Indian enterprises are really getting ready for the cloud. Recent months have been filled with announcements about small, medium and large enterprises transitioning into clouds to increase business agility and reduce cost. While banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI), telecom, manufacturing and government are the early adopters, other verticals such as healthcare, retail and education are also emerging in the adoption of cloud technologies.
Statistically speaking, the total cloud market in India currently stands at $400 million?globally, it is estimated at $123.7 billion?and is expected to reach a market value of $4.5 billion in the next five years. This would result in the increase of cloud contribution from the current 1.4% to 8.2% of the total IT-BPO spend in India by 2015. Interestingly, private cloud market is fast growing in the country and has already reached a market value of $312 million in 2010. It is further expected to grow at a rapid pace of 60% over the next five years to reach $3.5 billion in market value by 2015, a recent EMC-Zinnov Consulting study estimates. Realising the huge market potential, several companies are competing aggressively to grab a share in the lucrative cloud computing market. More than 2/3rd of the global cloud services companies already have a direct presence here for its services for Indian enterprises.
But the focus here is on the actual cloud clout build up of Indian enterprises, many of whom are evolving to a self-service private cloud offering the same flexibility and incremental cost advantages to end users as public clouds, but with less perceived risk and greater assurances of security and accountability. In sync with this trend, Fortis Healthcare has set up its own private cloud to maintain and easily access the electronic patient records from its 56-hospital healthcare chain spanning the country. The deployment has led to fewer errors, quick response time in emergencies and patient convenience. Medical practitioners are able to access patient records on their handheld devices. Radiology images are available to doctors across Fortis locations; thus eliminating the need of expensive film and physical transportation of reports. This drastically brings down cost, and a patient no longer needs to travel distances to see specialist doctors.
Mumbai-based retailer Shoppers Stop is running most of its systems on the cloud. Arun Gupta, Group chief technology officer at Shoppers Stop explains the rationale behind adopting cloud computing. Instead of buying and maintaining expensive servers and software to manage customer conversations and information, companies can use Web-based (cloud) applications to run their customer relationship management (CRM)? and get a high return on their investment. ?We adopted Salesforce.com solutions in 2005-2006 for our institutional sales team as a low cost experimental system. The system offered low TCO with adequate functionality to the team. Our second adoption was for our e-commerce website http://www.shoppersstop.com which was deployed on a software-as-a-service (SaaS) cloud with a global service provider. The system offered a comprehensive solution in an OPEX model,? he informs.
On the business benefits being derived, Gupta says, ?SFC was a good solution for the requirements at that time; we subsequently moved the process in-house. The benefit was a low cost process automation enabling the sales team. For the transactional e-commerce website, the model was a low risk solution as the internal team did not have the relevant expertise to create and run the solution. The capital expense saving was an added advantage.? According to him, as different cloud models evolve and mature, the datacentres would shift outside of the enterprise and so would many applications. The complexity of managing, integrating these will challenge the IT organisation. Security concerns will get addressed between customers and service providers as the models stabilise.
The country?s education sector is not behind too. Thanks to the cloud, Manipal University is able to provide its students with an always-on portal experience especially when exam results are published online. Owing to a high visitor traffic that peaked during the time when exam results were published online, Manipal University Learning was facing challenges in the form of high server and network loads on the online portal ?EduNxt? during publication of examination results, and inefficient use of IT infrastructure with high TCO and low returns on investment. Mumbai-based Netmagic Solutions has given Manipal University Learning the ideal answer in the form of its Cloud 2.0 solution; the cloud offering has provided Manipal University Learning the perfect utility computing model with a pay-as-you-use model that allowed them to pay for only what they used.
Adding clout to its cloud offerings, Netmagic has introduced the third generation of its enterprise-grade on-demand public cloud services?SimpliCloud (cloud services on public internet), HybriCloud (public cloud services extended to an enterprise?s dedicated IT infrastructure over secure virtual private network) and Private Cloud (dedicated cloud services for an enterprise). Sharad Sanghi, MD & CEO, Netmagic says, ?Netmagic?s cloud business is growing at more than 100%. There is a clear intent from customers to leverage the cloud for greater business flexibility and no upfront investment. They also want a simple solution that can make their journey onto the cloud hassle-free.?
IIT Delhi has set up a private cloud which enables it to consolidate its entire departments into a common account. The cloud would also help allocate computing resources based on the requirements of the research oriented projects. Among IT firms too, shrinking development cycles, need to support multiple platforms and focus on non linear business models is mandating increased use of efficient and scalable infrastructure. Wipro has deployed more than 1,000 servers in its internal private cloud that has helped them reduce the cost by 60% and energy consumption by 30%. Mid-tier IT firm KPIT has deployed the Vblock Platform for a Virtual Desktop Interface implementation to serve 1,200 users across India. The deployment will help enable KPIT to scale its infrastructure and at the same time enable employees access to their virtual desktop from any where and over a broad range of end user devices.
The rationale behind adopting cloud computing was to make infrastructure more efficient, secure and environment friendly, says Shrikant Kulkarni, senior vice-president & CIO, KPIT Cummins Infosystems. The benefits: provisioning time for virtual desktops, servers is now in minutes/hours against days/weeks in the past; a thin client machine can have multiple user profiles, this results in reduction of machines required per user; high flexibility in operations, one can work from anywhere; simplified software deployment and compliance management.
Kulkarni says, ?Future business environment is going to be benefited in a big way. The cloud computing will make the infrastructure operations much more efficient with reduced overheads. For SMB segment of industries, the cloud technology will help reduce capex, turnaround time for deployment of hardware/application and overheads on infrastructure. I would say, cloud computing is going to be a ?game changer? for the future businesses.?
Riding high on citizen services as part of the National E-governance Programme, Central and state governments are looking to set up various datacentres across the country. Jammu & Kashmir government is utilising the computing resources of Madhya Pradesh government for its e-governance programme. This utilisation of the private cloud has helped J&K government save almost 50% of the budget allocated for the datacentre installation. Telecom and IT services firm Spanco is setting up datacentres for the Orissa government. These datacentres will consolidate services, applications and infrastructure to deliver government-to-government, consumer and business services.
As part of its cloud services strategy, Microsoft has introduced Microsoft Office 365 in India, which would enable enterprises to access solutions such as email and other collaboration tools on a pay-per-use model, along with security and simplified IT management. Microsoft India managing director Sanket Akerkar says, ?Customers who have already started using the services are realising savings from reduced hardware, software and operational costs. In a nutshell, it allows them to do more with less.?
Sure, cloud computing makes things easier, and good news is that Indian enterprises are jumping to the cloud.