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As the Indian economy continues to grow, the role of the solution provider is vital because they must anticipate demand and secure the right resources to support present and future customers. At Infibeam Avenues, we rise to the occasion by building a new data center in the heart of the Gujarat International Finance Tec-City (GIFT), a purpose-built smart city designed to act as a global financial hub.

In the digital economy, competitive advantage is built on speed and security. Increasingly, this means that companies need to be physically close to wherever their cloud applications are hosted–especially for financial services companies, where network latency can make or break deals. Equally, forthcoming data protection legislation requires companies to know where and how their sensitive data is being stored. All of this translates into a great opportunity for innovative Indian service providers to win more business.

At Infibeam Avenues, we wanted to provide a more flexible, higher-performance alternative to global public clouds, backed by local expertise and services. We had two main objectives: first, to bring existing hosted services back from the public cloud so that we could offer better support to customers, and second, to build a secure, low-latency blockchain platform.

Infibeam Avenues offers payment solutions using the brand CCAvenue, which is one of India’s most trusted and largest online payment gateways. The company also offers ecommerce solutions to government and corporate entities, allowing them to set up an online store, manage back-end and marketing activities, and integrate with marketplaces. Recently, Infibeam Avenues entered the education space with its new BuildaBazaar for e-learning service offering, which will allow schools, tutors, colleges, professors and companies to access a private cloud to upload multimedia content and maintain libraries[1]. All these services call for nonstop availability, so reliability and security were critical considerations as we looked at the options for creating a private cloud.

Open for business

Part of our goal in offering a hosted blockchain solution was to offer affordable, secure and NextGen compute. IBM LinuxONE was selected because we saw that it offered highly differentiated capabilities in terms of the built-in hardware resiliency[2], and the encryption and security mechanisms at the hardware level[3].

We worked with IBM Services to design and fit out our new data center, migrate existing workloads from the public cloud, and create a scalable and highly secure platform for blockchain offerings built on IBM LinuxONE running Linux.

Blockchain offers exciting possibilities to reduce trade friction and enable selective transparency between suppliers and their customers, as well as significantly reducing costs and paper by providing an immutable, decentralized record of transactions. By choosing to build our blockchain-as-a-service offering on IBM LinuxONE, we can give our customers these benefits backed by exceptional performance, stability and reliability. And from our perspective as the solution provider, the ability to seamlessly scale the volume of blockchain nodes on a single physical server will save us both in footprint and power requirements in the data center.

Full-spectrum solution

At Infibeam Avenues, we see enormous opportunity for blockchain-based services in India, and we are building out services aimed at BFSI, Cross Border remittances and invoicing, supply chain logistics, retail loyalty programs, the oil industry, and beyond. The real benefits come from the network effect: once you build a blockchain network, you can expand membership to a large group of partners to make business relationships faster, smoother and less costly. And we can be a true one-stop-shop for companies seeking blockchain solutions, because we have not only a scalable and stable blockchain platform on LinuxONE, but also the in-house skills and expertise to build the front-end blockchain applications.

With IBM LinuxONE, we are able to host large numbers of virtualized client environments within a single physical footprint, in total isolation from each other, making it the ideal platform for blockchain. We have already been engaged by Primechain, a blockchain independent software vendor, to host their blockchain on our IBM LinuxONE platform[4].

Another potential benefit of LinuxONE is the advantageous pricing for hosting software licensed by the core, such as Oracle Database. We will be able to consolidate client workloads of this type at much lower cost than using equivalent x86 infrastructure, enabling us to offer very competitive pricing.

At Infibeam Avenues, we’re excited to be deploying a first-of-its-kind solution in India. IBM LinuxONE combines the best of Linux and open technology with the best of enterprise computing. With its exceptional agility, security and resiliency, LinuxONE will act as the backbone of our hybrid cloud, enabling us to set new standards in performance and security.

[1] https://www.buildabazaar.ooo/els

[2] ITIC 2019 Global Server Hardware, Server OS Reliability Report

[3] IBM Journal of Research & Development, Volume 62, Paper 2, March/May 2018

[4] http://www.ia.ooo/PR-InfibeamandPrimechainCollaboration.pdf

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