Ricoh India to invest Rs 300 crore to set up data centre in Gujarat

Printing and IT solutions firm Ricoh India today said it will invest Rs 300 crore at its Gandhinagar-based facility to set up a data centre and state-of-the-art business zone.

"This will be our third data centre in India," the company's MD and CEO Manoj Kumar told reporters here.

"We have a facility at Gandhinagar since the last two decades, where we run our toner refilling operations along with a warehouse and a logistics support centre. Now, we are planning to set up our data centre as well as a business zone in that facility with an investment of Rs 300 crore," he said.

The business zone will serve as a one-stop destination for other companies, as they will get support of Ricoh's IT and communication infrastructure to run their operations.

"The time-frame of investment would be around two-three years. Though we already have two data centres in India -- one in Kolkata and another in Delhi -- this will be much larger in capacity.

"This centre will help us in strengthening our presence here through services like cloud computing and data storage," said Kumar.

According to Anil Saini, Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of the company, they are working closely with Gujarat government to strengthen IT infrastructure in the state for Unique Identification number (UID) or Aadhaar project.

"We are working closely with Gujarat Informatics Ltd (GIL), state's nodal agency for IT services. We have recently supplied 1,500 UID kits to the agency to set up permanent Aadhaar enrolment centres at 400 locations across the state," said Saini.