Close to Cloud Nine

Of late, cloud computing has evolved as a
commercially viable option for enterprises of
all sizes. It is because cloud computing, as a platform, has the potential to change how organizations manage IT and transform the economics of hardware and software at the same time. Over the next five years, IDC forecasts Asia Pacific spending on IT cloud services to grow fourfold-reaching $4.6 billion by 2014. According to research firm Zinnov Consulting, the Indian market for cloud is projected to be worth $260 million by 2011. Further it is expected to touch $1 billion in the next five years. Apparently, it is enabling a new class of entrepreneurs, who do not need to build offices, distribution centers, datacenters or infrastructure of any kind, as everything is managed in the cloud. And it won't be wrong to say, that it has emerged as a core technology with a definite value proposition in terms of reduced cost and increased agility.

“Within just a few years, cloud computing has reshaped the IT marketplace and the way organizations acquire and use IT products and services, thereby disrupting their strategies. It is increasingly being looked at by the enterprises as a great alternative, as it lets them scale up or down, save organizations money and decrease the time to market,” said Rohit Madhur, Director-Business ByDesign, SAP India. “The successful infusion of the right cloud strategy into your business approach, including focused pilots into your overall IT roadmap, will result in significant business dividends. It is seen as the wave of the future, and maybe that is why the cloud computing market is expected to reach $160 billion by next year,” added Vamsi Mudiam, Cloud Leader, IBM India/South Asia.

If we look at some of the current trends in cloud computing, we will find that today, both the applications and platforms are moving to cloud. In fact, the technology has enabled the cloud environment to run even complex business processes. “We are seeing trends to move tier-2 application on cloud like document management and business process information management. There is also big demand to look at back up and disaster recovery data center on cloud,” pointed out Sunil Chavan, Director-Software and Cloud Solutions, APAC, Hitachi Data Systems. According to Anil Pochiraju, MD-India and SAARC, F5 Networks, the role of application delivery in a cloud computing environment is the same as its role in traditional architectures-to securely deliver high-performing applications while maintaining availability and reliability. The trend of application delivery networking in cloud is rapidly increasing and gaining customer approval.

S Sriram, CEO of iValue InfoSolutions, asserted that CRM, ERP, security, and storage are already building traction of movement to cloud. "Platform-as-a-service is increasingly being used by entrepreneurs to come out with innovative offerings. RIM is also in vogue, which will get consolidated using cloud-based model,” Sriram said. Moreover, the perception of this technology as commercial, is not because of public clouds, but to a large extent it is because of private clouds and this has had an impact on procurement patterns and IT investments. A recent Gartner report suggests that, despite the economies of scale offered by public cloud providers, private cloud services will prevail for the foreseeable future. Though public cloud offerings continue to mature, through 2012, IT organizations will spend more money on private cloud computing.

Regina Tan of Amazon Web Services, however, believes that private clouds come with expensive fixed cost, private installation of infrastructure, and lacks all the key benefits of the cloud. Companies that build these types of internal clouds still own all the capital expense at the datacenters and incur ongoing high maintenance costs. Meanwhile, besides security, the other primary concerns for any organization going in for cloud computing today are compliance and privacy policies, data residency, lack of knowledge and understanding about the platform. Performance, availability as well as scalability and flexibility in the usage of the underlying technology are also on the consideration list of CXOs.

As per the views of Murali Meenakshi Sundaram, Technology Consultant at CSC, security and training needed for cloud adoption are the primary areas of concern. CSC has active programs to communicate about its trusted cloud to alleviate the security concerns. “Customers are looking for a very specific definition of what the interfaces are and how is the service level defined. They also want demonstration of how their data and access is secure and private,” said Lakshman Narayanaswamy, Co-Founder and VP-Products, Sanovi Technologies. Going forward, the market will see rapid growth, as more organizations turn to cloud-based computing and alternative deployment options. Also, the government which is the largest spender on IT services will increasingly understand its benefits as they need not worry about constant server updating and can concentrate on innovation. Government is not just a user, but also a facilitator.

The game changers

Contrary to popular belief, the implementation of clouds is not restricted to large system integrators or cloud service providers only. Even lesser known solution providers have joined the fray, including the likes of QuantM Net Technologies, who has recently launched its own cloud computing offering, called 'Qloud Computing', through which it wants to help its clients take advantage of cloud computing solutions, including the ability of cloud applications to integrate with their existing IT infrastructure via SOA-based Web services. As of now, cloud computing contributes 10 percent in QuantM's overall business model.
Some of the major deployments of QuantM have been a multinational hospitality firm that chose QuantM to be their preferred partner in hosting their mission critical applications, from live environment to its backup on a virtualized performance computing solution; a UK-based MNC consulting firm has chosen QuantM to host its IT infrastructure on IT-as-a-Service model; and an export house based out of Delhi/NCR has tied up with QuantM to switch from its in-house IT infrastructure to Qloud offering. The company has also partnered with a manufacturing firm to provide Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS).

Meanwhile, QuantM is pursuing its cloud computing strategy and this move will enhance its infrastructure-centric services and cloud computing-based solutions for manufacturing, telecom ISV, universities, Internet-based enterprises, retail, including global organizations preferring to outsource/setting up IT infrastructure in India. The company is very upbeat over business prospects in cloud computing from India's price-conscious SMBs. Additionally, it will keep launching more services and offerings as the market matures and customer base grows. Some of the other offerings envisaged are joint initiatives with some ISVs to roll out their applications on Qloud, along with some other basic productivity applications such as office productivity tools, and secure messaging platforms amongst others.

