For American chipmaker Intel, data centres are an increasing part of overall revenue, even as its internal private cloud effort has returned net savings of $9 million thus far. At the company?s Asia Pacific (APAC) Cloud Summit 2012 in Bangkok recently, Jason Fedder, general manager of Intel?s Data Center and Connected Systems Division (Asia Pacific and China) told Ajay Sukumaran that public clouds would likely go mainstream in India around 2015-16 after a few states or government projects get on-board. Excerpts:

The number of internet users in India is estimated to grow to 300 million by 2015. How do you see the growth in big data with the potential for services?

I think two things will happen. You are drawing a correlation between internet availability, broadband availability and big data, and the underlying assumption there, is that as more people get connected, more services get delivered to those people and that creates need for big data. That certainly will happen and is happening. In India, you know, that will probably be less about a large internet service provider because you don?t have a Tencent or an Alibaba in India right now, but maybe more about government. The UID (Unique Identification number project ) would be a perfect example, though there are others we could give. But in addition to those new services that would create or lead to the creation of those large data sets, you already have existing data sets which are in the process of being computerised. There?s a massive programme going on there to computerise. The data is already there but it is not meaningful.

So some of them will be driven by an expansion and delivery of user services through the cloud and a lot of it would be going back and using existing data sets in a more profitable or useful way.

How is India placed in the APAC region for cloud computing adoption, both by private industry and government?

In the APAC market, Southeast Asia especially, because of the relative size of the marketplaces, cloud computing will start in the private cloud and over time will probably go to public clouds. So, in that context you would expect to see some of the larger Indian corporations?Reliance is a very good example, Indian Oil also, for their pipeline monitoring applications? begin to evaluate approaches and what it would take for them to transition. But that?s very much private cloud. In terms of broad public cloud adoption outside of specific projects like UID, we are probably talking 2015-16.

What will you see by then?

I think you will see enterprise private clouds put in place around 2013-14. You?ll see one or two of the more forward leaning states or government projects embrace some form of public cloud with public keys, security encryption by 2014-15.

Beyond that, we?re guessing, but I?ll expect that it would go mainstream around 2015-16.

How has the adoption been in the rest of the APAC region?

Korea and Taiwan would be far ahead of that. In terms of Southeast Asia, broadly the same I would think. Australia, of course, is effectively running at the same pace as America.

How big is the Indian market for data centres and connected systems in the APAC region? What?s the outlook by 2015 when cloud computing is expected to go mainstream in the country?

As cloud awareness increases and the market matures, there is heightened interest in public and virtual private cloud initiatives across Asia Pacific, excluding Japan. According to Forrester Research, the virtual private cloud market, excluding dynamic BPO services, in Asia Pacific will grow from $534 million in 2010 to $10.1 billion in 2020. Forrester estimates that the public cloud market in India will grow from $250 million in 2011 to $1.8 billion in 2020. Large organisations and MNCs will drive demand for the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) market. Revenue growth will be driven by ongoing data centre modernisation, as well as new data center build-outs. By 2015, we expect that the cloud will account for 20% of overall usage volume of data centre processors.

(This correspondent was in Bangkok recently on the invitation of Intel)