Lightstorm is a carrier-neutral telecom infrastructure platform focusing on digital native network solutions like Polarin and Smartnet. In an exclusive conversation with CXO News and APAC News Network, Lalit Chowdhary, Chief Technology and Innovation Officer, Lightstorm, explains their unique differentiations over traditional network platforms.
What is the story behind the genesis of Lightstorm?
Lightstorm was founded just before the pandemic.As enterprises cloud adoption started to become prevalent, the demand for reliable, flexible and scalable networking solutions started growing. Traditional networking infrastructure was struggling to handle the demand of cloud which thefounders of Lightstormidentified and thus Lightstorm was born with backing from a US based PE firm.
Our founding team, with decades of experience in IT, telecom, networking, cloud, and having led companies like Microsoft, Cisco, Juniper, etc., started Lightstorm with a vision to provide flexible, scalable, and high-performance network solution in the Asia-Pacific region where a digital revolution was underway.We built our network and software stackfrom the ground up, without any legacy ecosystems, and within just four years, we have carved out a unique category in the market, successfully competing against major players in enterprise cloud and data center connectivity.
What solutions and services in Lightstorm’s portfolio are available in the Indian market?
Our product portfolio includes Polarin and Smartnet. These solutions are designed to provide scalable, reliable, and low-latency connectivity, tailored specifically for the needs of hyperscalersand modern enterprises.
Polarin is our flagship Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) platform, offering network solutions through aself-service portal through which connectivity can be provisioned in a matter of minutes. Polarin’s Single-Pane-of-Glass (SPOG) provides an intuitive interfacethat allows businesses to manage their network resources efficiently. With its cloud-centric and elastic experience, Polarin stands out as one of the few true full-stack NaaS solutions on both the packet and optical layers of the network.
Lightstorm’s Smartnet product family provides bespoke and hyperscale connectivity solutions across datacenters, cable landing stations and clouds. It offers a unique and innovative approach to network connectivity, specifically tailored for hyperscalers, OTTs, cloud-native companies, and large enterprises.
How does Lightstorm’s NaaS platform Polarin provide enterprises with agile and scalable networking interconnection capabilities in multi-cloud environments?
Enterprises are increasingly embracing hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud ecosystems to drive innovation and accelerate the time to market. Interconnecting these various cloud environments is critical for businesses for the seamless exchange of data; and this necessitates astrong flexible and scalable network connectivity. Through our Polarin platform, enterprises can quickly and securely interconnectmultiple data centers and clouds as one seamless fabric by provisioning network resources with just click of a button through our intuitive web portal.
Additionally, Polarin DCI Wave is transforming the way enterprise customers acquire and manage layer 1 (physical / optical layer) connectivity from a long-drawn and cumbersome process to one that’s as simple and on-demand. By utilizing robotic automation and software orchestration, layer 1 connectivity; for the first time in the world, can be self-provisioned in under 10 minutes across more than 60 of the top data centers in India. This optical layer NaaS will soon be available across our international data center locations too!
What are the dynamics behind Polarin’s network-as-a-service model for enterprises? What is the revenue model underlying this service?
Polarin is designed to meet the network connectivity pain points and simplify the management of the network, allowing enterprises to focus on their core activities without worrying about network infrastructure. Key dynamics of Polarin include:
On-demand provisioning: Users can provision the network on-demand, with just a few clicks, reducing the operational burden on their IT teams
Scalability: Bandwidth rangingfrom 10Mbps to 100Gbps can be scaled up or down granularly according to business needs of enterprises
High visibility: Customers can have a unified, real-time view of their network’s performance and operations through a centralized dashboard
Pay-as-you-go: Polarin offers enterprises with flexible payment terms which range from annual to monthly to even pay-as-you-go options which ensures that customers have maximum operational ease and no bill-shocks.
Cost-effective cloud connectivity: Polarin’s cloud connect solution enables enterprises to save up to 40% in cloud egress costs across all major cloud providers.
The rigidity of conventional networks is a major challenge today. How can Lightstorm help enterprises mitigate these challenges?
Traditional networks pose a significant challenge in today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, where agility and adaptability are essential; it often lacks the flexibility needed to respond to changing market conditions, making it difficult for businesses to stay competitive.
Lightstorm’s Network as a Service (NaaS) solution, offered through Polarin, directly addresses these challenges by providing agile, scalable, and flexible connectivity. By breaking away from captive connectivity models, Polarin ensures that network resources are optimized for enterprises and turned up and down as they require. This approach enables organizations to stay ahead of market demands without the constraints of rigid network.
Which verticals are witnessing the most traction for Lightstorm’s solutions in India, and what are their specific use cases?
