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Of
late, cloud
computing has evolved as a commercially viable option for
enterprises of all sizes. It is because cloud computing, as a
platform, has the potential to change how organizations manage IT and
transform the economics of hardware and software at the same time.
Over the next five years, IDC forecasts Asia Pacific spending on IT
cloud services to grow fourfold-reaching $4.6 billion by 2014.
According to research firm Zinnov Consulting, the Indian market for
cloud is projected to be worth $260 million by 2011. Further it is
expected to touch $1 billion in the next five years. Apparently, it
is enabling a new class of entrepreneurs, who do not need to build
offices, distribution centers, datacenters or infrastructure of any
kind, as everything is managed in the cloud. And it won't be wrong
to say, that it has emerged as a core technology with a definite
value proposition in terms of reduced cost and increased agility.
“Within just a few years, cloud computing has reshaped the IT
marketplace and the way organizations acquire and use IT products and
services, thereby disrupting their strategies. It is increasingly
being looked at by the enterprises as a great alternative, as it lets
them scale up or down, save organizations money and decrease the time
to market,” said Rohit Madhur, Director-Business
ByDesign, SAP India. “The successful infusion of the right cloud
strategy into your business approach, including focused pilots into
your overall IT roadmap, will result in significant business
dividends. It is seen as the wave of the future, and maybe that is
why the cloud computing market is expected to reach $160 billion by
next year,” added Vamsi Mudiam, Cloud Leader, IBM India/South Asia.
If we look at some of the current trends in cloud computing, we will
find that today, both the applications and platforms are moving to
cloud. In fact, the technology has enabled the cloud environment to
run even complex business processes. “We are seeing trends to move
tier-2 application on cloud like document management and business
process information management. There is also big demand to look at
back up and disaster recovery data center on cloud,” pointed out
Sunil Chavan, Director-Software and Cloud Solutions, APAC, Hitachi
Data Systems. According to Anil Pochiraju, MD-India and SAARC, F5
Networks, the role of application delivery in a cloud computing
environment is the same as its role in traditional architectures-to
securely deliver high-performing applications
while maintaining availability and reliability. The trend of
application delivery networking
in cloud is rapidly increasing and gaining customer approval.
Sriram, CEO of iValue InfoSolutions, asserted that CRM, ERP,
security, and storage are already building traction of movement to
cloud. "Platform-as-a-service is increasingly being used by
entrepreneurs to come out with innovative offerings. RIM is also in
vogue, which will get consolidated using cloud-based model,” Sriram
said. Moreover, the perception of this technology as commercial, is
not because of public clouds, but to a large extent it is because of
private clouds and this has had an impact on procurement patterns and
IT investments. A recent Gartner report suggests that, despite the
economies of scale offered by public cloud providers, private cloud
services will prevail for the foreseeable future. Though public cloud
offerings continue to mature, through 2012, IT organizations will
spend more money on private cloud computing. Regina Tan of Amazon Web
Services, however, believes
that private clouds come with expensive fixed cost, private
installation of infrastructure, and lacks all the key benefits of the
cloud. Companies that build these types of internal clouds still own
all the capital expense at the datacenters and incur ongoing high
maintenance costs. Meanwhile, besides security, the other primary
concerns for any organization going in for cloud computing today are
compliance and privacy policies, data residency, lack of knowledge
and understanding about the platform. Performance, availability as
well as scalability and flexibility in the usage of the underlying
technology are also on the consideration list of CXOs. As per the
views of Murali Meenakshi Sundaram, Technology Consultant at CSC,
security and training needed for cloud adoption are the primary areas
of concern. CSC has active programs to communicate about its trusted
cloud to alleviate the security concerns. “Customers are looking
for a very specific definition of what the interfaces are and how is
the service level defined. They also want demonstration of how their
data and access is secure and private,” said Lakshman
Narayanaswamy, Co-Founder and VP-Products, Sanovi Technologies.
Going forward, the market will see rapid growth, as more
organizations turn to cloud-based computing and alternative
deployment options. Also, the government which is the largest spender
on IT services will increasingly understand its benefits as they need
not worry about constant
server updating and can concentrate on innovation. Government is not
just a user, but also a facilitator.
GAME CHANGERS
Contrary to popular belief, the
implementation of clouds is not restricted to large system
integrators or cloud service providers only. Even
lesser known solution providers have joined the fray, including the
likes of
Net Technologies, who has recently launched its own
cloud computing offering, called 'Qloud Computing', through which
it wants to help its clients take advantage of cloud computing
solutions, including the ability of cloud applications to integrate
with their existing IT infrastructure via SOA-based Web services. As
of now, cloud computing contributes 10 percent in QuantM's overall
business model. Some of the major deployments of QuantM have been a
multinational hospitality firm that chose QuantM to be their
preferred partner in hosting their mission critical applications,
from live environment to its backup on a virtualized performance
computing solution; a UK-based MNC consulting firm has chosen QuantM
to host its IT infrastructure on IT-as-a-Service model; and an export
house based out of Delhi/NCR has tied up with QuantM to switch from
its in-house IT infrastructure to Qloud offering. The
company has also partnered with a manufacturing firm to provide
Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DraaS). Meanwhile, QuantM is pursuing
its cloud computing strategy and this move will enhance its
infrastructure-centric services and cloud computing-based solutions for
manufacturing, telecom ISV,
universities, Internet-based enterprises, retail, including global
organizations preferring to outsource/setting up IT infrastructure in
India. The company is very upbeat over business prospects in cloud
computing from India's price-conscious SMBs. Additionally, it will
keep launching more services and offerings as the market matures and
customer base grows. Some of the other offerings envisaged are joint
initiatives with some ISVs to roll out their applications on Qloud,
along with some other basic productivity applications such as office
productivity tools, and secure messaging platforms amongst others.
