Iron Mountain Eyeing India as its next Potential Market

The newly appointed Managing Director of Iron Mountain India, Hitesh Gupta opens up with VARINDIA to discuss the strategic plans and investments that his company is ramping up in India and how the information management market is changing vis-a-vis the global scenario -

How is Iron Mountain positioned currently in the India market? What are its focus areas?

Iron Mountain Incorporated is a global business dedicated to storing, protecting and managing information and assets. As a global leader in the industry, Iron Mountain provides record and storage management services to almost 94% of the Fortune 1000 companies globally. Organizations across the globe trust us to store and protect their information and other valuable assets.

Iron Mountain has been present in India since 2006 and became a fully owned subsidiary in November 2013. One of the fastest growing economies in the world, India is a key market for Iron Mountain. Although we are relatively new and are still in the early phase of realising our full potential here, we have successfully doubled the size of our business over the last year. Today, we serve over a thousand customers and manage over 10 million cubic feet of stored documents. To give you a sense of size, that’s equivalent to filling more than 110 Olympic-size swimming pools with stored documents. We have over 60 facilities in 13 cities across the country. We partnered with Samara Capital, our private equity partners, in 2014 and have since acquired businesses like NAX, Safehouse & ITCL. These acquisitions expand our footprint in terms of new customers and new territories. We have acquisition plans to help us extend our cover to 90% of the country over the next 18 months.

Today, we have the infrastructure in place toprovide our services to nearly all the country’s financial centres.

The core services we provide are records and data, storage and management and secure destruction. Demand for these services is driven by an increasing trend in outsourcing. We estimate that organisations in India outsource somewhere between 10% - 15% of the records they produce, whereas the figure is as high as 50% in developed markets. While the trend towards outsourcing information storage and management is only just underway in this country, we believe it is a trend that will grow as businesses look to lower their storage costs, comply with regulatory requirements across multiple locations, make better use of their information and mitigate the potential risks. We have a new leadership team in place with the knowledge and experience to make the most of the growing demand and deliver excellence to the Indian market.

With you coming on board, what kind of growth strategies are you looking at to steer forward the company?

The most pressing need is change management. My experience in leading change, integrating newly acquired companies and implementing global best practice across the board will ensure that our customers receive the same experience wherever they are located.

Iron Mountain also plans strategic investments to introduce key services to the Indian market in areas such as document management systems (DMS), digitization and secure shredding. The pace at which the Indian market is maturing is driving demand for these services. New investment will also focus on our people, facilities and processes.

Employing the right people is key, as they will make sure our existing customers are provided with a high-quality service that meets their needs. They will also deliver the same high quality service consistently to our new customers in India, irrespective of their location. One of my key responsibilities is to guide the new leadership team to create a completely integrated organisation, delivering consistent and streamlined services.

How is the Information Management market shaping up and how is Iron Mountain leveraging the opportunity to take it to the next level?

Most organisations in India, whether operating in the public or private sector, are just beginning to understand the whole outsourcing of records management. With the new government initiatives, PSUs present one of the greatest opportunities for an organisation like ours. Other sectors where I see great potential are Banking, Telecom and the Mid-Market.

Today, Iron Mountain has a global real estate network of more than 80 million square feet across more than 1,350 facilities in 45 countries dedicated to the storage needs of more than 220,000 customers. We help our customers keep their information secure, know what they have, know where it is and help them access it when they need it.

As a global leader in storage and information management, Iron Mountain engages constantly with its customers to improve the services we provide. As and when needed, we also provide Business Process Management to Telecom organisations in India. We aim to bring the best practices implemented across the world and offer the most suitable storage solutions for the records our customers consider most important. We also have enterprise-wide DMS solutions to manage information across the entire life cycle. Our main differentiators are our global experience and presence, the high standards of compliance, safety and security that we offer and our end-to-end approach toinformation management.

How is the market scenario elsewhere globally?

Ad-hoc information management policy is redundant. Today, more and more corporates as well as federal, banking and healthcare organisations are moving towards storage and information management outsourcing services as large volumesof data move across organisations, makinginformation storage a nightmare for CIOs and IT managers. 

Iron Mountain completed the acquisition of Recall in mid-2016 tostrengthen its global footprint, open up new markets and enhance service delivery. This consolidates our position as the leader in the delivery of information storage and managements solutions globally.

Currently, we have a renewed focus on partnering with large public sector organisations as well as, BFSI and telecom. We are also in the process of consolidatingour acquired businesses and partnerships (recent acquisitions like NAX, Safehouse, Samara and ITCL) in the Indian market, which will give us expanded footprints in terms of customers and territories.

Which are the main growth verticals for Iron Mountain? How is the SME sector responding to it?

Most of our business is coming from our existing customer base with around 20% resulting from new sales. Almost sixty percent of our private segment business comes from BSFI as these businesses generate high volumes of paper documents and require the high levels of security we can provide. The manufacturing segment contributes 10-15% of our business and we cater to healthcare, energy, entertainment, FMCG too. In the public sector (central and state governments) we cater to insurance, central government department and tax authorities, though not extensively. The major demand is from large corporate but medium-sized companies which have end-to-end document life-cycle requirementssuch aswork-flow policy, scanning and storage solutions are important for us. At present, around 30% of customers come from small scale enterprises in India.

What are your plans with regards to market expansion, new customer acquisition and partnerships with respect to India?

We deliver the best off-site storage and information management services to our current customer base. The quality of service drives demand for more within the existing base. Expansion will come from our growing geographic coverage as we aim to be everywhere that our customers want us to be. In the longer term we will look to bring services that have proved effective in other global markets to our customers here.Government initiatives such as ‘Digital India’ create opportunities for Iron Mountain in India.The government’s ambition to deliver digital services is creating strong opportunities for Iron Mountain to serve government departments and public sector undertakings.

Iron Mountain sees immense growth potential for the Indian market. We grew 25% CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) in the last four years and expect a similar growth of around 20% over the next few years. India is one of the critical markets for Iron Mountain and we have plans for further acquisitions to expand our business. We are looking toinvestup to 30 million dollarsover the next two to three years. Over the same time we expect to triple thestorage space we provide to customers.