed solutions, delivering services to multi-national enterprises, service providers and Indian consumers. They have one of the most advanced and largest submarine cable networks, a Tier-1 IP network and nearly one million square feet of datacenter and collocation space worldwide.

The challenge: quickly enter the cloud market

When Tata Communications set out to build a new Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) called InstaCompute,  they needed a cloud platform that fulfilled their technical requirements and the business objectives. From a technology perspective, they needed a proven and reliable solution that could easily integrate with existing infrastructure technologies and provide their customers with the control and flexibility they demanded. From the business side, they wanted to quickly enter the market with a competitively priced solution. “Our team had an extensive list for choosing a cloud vendor that could quickly take us to market and act as a partner in the process, versus simply buying software,” said Mara McMahon, Director of Product Management, Global Data and Mobility Solutions at Tata Communications.

The solution: Citrix CloudPlatform and industry expertise

During the search for a cloud platform, a variety of different sources mentioned the name Citrix. Tata Communications found that Citrix had an impressive reputation in cloud computing communities and offered a highly scalable and reliable solution. After meeting with Citrix representatives, they understood Citrix was a true cloud platform partner who had the willingness and capability to guide them throughout the InstaCompute deployment. “While we were doing due diligence after narrowing our selection to Citrix, we quickly realized that by choosing Citrix we would get award-winning software and an executive team that brought years of experience and expertise,” explains McMahon.

Because time to market was a key success factor, Tata Communications looked closely at the partnership and support offered by different cloud platform providers. “Tata Communications chose Citrix because of its ability to get the organization to market with a highly scalable and reliable cloud platform that enables us to address the growing demand for global, affordable cloud computing services delivered to any device,” says McMahon.

The benefit: choice, control and cost

Businesses are looking for cloud innovations like InstaCompute to help overcome the IT management bottlenecks and constraints of tight budgets. Citrix CloudPlatform, powered by Apache CloudStack enabled Tata Communications to deliver differentiated and flexible cloud services that can be tailored to the customer’s needs.
On-going management of InstaCompute posed a potential challenge for an organization as a large as Tata Communications. However, CloudPlatform enabled Tata Communications to delegate administration permissions and control access levels for InstaCompute users without increasing costs. “Having management controls in our cloud gave us the freedom and flexibility we needed when handling telecommunication accounts all over the world, ensuring  security and reliability—along with all the speed and agility—that cloud computing has to offer,” explains McMahon.

With so many potential users for the InstaCompute cloud, cost was obviously a huge factor. The open source approach of CloudPlatform offered Tata Communications a lower cost option without diminishing features or performance. “Additionally, India has a highly price-sensitive market and Citrix was able to not only hit the price point required, but helped us go from production to market in less than nine months,” says McMahon. “We look forward to continuing our relationship with Citrix and its CloudPlatform technology.”