Cloud Computing in India: 'The Perfect Storm'

25th June 2010
Cloud Computing in India: 'The Perfect Storm'
Outlook cloudy? That's good news for India!

Zinnov report on India opportunity;  recent  cloud computing announcements in India by NIIT, Hitachi, CSC, HP, VmWare, Cisco, Symantec

The total market of cloud computing in India stands at US$ 110 million today and is expected to reach a figure of about US$ 1,084 million by 2015, finds a study by globalization consulting firm Zinnov Management Consulting. The study entitled Cloud Computing in India: Opportunities & Way Forward’ shows that in the cloud computing market in India, Software-as-a-Service has witnessed the most rapid uptake until now. As a components of the overall cloud market, Software-as-a-service (SaaS) in India is likely to reach a mark of US$ 650 million by 2015, while Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) markets cumulatively would touch 434 million each by then. The domestic market for SaaS is estimated to be about US$ 66 million and is currently dominated by Collaborative Applications, CRM, ERP & Email workloads.
There are several multinational and Indian companies entering the cloud space and trying to drive business relevance of its solutions for the Indian customers. Divulging details on the SaaS market, the report said that
Pari Natarajan, Chief Executive Officer, Zinnov Management Consulting Pvt. Ltd,says, “The next wave of transformation in the Indian IT industry is ‘Cloud Computing’. This is indeed a perfect storm. The only difference is that, this storm is destructive only to companies who are not willing to change, while it is a huge opportunity for others. Cloud computing has allowed the smaller ISVs access to customers that they could have never had through the use of market places. This has allowed smaller ISVs to be based on cloud platforms (such as Azure, App Engine etc) and make themselves available to global customers, thereby, significantly reducing their cost of sales. On the other hand, this has also increased the flexibility for end customers and increased the choice of products and services”.

In addition to the global providers of PaaS, Indian companies have also sprung up offering cloud based Platform-as-a-Service. Several Indian companies are beginning to offer IaaS to leverage the untapped market potential, says  the report.
Praveen Bhadada
, Engagement, Zinnov Management Consulting Pvt. Ltd, adds: “The growth in IT spending in India is one of the fastest in the world and is expected to be higher than China soon. India being the world’s fastest growing mobile market with over 20 million subscribers added every month and the money that companies have invested for 3G services showcases the belief the large telecom providers have on data services in the Indian market. Also, over 500 million people form the middle class in India, and the products and services consumed by them are relevant to other emerging markets as well. All this clearly suggests that Indian customers are ideal for cloud offerings. Indian SMBs particularly, , lack budgets, want business improvement, lack management bandwidth required to manage internal IT and are looking for rapid growth in the next few years. For all of this put together, ‘Cloud Computing’ is indeed the answer”.

Zinnov’s report also highlights the highest spending on IT as a percentage of revenues is to be found in IT-BPO and Retail sectors. Telecom and BFSI are highly mature with their IT adoption and show higher potential towards cloud adoption going forward. In an effort to meet global standards, verticals such as Education, Healthcare, and Government show massive potential for cloud adoption in the immediate future.

The week also saw cloud related announcements in India from a slew of international players:

Symantec Corp and Amazon:

Symantec  offered its next-generation security and enterprise-class storage management solutions through the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Symantec Endpoint Protection and Veritas Storage Foundation Basic are available on Amazon EC2. Businesses can leverage the Symantec solutions to add additional protection to their Windows servers in the cloud with comprehensive threat prevention and manage their cloud storage online with a single toolset that delivers reliability, scalability and high performance.

“As many businesses increasingly leverage the cloud for applications and services, they want to protect and manage those environments with the security and storage management solutions they are used to from Symantec,” said Vishal Dhupar, MD, Symantec India. “By taking the same proven security and storage management solutions that organizations have come to rely on in their data center and extending them to Amazon EC2, Symantec is delivering on its commitment to provide value in the cloud.”

Amazon EC2 users now have access to key protection technologies provided by Symantec Endpoint Protection. Symantec Endpoint Protection combines Symantec AntiVirus with advanced threat prevention to deliver defense against malicious attacks such as viruses, worms, spyware, Trojans, zero-day threats, and rootkits. Symantec Endpoint Protection helps ensure information remains safe and business assets are protected wherever that information resides.