QuantM believes that in future, on-premise enterprise ISVs will push
for a private cloud, money and margin will come from verticalized
cloud applications, and lastly, social cloud will emerge as a key
component platform. “We primarily wanted every business to
understand the benefits of cloud computing and the mature services
that QuantM delivers. Using these benefits clients can save money
without giving up speed, reliability, flexibility, and performance,
and will be able to get up and running with our services quickly and
easily. Going by our new customer acquisitions and technical
expertise we surely can exclaim that, QuantM today is moving in the
direction of being a major Qloud player,” said Pawan Khurana, CEO,
QuantM Net Technologies.
Aditi Technologies is another solution
provider which generates 10-15 percent of its business currently from
cloud computing. As a solution provider, it is looking for upper mid
market customers that will go for their own private hosted cloud part
and the small customers that will go for shared technology. The
company's performance in this
space has been going very steady, as it provides an end-to-end 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 has signed
three new customers in this space. In fact, it is one step ahead in
terms of building the frameworks around the cloud platform that will
allow it to develop a cloud solution much faster than some of its
competitors. Out of its success stories, the two prominent ones include
an upper
mid-market financial sector customer in the US, who was looking for a
collaboration solution, which it did not get with its internal IT and
even its infrastructure was not compatible with the collaborative
solutions. So, Aditi deployed the cloud solution through which the
client is now able to do collaboration in a much faster way, and the
deployment also took away all its compatibility issues. The other one
is about a retail sector company in Europe, wherein Aditi deployed
the cloud solution to enable the collaboration between the partners
and the internal employees. Cloud computing is one such solution
which is growing very constantly for Aditi Technologies. The company
will continue to invest in cloud computing in 2011 as well. It is
because the solution provider believes that there is enough supply
for the demand to pick up. “Cloud computing as a technology itself
makes
a lot of sense to the users because either you install the cloud
technology inside your datacenter or
you can rent it with somebody else. But from a pure incentive or
benefits perspective, you will use it
as much as the computing powers you need. You can load balance across
your different applications. It
has lot more benefits in terms of running an IT infrastructure,”
said Vineet Kumar Arora, MD, Aditi Technologies. One of the country's
largest solution providers Allied Digital, is also having a fairly
large presence in the cloud computing space. The company believes
that this is one area where the industry is going towards making
their businesses more profitable.
Cloud computing is an excellent
opportunity that companies are looking at, bringing down their
operational costs from the IT side. Allied Digital has got a very
good jump start, wherein a few of its clients are already on the
cloud and its main focus has been on setting up private clouds for
those clients. As these clients are in the infrastructure business,
it has been successful in implementing the cloud solution at their end.
These
clients are focused on certain areas of infrastructure and since they
are based out of the US and after the recessionary period, they
wanted to revamp the IT part of their business in a cost effective
way. That is where, Allied helped them with the cloud computing
solution. It gave them end-to-end offering in terms of helpdesk and
support, right from the desktops to applications. As of now, the “We
primarily wanted every business to understand the benefits of cloud
computing and the mature
services that QuantM delivers.” Pawan Khurana, QuantM Net
Technologies company has been able to do success stories for five of
its clients in the US. And out of these five clients, three are from
the automobile sector, one from the banking and finance sector, and
the last one from the insurance sector. Moreover, it is setting up
the private cloud for one of the largest textile manufacturing
companies in India, whose details will be disclosed only early next
year. The company sees more and more contribution coming up from this
area. While only five to seven percent of the revenue comes from
cloud computing today, Allied is expecting 20-25 percent of the
revenue to come from cloud-based solutions in 2011. It is going to
shape up more and more in 2011, in terms of providing private cloud
and tuning it up with the integrated solutions. It will also be
focusing more on providing end-to-end solution offerings. “It is
going to see an exponential growth in the next two years time. Today,
we are seeing
acceptance from the large enterprises but going forward, it will be
driven by mid-sized and small business segments that are going to
derive huge value out of cloud computing. It is now the turn of these
SMBs to speed up and adapt this technology in a better and productive
way so that they don't
need to have internal laborers for IT, and manage the attrition
issues amongst others,” said Paresh Shah, Director-Technology
Solutions Group, Allied Digital. Ahmedabad-based Sai Infosystems, is
also striving to make big in the cloud computing arena. It has
recently bagged a project from BSNL for setting up four datacenters
in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Cochin, and Ernakulam. As a part of this
deployment, cloud computing will be one of the few applications that
will be hosted on a couple of datacenters. The company also believes
that cloud computing is emerging as a game changer from multiple
angles. From the hardware perspective, it will only be an access
point and not a computing device; from the user perspective, it will
successfully lead to computing going away from PCs; and from the
software perspective, the differentiator will be the usage of
multiple applications. Sai is of the view that
software companies might have to rethink their business as well as
marketing strategies. Even the revenue model is going to change
drastically and it will be more of a pay-per-use model. TCO will
definitely reduce for the companies going in for cloud computing in
terms of maintenance, manpower, and upgradation and migration of
hardware as well as software. “We are foreseeing a very interesting
scenario emerging in the future. And we are going to concentrate more
on cloud computing in 2011 and henceforth,” said Kirit Joshi,
Senior VP, Sai Infosystems.
THE CHAMP
Now, if we analyze the presence and
success stories of these solution providers in the cloud computing
space, notwithstanding the presence of the biggies like Allied and
Sai, one name that clearly stands out is QuantM Net Technologies.
With a rich heritage of providing enterprise-class IT infrastructure
solutions for the last 16 years to its customers, QuantM is well
positioned to be a strong player in this emerging business
opportunity.