Cloud Computing: Slow but Steady in India

With the advent of Cloud Computing on the Indian IT firmament, enterprise CIOs have one more buzzword to contend with and another set of vendors promising that their product will cure all ills.

Companies of all sizes are contending with a combination of market trends which are forcing them to seriously reevaluate how they do business. These forces include growing globalization, lower customer loyalty and widening dispersion of today’s workforce.

Cloud Computing has become the preferred mechanisms for organizations to better leverage the power of technology. Rather than contending with the endless hassles and increasing costs historically associated with traditional, on-premise, hardware and software products, today’s cloud computing solutions enable organizations to more quickly and cost-effectively harness technology to achieve their business objectives.

Cloud Computing solutions capitalize on the ubiquity and real-time availability of the web to deliver a new breed of business applications. These solutions also eliminate the infrastructure, installation, maintenance and support costs of the past. Organizations no longer have to acquire additional hardware or hire additional staff to support their business requirements. Instead, the cloud computing provider assumes this responsibility as a part of guaranteeing the availability and performance of its solutions.

Platform Computing has announced the findings of its second annual financial services cloud computing survey. The research reveals that 83 per cent of respondents are making private clouds their first priority in moving to a cloud model. Furthermore, the majority (83 per cent) of respondents plan to increase their investment in grid and high- performance computing (HPC) in the next 12 months as part of their plans to incorporate cloud within the IT infrastructures.

Cloud Computing is gaining momentum in India. It is one of the hottest topics in the IT world currently and has attracted phenomenal attention from customers, vendors, channel partners, analysts, and et al.

India is still in the preliminary phase and it is only when the people are fully aware about the concept and ready to adopt the same is when usage of solutions on cloud computing will actually pick up. However, perhaps the biggest IT opportunity for Cloud computing as available in India is not getting tapped rightly by major players who had promised big investments in this space. “The Indian IT opportunities are still having a huge demand and supply mismatch. A perfect product of cloud computing with scalability, security and SLA driven business service management can make huge business impact. The opportunities in SME, Government and education sector here in India will offer the biggest cloud computing market of the world,” explains Debasish Choudhury who is National Manager of Adva and one of the pioneers in cloud computing technology research. According to Debasish, the opportunity available in India for Cloud Computing is US$5 billion.

In India, the main reason why adoption of cloud services in general is behind market projections is that the enterprises are still wary of adopting cloud-computing-based environments is the fear that that prospect of getting locked in with proprietary platforms that makes it difficult to exit from an inefficient provider.

Cloud computing has witnessed adoption by product and service companies in the banking, finance and healthcare verticals. Other verticals like IT, BPO, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, government and education are also embracing this model.

“The beauty of cloud computing is that it democratizes the applications industry by allowing businesses of all sizes to make innovation their primary focus, not infrastructure,” says Andrew Knott, Vice-President – Marketing, APAC at Salesforce.com.

“Cloud computing is the right model in times like these. The cloud computing model does not have any of the cost, risk or complexity of traditional software. Cloud computing is much less risky – there are no huge upfront capital expenditures in hardware or software and no hidden costs or armies of consultants required to get started,” says Andrew Knott.

“With cloud computing, there are moderate, predictable operating expenses – front-loaded investments in commodity infrastructure and software licences are replaced by pay-per-use fees. There are no maintenance fees that traditional client/server software providers charge their customers annually. And, the best part is that the system is completely scalable and able to grow with you,” says Andrew Knott.

Salesforce.com is arguably one of the most well-known names in the SaaS market, and has made inroads into the Indian market through its partnership with channel partners. Recently, salesforce.com and BMC Software entered into a strategic alliance to deliver BMC’s IT management solutions on the Force.com platform. With Salesforce cloud computing and the Force.com platform, all businesses, regardless of their vertical industry or geographic location, can buy, build and deploy solutions that are right for them.

As a pioneer in cloud computing, salesforce.com spent its first 10 years focussing on delivering a great application, Salesforce CRM. “While we are committed to maintaining our leadership in the CRM space, we see huge potential in the custom application development market as well. Over the last couple of years, we have built out an amazing platform strategy, and introduced Force.com, the platform our own applications are built and delivered on,” says Andrew Knott.

