Aiming for the Stratosphere

Is cloud an option
or a necessity? Unlike 5 years ago, when cloud computing was a crazy
thing, which Amazon and a few other companies were trying, today it
seems to have become a paradigm computing concept. It enables both
information technology infrastructure and software to be delivered
directly over the internet-as-a-service. Its lower budgetary
commitments even allow smaller companies to put together an IT
project without spending on purchasing legacy server, and storage
systems. By offering costeffective and fundamentally faster
alternative to onsite application developments, cloud computing is
poised to transform the economics of IT in the next few years.

According to the
recent survey done by the Global Industry Analysts (GIA), global
cloud computing services market is projected to reach about $127 bn
by 2017. As stated by the new market research report on cloud
computing services, the US remains the largest regional market
worldwide. Asia Pacific is one of the fastest growing regional
markets for cloud computing services, with revenues from the region
waxing at a CAGR of about 35% over the analysis period. IDC forecasts
Asia Pacific spending on IT cloud services to grow fourfold, reaching
$4.6 bn by 2014. According to Sriram S, CEO, iValue InfoSolutions,
“The adoption of cloud will be a key competitive advantage for our
customers and will be the dominant technology paradigm going forward.
Over 70% of all enterprise apps and ISV products will move to the
cloud in the next 5-10 years. The old way of IT services of managing
legacy deployments will be replaced by this paradigm shift.”

Cloud computing
came as a boon for companies during tough economic and financial
climate, given that the technology can potentially slash IT costs by
over 35%. The bad economy fed the global cloud computing services
market as cash and revenue famished companies prowled for IT
solutions that are cost-effective, require minimum to zero
investments, and low management of computing resources. Technically,
the feature of multi-tenancy, or the ability to scale up or scale
down services on demand, makes fiscal sense in tough economic
climate. And with cloud computing fitting the bill in every respect,
the business case for the technology stands exemplified. In short,
recession became the push factor, which tripped the market into the
mass adoption stage. Given the fact that cloud computing services
help companies scale up or scale down their computing requirements
and resources through public, private and hybrid clouds, the value
proposition offered is overwhelming. Companies that will consume the
most cloud services are expected to be those operating in a
commoditized business environment where constant product
differentiation is a perennial need. Pradeep Rathinam, CEO, Aditi
Technologies says, “More than 50% of future revenues directly or
indirectly will be generated from our cloud services division.” But
unlike Aditi, iValue Infosolutions generates just 5% of the
revenue from cloud business. But, they too believe that it would grow
rapidly. Sriram added, “It will grow very fast once commercial
launch of aggregated cloud offering starts with service providers.”

STRIKING FORCES

With the usage of
cloud solutions increasing every year, if there is one company which
seems to

have impressed the
most is QuantM. The company offers a comprehensive range of cloud
solutions relevant to the needs of various small, medium and large
enterprises. This suite of solutions comprises fixed, data and
mobile services, including managed services, with QuantM series of
cloud offerings. With QuantM cloud, enterprises can have access to
the latest technologies without the high cost of purchasing and
maintaining hardware. Whether it is storage, back up, hardware,
servers or network components, these resources can be provisioned
fast and are highlyscalable suited to the specific needs of
businesses. QuantM business' suite includes backup-as-a-service,
storageas- a-service and computing-as-a-service.

The major focus of
QuantM has been SMB sector. Pawan Khurana, CEO of QuantM Net
Technologies said, “Our primary focus has been the SMB segment.
QuantM is currently collaborating on cloud computing initiatives with
select mix of industry verticals from manufacturing, telecom, ISVs,
universities, internet based enterprises, retail, including global
organizations preferring to outsource/setting up IT infrastructure in
India. In offerings portfolio, infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) has
contributed the most out of all offerings followed by backup-
s-aservice with a total of 12% business revenue share of QuantM.”
QuantM's IaaS is the cornerstone in QuantM cloud services offering
for customers. IaaS provides the flexibility and cost effectiveness
anticipated by the business and delivers the security, resilience and
performance required to host live business systems. The flexibility
and high utilisation it provides, lowers clients' infrastructure
costs, and makes expenditure on additional data centre premises
unnecessary. Khurana added, “Using IaaS to host the business
systems reduces the total amount of required physical server
capacity.” According to Khurana, using IaaS, electricity
consumption will be reduced by 85%, not just from the increased
utilization, but also because IaaS servers and storage systems are
energy efficient and they are installed in QuantM's most efficient
data centers. Khurana said, “For the service and scope of this
program, we expect the carbon footprint to reduce from 500 tons per
year to 15-30 tons per year as each server is decommissioned.”
Also, according to QuantM Net Technologies, 'computing-as-a-service'
will similarly allow enterprises to acquire processing power without
the high cost of purchasing additional servers. Server 'instances'
or virtual machines are hosted in QuantM's ISO-certified data
centers, which customers can load with their choice of OS and
applications. “As enterprises and governments continue to deal with
the cost of operating individual data centers, consolidation has
become a much more important topic. As the consolidation process is
planned, further migration to cloud computing and virtualized
environments has become very attractive-if not critical-to all
organizations,” explained Khurana.