We are seeing strong demand for our solutions across verticals such as BFSI, retail, media and entertainment, and e-commerce. The BFSI sector, a bell-weather sector in digital transformation, is turning to Polarin for its low latency, high bandwidth, 100% uptime, along with security offered by an entirely private network
For media, retail and e-commerce, where workloads can fluctuate significantly during peak periods, our NaaS (Network as a Service) solutions offer the flexibility to scale resources based on real-time demand. For example, during festive sales, an e-commerce platform managed massive traffic spikes with ease. With Polarin, they could easily scale their bandwidth by simply going online, and instantly increasing their network capacity.
Similarly, large retailers with multiple locations across different geographies can establish secure, high-speed connections in just a few minutes, ensuring seamless operations without the complexity of traditional network setups.
What are Lightstorm’s unique differentiators over competitors?
Not all Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) solutions in the market can be classified as true NaaS. Lightstorm’s NaaS offering is distinctly positioned in the market by making the network resources fungible, just like the cloud. Our model enables businesses to quickly provision and manage network resources as and when the need arises.
The on-demand pay-as -you-go model helps these enterprises to mitigate over provisioning and reduces unnecessary spending on network resources. Through its dashboard, network teams can have a centralised view of the real-time network performance and essential metrics which enables them to monitor and manage the network environment, facilitating faster decision-making and troubleshooting.
How can Lightstorm help enterprises create a reliable core network and optimize it?
Lightstorm delivers industry-leading SLAs and ensures that the network of enterprises can keep pace with their growing business demands without compromising on performance.Businesses can optimize their network by leveraging below key features of Polarin platform.
High degree of visibility: With a fully functional dashboard, enterprises can gain comprehensive real-time visibility on key network metrics and performance that allow network teams to identify issues and opportunities, empowering informed decisions, faster troubleshooting, and optimising the cost.
On-demand scalability: Polarin effortlessly scales bandwidth-on-demand to adapt to changing business needs. Businesses can scale whenever they deem fit; its point-click-consume model eliminates the underutilisation of resources and reduces cost. With bandwidths ranging from 10 Mbps to 100 Gbps, Polarin offers businesses the option to scale granularly depending on business needs.
Pay-as-you-go model: With Polarin’s pay-as-you-go pricing, enterprises can optimize costs by only paying for the network services they actually use, eliminating unnecessary overhead.
How can Lightstorm reduce congestion in India’s network infrastructure, lower bandwidth costs, and ensure 100% uptime?
Lightstorm’s network architecture prioritizes linear and highly resilient fiber routes which significantly reduces latency and ensures industry leading SLAs. This enables Lightstorm to deliver 100% uptime on it’s metro and long-distance routes across the country.
Additionally, by deploying C+L band network equipment from industry leading OEMs, Lightstorm has doubled the network capacity per each fiber cable, which in turn increases efficiency and reduces overall bandwidth costs. This approach of a linear architecture and industry leading equipment also ensures that our emissions are among the lowest in the industry.
What are the key pillars of Lightstorm’s go-to-market strategy in India, and what initiatives have been undertaken as part of this strategy?
Lightstorm believes that network resources, like the cloud, like ride hailing applications, like quick-commerce; can be operated through an intuitive and easy platform. By abstracting the network resources to the platform layer, Lightstorm is democratising access to connectivity resources and helping enterprises optimize their digital infrastructure in this rapidly evolving era.
The advent of technologies like artificial intelligence are further exasperating the need for enterprises to make their workload management more efficient so that their network remains an innovation engine and not a cost center.
Can you elaborate on your partnerships with companies like Nokia, Iron Mountain, DE-CIX, or Web Werks?
We have strategic partnerships with leading companies in India and other regions. As we continue to expand our network routesin more cities,our technology partnership with Nokia helps us to cater to our customers’ increasing demand and fuels our Digital India vision.
Our collaborationwith data center, cloud and internet exchange providers like Iron Mountain, DE-CIX, and Web Werksaims to empower Indian enterprises and ISPs with the freedom to utilise the digital infrastructure they require, in the regions of their interest.
What will be Lightstorm’s key focus areas over the next 12–18 months?
From our point of view, backhaul networks play a crucial role in the seamless delivery of AI experiences, especially as AI adoption becomes more mainstream. These networks act as the backbone, connecting compute and storage resources to the users efficiently. As AI applications become more data-intensive, the demand for robust and scalable backhaul networks increases. They ensure that large volumes of data generated at the edge of the network are transmitted efficiently to central servers with minimal delay.
This is essential for maintaining the high-speed, low-latency connectivity required for real-time AI processing and decision-making. In essence, without a strong and scalable backhaul network, the potential of AI to transform industries and enhance user experiences would be significantly hindered.
Factoring in this new wave of network demand, Lightstorm will continue it’s physical growth in terrestrial and subsea fiber across India and the Asia Pacific region. This engineering challenge implies that Lightstorm will continue to deploy capital in robust and secure digital infrastructure that this part of the world needs to be interconnected in a seamless manner.
On the digital front, Lightstorm will continue to innovate on Polarin to extend the reach of fungible connectivity that can enable the digital transformation of enterprises in today’s AI era.
Rajneesh De, APAC News Network
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