QuantM believes that in future, on-premise enterprise ISVs will push for a private cloud, money and margin will come from verticalized cloud applications, and lastly, social cloud will emerge as a key component platform. “We primarily wanted every business to understand the benefits of cloud computing and the mature services that QuantM delivers. Using these benefits clients can save money without giving up speed, reliability, flexibility, and performance, and will be able to get up and running with our services quickly and easily. Going by our new customer acquisitions and technical expertise we surely can exclaim that, QuantM today is moving in the direction of being a major Qloud player,” said Pawan Khurana, CEO, QuantM Net Technologies.

Aditi Technologies is another solution provider which generates 10-15 percent of its business currently from cloud computing. As a solution provider, it is looking for upper mid market customers that will go for their own private hosted cloud part and the small customers that will go for shared technology. The company's performance in this space has been going very steady, as it provides an end-to-end offering around cloud computing. Besides, it also acts as the consulting partner to the companies in the mid-market and small business segments. Recently, it has signed three new customers in this space. In fact, it is one step ahead in terms of building the frameworks around the cloud platform that will allow it to develop a cloud solution much faster than some of its competitors. Out of its success stories, the two prominent ones include an upper mid-market financial sector customer in the US, who was looking for a collaboration solution, which it did not get with its internal IT and even its infrastructure was not compatible with the collaborative solutions. So, Aditi deployed the cloud solution through which the client is now able to do collaboration in a much faster way, and the deployment also took away all its compatibility issues. The other one is about a retail sector company in Europe, wherein Aditi deployed the cloud solution to enable the collaboration between the partners and the internal employees. Cloud computing is one such solution which is growing very constantly for Aditi Technologies. The company will continue to invest in cloud computing in 2011 as well. It is because the solution provider believes that there is enough supply for the demand to pick up. “Cloud computing as a technology itself makes a lot of sense to the users because either you install the cloud technology inside your datacenter or you can rent it with somebody else. But from a pure incentive or benefits perspective, you will use it as much as the computing powers you need. You can load balance across your different applications. It has lot more benefits in terms of running an IT infrastructure,” said Vineet Kumar Arora, MD, Aditi Technologies.

One of the country's largest solution providers Allied Digital, is also having a fairly large presence in the cloud computing space. The company believes that this is one area where the industry is going towards making their businesses more profitable. Cloud computing is an excellent opportunity that companies are looking at, bringing down their operational costs from the IT side. Allied Digital has got a very good jump start, wherein a few of its clients are already on the cloud and its main focus has been on setting up private clouds for those clients. As these clients are in the infrastructure business, it has been successful in implementing the cloud solution at their end. These clients are focused on certain areas of infrastructure and since they are based out of the US and after the recessionary period, they wanted to revamp the IT part of their business in a cost effective way. That is where, Allied helped them with the cloud computing solution. It gave them end-to-end offering in terms of helpdesk and support, right from the desktops to applications. As of now, the company has been able to do success stories for five of its clients in the US. And out of these five clients, three are from the automobile sector, one from the banking and finance sector, and the last one from the insurance sector. Moreover, it is setting up the private cloud for one of the largest textile manufacturing companies in India, whose details will be disclosed only early next year. The company sees more and more contribution coming up from this area. While only five to seven percent of the revenue comes from cloud computing today, Allied is expecting 20-25 percent of the revenue to come from cloud-based solutions in 2011. It is going to shape up more and more in 2011, in terms of providing private cloud and tuning it up with the integrated solutions. It will also be focusing more on providing end-to-end solution offerings. “It is going to see an exponential growth in the next two years time. Today, we are seeing acceptance from the large enterprises but going forward, it will be driven by mid-sized and small business segments that are going to derive huge value out of cloud computing. It is now the turn of these SMBs to speed up and adapt this technology in a better and productive way so that they don't need to have internal laborers for IT, and manage the attrition issues amongst others,” said Paresh Shah, Director-Technology Solutions Group, Allied Digital.

Ahmedabad-based Sai Infosystems, is also striving to make big in the cloud computing arena. It has recently bagged a project from BSNL for setting up four datacenters in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Cochin, and Ernakulam. As a part of this deployment, cloud computing will be one of the few applications that will be hosted on a couple of datacenters. The company also believes that cloud computing is emerging as a game changer from multiple angles. From the hardware perspective, it will only be an access point and not a computing device; from the user perspective, it will successfully lead to computing going away from PCs; and from the software perspective, the differentiator will be the usage of multiple applications. Sai is of the view that software companies might have to rethink their business as well as marketing strategies. Even the revenue model is going to change drastically and it will be more of a pay-per-use model. TCO will definitely reduce for the companies going in for cloud computing in terms of maintenance, manpower, and upgradation and migration of hardware as well as software. “We are foreseeing a very interesting scenario emerging in the future. And we are going to concentrate more on cloud computing in 2011 and henceforth,” said Kirit Joshi, Senior VP, Sai Infosystems.

The Champ

Now, if we analyze the presence and success stories of these solution providers in the cloud computing space, notwithstanding the presence of the biggies like Allied and Sai, one name that clearly stands out is QuantM Net Technologies. With a rich heritage of providing enterprise-class IT infrastructure solutions for the last 16 years to its customers, QuantM is well positioned to be a strong player in this emerging business opportunity.

Nivedan Prakash
(nivedanp@cybermedia.co.in)

with inputs from Avishek Rakshit
(avishekr@cybermedia.co.in)