Amazon EC2 users also have access to advanced online storage management capabilities provided by Veritas Storage Foundation Basic from Symantec, allowing them to manage multiple hosts from a central interface and optimize storage performance and availability online. Storage Foundation enables non-disruptive storage operations through GUI-based management and online configuration with dynamic disks.


NIIT and Hitachi:

India-headquartered global IT solutions organization, NIIT Technologies, and Hitachi Asia (Thailand) have jointly launched a high-reliability Cloud Computing Service, leveraging their respective expertise in Data Center management. The Cloud Computing hub will be hosted in NIIT Technologies’ Data Center in Bangkok and would initially serve local Japanese corporations.
"With our strong track record in Managed Services this partnership would provide enhanced value to our customers. Cloud Computing is a pioneering service being introduced to supplement our increased focus around non-linear services” said Arvind Mehrotra, Executive Vice President NIIT Technologies Ltd.
Hitachi Asia (Thailand) and Hitachi Information System have carried out design and architecture of the Cloud System and NIIT Technologies is responsible for the implementation and maintenance of the system. Both the Companies shall leverage their strengths for Solution designing, SaaS application development, sales and marketing to evangelize this technology.
http://www.niit-tech.com/media-detail.aspx?id=148&path=7/22

CISCO: Some of Cisco’s initiatives in the Datacenter enables cloud computing announced this week:

The shared, virtualized Cisco Data Center 3.0 architecture and solutions from Cisco and partners such as VMware, EMC and NetApp, lets enterprises build their own secure, scalable private clouds.

The Cloud Security Alliance: a non-profit organization consisting of such corporate members as Cisco, AT&T, Computer Associates, Dell, Intel, Microsoft and RSA. The alliance promotes best practices for cloud computing security and offers education to consumers of cloud computing services. For example, the Cloud Security Alliance's March 2010 report, "Top Threats to Cloud Computing V1.0," offers a deep dive into the most prevalent cloud computing security risks, along with examples and strategies for avoiding or minimizing those threats.
CloudAudit: formerly known as the Automated Audit, Assertion, Assessment and Assurance (A6) Working Group, CloudAudit is working to provide an open, extensible, secure Application Programming Interface (API). CloudAudit has over 250 members. When the API is ready, cloudproviders will be able to offer customers visibility into security and other aspects of the cloud service on demand, without compromising the security of the cloud provider's network or any other customers using it.

CSC: Opens Seven New Cloud-Enabled Data Centers and ecommerce portal for Hosting And Cloud Services
CSC announced the opening of seven cloud-enabled data centers in the US, UK, Luxembourg and Australia to serve clients across the globe. Clients can now fully exploit the innovation, flexibility, speed and economy of cloud-based business while obtaining the levels of security, reliability, continuity and sustainability required for enterprise-class operation.

The CSC cloud-enabled data centers feature fully virtualized cloud fabric and multiple grades of services for any size organization interested in public, private or hybrid cloud solutions. The data centers are located in Chantilly, Va., Newark, De., Chicago, Il., Sydney, Australia, Copenhagen, Denmark, Luxembourg, and the New Kent Complex, UK. As part of CSC’s global network of centers, these cloud-enabled data centers feature full software recovery capabilities, energy optimization, enterprise-class scalability and dynamic workload balancing to ensure continued business performance in every time zone.

CSC also announced CSC Gateway, an e-commerce portal for hosting and cloud services clients that simplifies and speeds access to CSC solutions and includes self-managing features such as auto-provisioning, pay-per-use and electronic purchase orders. Clients can now tap into the complete catalog of CSC’s Trusted Cloud and Hosting solutions through an intuitive, easy-to-use interface.


HP, VMWare:
Unveil range of IT solutions http://www.ciol.com/SMB/SMB/News-Reports/HP-VMware-unveil-range-of-IT-solutions/138112/0/  

Cloud Computing at TCS: http://www.tcs.com/thought_leadership/Pages/TCS-Cloud-Computing.aspx?gclid=CMKYyLq_uqICFQdB6wodkDl95A  

Finally …. What is cloud computing  http://www.csc.com/cloud/offerings/43581-what_is_cloud_computing  

June 25 2010