Suresh Sambandam, CEO & Founder - Orangescape

Suresh Sambandam,
CEO & Founder,
Orangescape

Cloud computing has an enormous amount of interest in the Indian market. However, the adoption in the Indian market is relatively slow as compared to how cloud is being used in the western market, especially in the US these days. So, the prediction is that 50 million dollars will start coming in through cloud computing in the Indian market alone. While there are orders worth billions of dollars as of now outside India, this is just to give you an idea about the comparison of scale. 

The role of channel partners is going to be very important, because India is still person- to-person economy. There is still a human touch point required to make a sale happen. That is the traditional way in which India has always done business unlike the western economies where people can just transact over the browser. That being the case, I see a tremendous potential for channel partners to leverage cloud and the opportunity definitely exists. What I also feel is that traditionally channel partners have been primarily selling boxes and they have always been trying to sell value-added services, but this has been always elusive primarily for two reasons - like capital barriers and some skills set barriers. Now what cloud computing does is that it eliminates the barriers of skills set as well as the barriers of capital and hence makes it easier for channel partners to provide those value-added services compared to the current model, resulting in tremendous opportunity for channel partners in India.

The benefits are already there. Only the adoption rate is slow. Larger companies have started using cloud. For example, there is a company like India Infoline. They have moved around 20,000 email boxes to Google cloud environment. This kind of bigger adoption is going to happen and we expect to see more such adoptions in the days to come.