While in the context of cloud computing, large enterprises have been availing the benefits of ERP and CRM since long now, the small and mid-sized companies are also evaluating the advantages of hosted and on premise model Cloud computing, in the context of enterprise application, is about mass storage and mass processing, and managing of data and information. Some 10-12 years back, the application of cloud computing was happening only in private environments, however, now it is being extended to the public environment, wherein customers are looking at outsourcing their IT infrastructure to a third party so that it can be effectively managed. Hence, the question that then emerges is whether India is ready for cloud computing from an enterprise application point of view.

The answer certainly is 'yes'. Indian companies are widely using traditional web-based services for their businesses today. So, many are comfortable with the basic productivity applications being offered as a service. While at the IT-as-a-service end, this is still in its nascent stages, many companies are using hosted facilities for their data centers, and IT-as-a-service will be the step forward.

DEFINING CLOUD COMPUTING
Shared Souma Das, Area VP, Citrix, India Subcontinent, “Cloud computing in all its forms is a phenomenon. Enterprise cloud computing is in its infancy, but the agility, economics, and scalability of cloud computing promises to forever change IT delivery and enable new business models.”

The services in cloud computing are provisioned, consumed, and monetized on-demand. Architecturally, cloud computing takes one or more of the many forms: infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), ie raw access, processing, and storage like Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3. Platform-as-a-service (PaaS), ie infrastructure-as-a-service, plus a development environment like Force.com and Google application engine. Software-as- a-service (SaaS) entails rich applications that are ready to use, for example Salesforce CRM and Google applications.

Sushant Dwivedy, Director-Business Solutions, Microsoft India	Souma Das, Asst VP-India, Citrix	Jeremy Cooper, VP-Marketing (APAC), Salesforce.com

Is India ready for cloud computing?
According to Springboard Research (Jan 2009) report, “Software as a Service in India' Indian SaaS market will register a compounded annual growth rate of 76 percent between 2007-2011 and reach $260 million in revenues by 2011. The Indian SaaS market is poised for high growth with 76 percent of survey respondents, who have not adopted SaaS, planning to do so within the next 12 months. SaaS-based ERP and CRM solutions are likely to see highest demand in the country.

Analysts say this positions India as the fastest growing SaaS market in Asia Pacific, growing with a CAGR of approximately 71 percent, and is expected to reach $267 million by 2011 (according to Frost & Sullivan).

According to Jeremy Cooper, VP-Marketing (APAC), Salesforce.com,“We started our operations in India in Sep 2005 and are extremely excited about the potential in the Indian market. Given the growing adoption rate of cloud computing solutions in the Indian market, we have long-term plans for India and are striving to be the partner-of-choice for customers of all sizes throughout the country and our partners will be instrumental in driving this with/for us.”

Benefits for partners/customers
Both customers and partners can enjoy several benefits if they adopt the cloud computing model for their enterprise applications.

Stated Sushant Dwivedy, Director, Microsoft Business Solutions, “Most of the large organizations already have ERP or they are still continuing to grow on an on premise ERP model. The case with mid-sized organization is similar. The smaller organizations are also evaluating ERP or having a hosted or an on-premise model.”

Shared Pankaj Sinha, Program Director-Lab Solutions & Services, IBM India Software Lab that due to current technology advances, SMBs are going global. By way of SaaS, small businesses will gain real-time access to work with all their employees, regardless of location, as if they were in the same room. “SMBs will use technology to collaborate more easily beyond their four walls and firewalls with outside partners, suppliers and customers. While the cost of professional-grade software may have hindered SMB investment in technology previously, more SaaS collaboration tools are breaking down that barrier. There is no software or hardware to buy, install, maintain or upgrade. By running programs from subscription-based websites, SMBs can focus on their core competencies without incurring the IT maintenance costs.”

Added Das of Citrix, “Users may be embracing the cloud for some applications, but remain hesitant to go further and change the way their core applications are delivered. The first step for many has been to deploy virtualization. By centralizing, virtualizing and delivering applications and desktops as an on-demand service over any environment or device, organizations can also benefit from lower operating costs and promote better productivity of IT personnel as there are far less variables to address.

While virtualization is an enabler of the cloud, in order for customers and solution providers' partners to truly benefit from the cloud, the major challenge today for cloud computing is compatibility. According to Citrix, companies will need to shift their IT strategy to include a broad mix of internal and external clouds in order to truly realize its benefits.”

Opportunities for the channel
From a target perspective, partners should aim at reaching out to the small businesses or the mid-sized markets. Cloud computing is enabling all business applications to be available to all users, regardless of their device or physical location.

The real benefits of cloud computing are many: It extends both capital and operational cost efficiency, leads to decreased footprint on the environment and offers boundless scalability and IT flexibility. According to Sinha of IBM, “The big thing to get excited about is that cloud could act as the means to connect billions of people, sensors and storage to powerful back-end systems that make sense of it all in seconds. Not to mention track risk in the banking system, store and provide access to online medical records for entire generations and integrate industries in entirely new ways.”

The partners can stress on the business benefits, including cost savings, enabling employee mobility and offering responsiveness and agility in delivering new solutions. Cloud computing allows IT to shift focus on providing capabilities to business and harvesting best out of available resources. It helps achieve economies of scale given same set of available IT resources. It accomodates both 'public' cloud where the cloud is outside an enterprise environment, or a 'private' cloud where the cloud infrastructure is managed within an enterprise environment.

Challenges
The tough tasks associated with cloud computing revolve around security, compliance, support SLA, global performance, transparency on location of your data among others. More and more companies are looking to use the general Internet, where once they would have used a private WAN. One of the primary issues in India continues to be bandwidth. While, in some cases, bandwidth availability and price is an issue; in others, the quality of the available bandwidth is an issue.

According to Das of Citrix, “Security is a key concern in cloud computing as businesses require security that results in privacy, trust, and compliance with both internal governance and external regulations. The resultant level of security also needs to be appropriate to the business to be effective. By breaking ties to physical data centers, cloud computing offers both security benefits and challenges.”

Sinha of IBM pointed that like any other emerging paradigm, cloud computing has challenges regarding interoperability across different clouds which would need standardization efforts. The type of flexibility that cloud computing offers and its proposed cost effectiveness makes it a perfect fit for SMBs. Larger enterprises already have a large amount of legacy infrastructure. “Until cloud computing is commoditized, they cannot shift from an all-on-premise infrastructure to an all-on-cloud infrastructure. Application portability, compatibility and licensing could be some of the issues that these organizations would have to deal with,” he added.

Conclusion
Cloud computing offers a predictable, pay-as-you-go model for businesses to access computing resources. Cloud computing is the need of the hour, since it's a cost-efficient alternative to managing the complexities of IT infrastructure and service delivery. Cloud computing has witnessed quick adoption in India by product and service companies in the banking, finance and healthcare verticals. With other verticals like IT, BPO, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, government and education also embracing this model the future certainly looks bright.

Puja Sharma
poojas@cybermedia.co.in

Page(s)   1