IBM has recently announced plans to deploy an internal cloud computing environment that will make more than a petabyte of information instantly available to employees under a project called Blue Insight. According to the Big Blue, Blue Insight will help more than 200,000 employees around the world make better decisions by providing them with real-time information about customers, suppliers, and other business contacts, whether in their offices, in the field, or on the road.

IBM will market the Blue Insight cloud computing architecture externally under the name IBM Smart Analytics Cloud. The commercial offering will also run on a System z mainframe, and will include business intelligence tools from IBM Cognos 8 BI.

"This new model of cloud computing will provide our employees with a single place to access real business insights, improve standards compliance, and create a repository of best practices throughout the company," said IBM CIO Pat Toole.

HP and Microsoft have announced a three-year agreement to invest $250 million to deliver new solutions. The proposed solutions will be built on a next-generation infrastructure-to-application model; advance cloud computing by speeding application implementation; and eliminate complexities of IT management and automate existing manual processes to lower the overall costs. HP and Microsoft will collaborate on an engineering roadmap for data management machines; converged, prepackaged application solutions; comprehensive virtualization offerings; and integrated management tools.

IBM has signed a five-year deal with UTV Software Communications Ltd. IBM will help UTV transform its business processes and migrate to LotusLive iNotes, Big Blue\\\\'s cloud-enabled email service. Under this agreement, UTV will work with IBM to sharpen its focus within the organization on its core media business. Acting as the change catalyst to UTV, IBM will be implementing various business transformation initiatives over the next few years.

Aptech Ltd. announced the global launch of a program in Coud Computing. The program has been designed by Vijay Mukhi, Aptechs Cloud Evangelist and the pioneer of Indian IT education. The program will be rolled out in 35 countries and in phases, starting with India, Vietnam and Malaysia. Ninad Karpe, CEO & MD of Aptech Limited, said, “Cloud Computing is now a critical aspect of IT and many companies are looking at adopting the cloud services. The trends suggest that it is obligatory for the aspirants and existing IT professionals to understand this change. Our course in Cloud Computing will help to skill as well as re-skill the IT industry both within and outside India.”

Vijay Mukhi commented, "Since there are different cloud models across the globe and lack of standards, we believe that there should be a neutral course that covers all cloud computing technologies. We will provide a homogeneous solution to the aspirants so that they are well versed with the latest technologies that exist. I am sure this course will provide students a power-packed combination which will enhance the employability of the students manifold, opening up a world of opportunities for them in this sphere.”

According to Stephen Dukker, Chairman & CEO, NComputing, Employee’s State Insurance Corporation (ESIC), is building India’s largest private cloud. The project would deploy 31,000 thin clients in 2,200 locations. ESIC, an Indian Government chartered insurance and healthcare organization, delivers Social Security benefits to employed individuals and their families. It provides health insurance and delivers medical care through over 2,200 facilities across India.

The linux machines would run applications hosted at a centralized data center. ESIC and Wipro selected NComputing’s proven virtual desktops for “Project Panchdeep”, the largest e-Governance project in India, to streamline insurance and healthcare services that ESIC provides to employers, employees, and State and Central Government workers.

According to In-Stat, unified communications is migrating to “the cloud”, as vendors begin positioning it as a service rather than a product. Infrastructure providers like Cisco, Broadsoft and Microsoft are now working closely with providers of hosted VoIP services.

“Several flavours of unified communications are emerging from the ‘cloud’,’” says Dave Lemelin, In-Stat Analyst. “There are versions that operate as a hybrid mix of customer-owned equipment with managed/hosted services targeting mid-size businesses, those that act as fully hosted offerings with smaller businesses in mind, and those that are revamped broadband telephony services targeting SOHO users.”

Finally…
There are a number of myths about potential drawbacks of cloud computing. One of the myths related to Cloud Computing is how secure Cloud Computing is. This is a debate that has been raging for long and like other myths would not be an impediment to the growth of Cloud Computing. If companies choose their vendors wisely and strategically implement cloud services, there are no drawbacks. Security, reliability and scalability are all concerns in the cloud model. So, customers need to evaluate who they work with carefully.