TelecomLive April 2024

IDC operations by NxtGen www.telecomlive.com 20 TelecomLIVE April 2024 enterprise customers, BSNL and DCSP would jointly go to market for capturing business. DCSP and BSNL shall understand the customer requirements and gave the proposal to end customers for offering services from IDCs on a customized business and revenue models. Based on the customer requirement DCSP shall procure and commission the hardware and software in the IDC in the agreed time frame. Data center space shall also be offered to end customers for collocation and hosting services. Pricing 3.11. End customer prices shall be fixed up on case to case basis depending on the market condi- tions. A governing body with representations from BSNL and partner DCSP shall be constituted for the purpose of deciding offerings to end customers. 3.12. Data center shall have network connectivity at least from BSNL mandatorily. Revenues on account of bandwidth charges to end customer shall be retained completely by BSNL. Bidder shall quote the revenue share offer to BSNL excluding this component i.e. Bandwidth earnings shall be out of revenue share and bidder 13.3. H2 shall be considered for awarding the work of IDC Project 4, 5 at theH1 rates (see table). (Note: EoI had asked to submit year wise Revenue share quote for Co-location services, and Hosting services that includes Managed services). 12.8.2. Revenue share figure (in Re terms) so arrived for different years shall be calculated to the net present value (NPV), by discount- ing (on annual basis) at a rate of 12%per annum, for the purpose of evaluation. 6.2. The approved Revenue share shall remain fixed during a particular year of contract and shall not be subjected to variation. Rollout 16.1. The successful firm shall establish the Internet Data Centers of the particular project and make them ready to use within 6 months of handing over the site by BSNL. 16.2. Data center (IDC) shall be built with TIA 942 standards tier- 3. DCSP shall get the IDCs certi- fied as per standard and from the authorized certifying agencies. After the certification, BSNL will declare IDCenter Ready forUse. 3.10. Once the IDCs is ready to offer IT management services to EligibilityCriteria ii) The bidder company shall have a minimum annual turnover of Rs 50 crores each year during last 2 years (i.e. financial year 2007-08, FY 2008-09). Alterna- tively Bidder company shall have a Networth of Rs 50 crores on March 31, 2009. In case of consortium, turnover/Networth of only lead bidder shall be counted. Lead bidder is being referred as bidder in the EOI document. iii) Bidder shall have relevant experience of setting up and running successfully at least 10,000 (cumulative) square feet of raised floor commercial data center space (excluding utilities) from a maximum of 4 commercial data center (IDCs) locations in India/ worldwide, for at least 12 months on the date of EOI bid submission. This implies that at least one of the data center set up and operated by the bidder must have such space of minimum 2,500 sq ft. Financial BidEvaluation 13.2. The bidder with the highest evaluated NPV figure in Re term (H1) shall be considered for awarding the work of IDC Project 1, 2 and 3. Box-A: Extract of EoI dated October 7, 2009 finalisation, CDSL officers had visited BSNL's IDC site at Fort, Mumba i . However , much in violation of EoI conditions, on January 2, 2020, NxtGen managed to get the purchase order (PO) directly from CDSL worth Rs 3.32 crore (Rs 81.50 lakh for the first year, and Rs 62.68 lakh for each of subsequent years). It appears from the communica- tions between BSNL officers and NxtGen that they were aware of this illegalities but did not raise their voice (see Scan-3 at pg 22-23). In fact they facilitated implementa- tion of CDSL project by arranging cross-connect facility on its fiber network enabling commissioning of service on March 8, 2020. BSNL did this despite having received no PO. While ignoring the illegalities of direct PO in the name of NxtGen, BSNL kept insistingwithNxtGen to issue themthe PO. Despite several reminders and escalation, NxtGen did not issue PO on BSNL. Only on February 26, 2021, after a gap of 390 days, NxtGen issued sub-contract to BSNL that too only for 20 per cent revenue share on the rental of placing 10 racks for CDSL for Rs 4.68 lakh for a year. It works out to be a meagre sum of Rs 3,900 per month per rack. Against a PO of Rs 81.50 lakh for the first year, BSNL's share worked out to be just Rs 4.68 lakh ie 5.74 per cent of the first year PO placed by CDSL on NxtGen. Is thiswhat BSNLwas looking at! BSNL's site is located in themost in 2019, got an order in its favour fromNCLT for default byNxtGen. On July 8, 2016, a separate agreement was made between NxtGen and BSNL for the same project. Out of the six IDC sites, NxtGen is continuing at Mumbai, Ahmedabad and Faridabad, while i t h a s a b a n d o n e d J a i p u r , Ghaziabad, and Ludhiana IDC sites. CDSL - Breakthrough Mumbai based Central Deposi- tory Services (India) Ltd (CDSL) had floated RFP in 2019 for Data Cen t r e Co l o c a t i on Se r v i c e s (Disaster Recovery Setup) for five years. NxtGen participated in this RFP quoting services from BSNL's IDC at Fort, Mumbai. Prior to