As the managing director of Hewlett-Packard India, Neelam Dhawan has countrywide responsibility for revenues and profitability and ensuring the greatest leverage from HP?s Services, Personal Systems and Imaging & Printing businesses. Visibly excited on the business opportunity here, she tells Sudhir Chowdhary that HP has a clear vision and strategy as well as experience in helping Indian enterprises, service providers and governments in their journey towards cloud adoption. Excerpts:
Is cloud really democratising the access to cutting-edge technology especially in emerging countries like India?
According to a research commissioned by Hewlett-Packard, 75% of business and technology executives in India believe that cloud computing will be at least as disruptive to the technology landscape as the impact of client and server technology or the internet. We are known for selling personal computers, servers, storage, networking, printers, software and services. When you look at cloud, you are looking infrastructure which is required for the cloud. Therefore, we are very excited about cloud because it leads to servers, storage, networking, software and services to integrate all the offerings. Essentially, it brings the entire Hewlett-Packard portfolio together.
What are the opportunities that you see in the cloud computing market. What is the strategy behind increasing your market share in this space?
Whenever we make a new announcement of technology, the first question is who is going to use it. Cloud is a complex technology and we are trying to simplify its pieces so that the adoption increases. What we are doing is bringing lots of things to work together.
When I look at who will adopt it, it is anyone and everybody. It starts with the small and medium business (SMB). India always had this model wherein companies were encouraged to set up manufacturing in remote areas of the country, in order to get various tax benefits and tax breaks. But companies in these remote locations do not get people to run their IT operations. From May 10, Hewlett-Packard will deliver on-demand compute instances or virtual machines for companies.
We are looking at the key verticals including IT-ITeS, banking, financial services and insurance, telecom, manufacturing and government. They already spend a significant percentage of their IT investments into cloud related areas. Other verticals such as energy, healthcare, retail and education among others also present a sizable opportunity for us.
Cloud computing market is around $2 billion and contributes 0.5% of the total ICT spend in India. Personally I see it growing at 30-35% every year, which is nearly two times the IT industry?s growth rate.
Is it safe to say now that cloud is no longer a hype?
Two years ago, cloud was more of hype and cloudy. We used to hear this quite often. But in the last 18 months, we have managed to get more than 70 customers in India, who are either using cloud infrastructure or end-to-end cloud solutions. We haven?t focused outside technologically aware customers because they would be the early adopters for us. But I think that cloud adoption is going to pick up significantly in the months to come. Cloud adoption will be much higher and at a very accelerated rate.
Amazon is believed to have one of the largest corporate cloud businesses. How different is Hewlett-Packard from Amazon?
Amazon only sells access to things like computing and data storage, not hardware. Amazon cannot set up the cloud for you. If you are a bank, telecom or a manufacturing company and want a cloud to be set up so that you can be connected to your dealers or customers, Amazon cannot do it; Hewlett-Packard can do it. We are in the business of designing and building clouds as well as offering public clouds to companies.
We have invested some capital in creating a cloud factory in our Bangalore office. Around 20 companies are currently working there to develop their applications.
We have also set up a $2 billion global fund to provide flexible leasing options, asset management and staggered payments to companies looking to set up large clouds. Such initiatives will definitely increase cloud adoption in the country.
Are Indian companies adopting cloud as a service?
Enterprises in the fast growing BFSI sector are exploring cloud storage and compute power to handle massive amounts of real time core/ non-core banking data and minimise outages. Telecom companies are witnessing rapid growth and would continue to leverage cloud benefits to support growth. IT-ITeS companies are fast evaluating cloud offerings. Upfront infrastructure investment is a big challenge for the vast base of SMB manufacturers and hence are considering cloud infrastructure to enhance competitiveness. The number of hospitals adopting e-health records and other digitised clinical systems is increasing rapidly in India. So, all these verticals present a sizable opportunity for us.
