Exclusive Interview with Sandeep Lodha, Co-Founder of Netweb Technologies

The adoption of Artificial Intelligence in different enterprises has grown due to the pandemic. In 2019, IDC had predicted that spending on AI technologies would increase to $97.9 billion by 2023. Netweb Technologies has been at the forefront of transforming storage and computing with innovative Servers, Workstations, Storage, Cloud, HPC, AI, and Big Data solutions. Netweb's technology-based solutions equip businesses to achieve their businesses goals and ROI. Analytics Insight has engaged in an exclusive interview with Sandeep Lodha, Co-Founder of Netweb Technologies.

1. With what mission and objectives, the company was set up? In short, tell us about your journey since the inception of the company?

We were very young when we started this company but few things were clear in our minds and we stuck to our company's guiding principle. Firstly, was to enjoy what we do if the enjoyment is not there it does not work pursuing that path secondly was to make products and solutions that address a real customer problem that we are proud of being solving. To this date, we might have many well thought additions and calibrations but these two principles mostly guide us in HR, Sales, marketing, or any of the functions that the company performs.

We started with some of the niche networking components providing redundancy for the servers and which was a big problem-solving solution in the market. One thing led to another and we started a lot of other networking products. Slowly we started working in the Server market when a server in India was a glorified PC, to now being the server manufacturers in India, and in the PLI scheme, we do have to make in India servers. Servers are also a great building block for many solutions and products and we have been able to do immense leverage on the same.

2. How is IoT/Big Data/AI/Robotics evolving today in the industry as a whole? What are the most important trends that you see emerging across the globe?

Yes, they are evolving and getting better in terms of technology and usage. With the 5G coming into the picture it will play a pivotal role in all of these. G will be having 20 times faster bandwidth and will cover over 1 million devices every square kilometer, whooping 10 times denser than 4G. This is going to accelerate data 5generation multi-fold. A lot of IoT devices will come to be which will be getting benefitted from the 5G, the huge data generated will need to be stored and processed and these will further evolve Big Data and AI for the processing and all form of cloud solutions from Private, hybrid to the public will be required to provide all the infrastructure.

3. The industry is seeing a rising importance of business and technology enablers like virtualization, convergence, and cloud. How do you see these emerging technologies impact your business sector?

Virtualization is quite established and is a norm in the industry, probably what virtualization used to be a decade and a half before is what Containers are there today. Most of the new software is leveraging microservices and is expanding on the containers. As containers bring more dense and easier updating of the systems it will soon be a norm too. We are working massively on the cloud, Kubernetes, and containers and leverage on with our products, solutions, and services for hosting, managing, and orchestrating Virtual machines and containers. We are also launching our HCI Cloud platform which will redefine the HCI world with a private cloud at ease so that any small to the large organization can leverage the same instantaneously. We also have a Container platform with ready containers for HPC and AI and have been working on organizations' container orchestrations using Kubernetes and multiple Kubernetes. We also do have a Mixed workload architecture where we look into various customers' workloads and make them use the resources more flexibly for multiple needs and converge them.

4. How is your company helping customers deliver relevant business outcomes through the adoption of the company's technology innovations?

Customers have been the center of our existence and also most of the solutions we offer in the form of Products. All these have come from our experiences in providing solutions to our customers or easing the process of delivering these solutions. We enjoy the customers' trust in believing in us and coming to us with some of these requirements and problems to be solved. We have been able to deliver customers solutions that have been unified and flexible enough and end up giving them an efficient solution but also a very cost-effective one with enough room to grow.

5. Could you highlight your company's recent innovations in the AI/ML/Analytics space?

We have been doing a lot of development projects for customers in AI and ML space and maybe we might also come up with some of the ready products out of these projects we have undertaken. But our work on mixed workloads where we have been able to do seamless integration of various kinds of workloads for AI, AM, and HPC (supercomputing), making the multiple uses of the same infrastructure with the flexibility to scale any of these applications.

6. How can organizations leverage HPC   Big Data and AI, thereby enabling them to stay ahead of the curve?

Today HPC is used in most the simulations, for example, reservoir simulation in Oil and Gas is resulting in better yield from the wells, Car crash simulation is saving a lot of resources for an automobile manufacturer, life science and Pharmaceuticals can be some of the other good examples.

Any organization having a huge amount of data generation may be from people or machine data generation will need to analyze them and then further make some models which can help them to predict. AI in images and video has been helping many and a good example can be surveillance and medical imaging. These fields are changing forever with the disruptions brought by AI and ML.

7. Do you also feel that the right kind of talent is a challenge in the industry?

We do have a shortage of the right kind of talent and this is one area we have been trying to tackle. We have now started to look into how we can tap into the different geographies and are also getting the fresher and training them to see if we can maintain that.