Small companies
require routine data center support, including office automation,
servers, finance applications, and web presence, which found it
difficult to justify installing their own equipment in a private or
public colocation center. In fact, the savvy investors have even
started supporting companies planning to operate out of a
public/private cloud data center. Besides QuantM, there are few more
SPs like Aditi technologies, Allied Digital and iValue InfoSolutions,
which manage to impress industry leaders. Rathinam said, “Aditi
builds products and offers services using Windows Azure, a Microsoft
cloud platform to help businesses understand and develop strategies
for adopting cloud computing to reduce their costs.” Aditi has
built a cloud based system for an auto major that would enable
vehicles connect with social media networks like Twitter, Yelp and
other online services such as apps and music. Through this, a car's
progress on a cross-country trip can be tracked through Twitter. And,
like QuantM's infrastructure-as-a-service, Aditi Technolgies has
the solution called platform-as-aservice, which helps in unlocking
value in 4 critical business scenarios digital marketing, high
traffic sites, online games and mobile/web 2.0. “We are already
doing a lot of work on all 4 of these workloads and cloud gives us a
clear differentiation in solving these old problems cheaper, faster
and better,” said Rathinam.

Aditi Technologies
recently announced the acquisition of Cumulux, the 2010 Microsoft
Cloud Partner of the Year. With this acquisition, the company is
positioned to be a leader in cloud services and will drive the
transformation of applications and workloads to the cloud. “Aditi
is betting its business on the cloud. We believe that the adoption of
cloud will be a key competitive advantage for our customers and we
are committed to help them strategically to leverage Azure. To
accelerate the adoption, we are investing $5 mn in Azure Acceleration
Lab—an Azure based rapid application development offering,” said
Pradeep Rathinam, CEO of Aditi Technologies. Allied Technologies is
another major force, which is recognized for its cutting-edge
solutions. Due to the increasing load and continual growth in
operating costs, many enterprises find building new data centers
expensive and an inefficient use of their valuable capital. Also,
emerging or cyclic businesses have other challenges such as on-demand
scaling. Another critical aspect is the cost of managing fullscale
support of all levels of infrastructure from the hardware through the
operating system (OS) layer. “Our cloud based
infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) has the potential to change the
way IT hardware is purchased, designed and used by providing a lower
cost, scalable, customizable, secure and reliable service based
alternative that meets the ever changing demands of business and
technology environments,” said Nitin Shah, CEO Allied Digital. Its
cloud IaaS practice brings utility computing closer to reality. With
infinite scalability and a pay-as-you-go pricing model, the primary
benefit that cloud IaaS services delivers to both large enterprises
and SMBs.

Allied Digital has
achieved its standard project from a client, which is a leading
middle market private equity firm which makes control investments in
North American based industrial businesses. The client acquired one
of the leading US based recreational vehicle manufacturer which had
filed for bankruptcy. Under bankruptcy, the company sold its assets
to 2 investors and each bought a business division of the company,
forming 2 new companies. Then the challenge was to manage the
centralized IT function for both the new companies without splitting
the IT operations which would be cost prohibitive and disruptive to
the new businesses. Then, Allied Digital took up this challenge and
crafted a strategic transition and takeover plan to transform
client's future to achieve the vision of an advanced IT
infrastructure model for their business. Allied Digital's subject
matter experts worked with client business and technology team to
understand existing business challenges. “During the diligence
phase, we captured in-depth understanding of 'as-is' process and
based on the collected data we proposed 'to-be' process. This
activity helped us to implement client centric solution which were
aligned with the business goals,” said Shah. Wysetek System
Technologies is another solution provider which generates a major
chunk of its revenue by bagging the deployment projects for cloud
computing. The company's performance in this space has been going
very steady, as it provides an end-toend offering around cloud
computing. Besides, it also acts as the consulting partner to the
companies in the mid-market and small business segments. Recently, it
bagged an application virtualization and backup solutions project
worth Rs 1.5 crore for Asian Heart. Cherian Thomas, director, Wysetek
Technologies said, “Virtualization is the essential catalyst for
cloud computing. With the virtualization solution, we would be able
to build on solid platforms and solutions to power the private or
hybrid cloud infrastructure, build and run robust cloud applications
and supply end-user computing as a cloud based service. The result is
not just any cloud, but your cloud, where accelerated IT delivers
accelerated results for your business. Customers typically save
50-70% on overall IT costs by consolidating their resource pools and
delivering highly available machines.” While, Nitin Shah, CEO,
Allied Digital said, “Our capabilities provide the operational
footing for a diverse portfolio of end-to-end business technology
solutions and services including on-site and remote infrastructure
management services, unified communications, networking, integrated
solutions, and cloud solutions.”

'QUANTM' TOPS IT

According to
experts, sectors, which have been using cloud solutions extensively
over the past few months, are financial services, online and gaming.
These are the verticals, which contribute to cloud computing
business. And, even if so many major companies have entered the cloud
business, it is QuantM, which seems to be standing tall among its
competitors.