Over the last few months, Razi Healthcare has been on an expansion spree, setting up primary healthcare clinics in Hyderabad and elsewhere in Andhra Pradesh. But it also wants to ensure that all its patients receive the same standard of medical services at all its centres.
N V Subba Rao, the company CEO, opted for iON – a branded on-demand cloud computing offering from India’s largest IT services provider, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) – to digitise patient-care profiles with electronic medical records that would help in easy access and more accurate treatment. Now Rao is one of TCS’ 250-odd clients.
Also called IT-as-a-service (ITaaS), iON is sharply focused on small- and medium sized businesses (SMBs). “It dispenses with the need for these companies to invest in IT assets or retain scarce IT talent. It allows them to choose whatever is relevant to their needs from an integrated suite of hardware, network, and software solutions provisioned by iON and its partner network (100 Cloud Service Partners across India). SMBs only have to pay subscription charges for what they use. The software hosted by TCS runs on the internet and users can use it on standard browsers,”says V Ramaswamy, Global Head of iON, TCS
He adds that the solution addresses the entire spectrum of an SMB’s technology needs. TCS iON is not a new concept. Cloud computing has been around for many years in India and matured from its earlier avatar – the application service provider or ASP model. Also referred to as Software-as-a-service (SaaS), cloud computing allows on-demand network access to a shared pool of computing resources like servers, networks, storage and applications. Organisations can avail of third-party services for all their IT requirements, and pay as they use the infrastructure, thus saving around 30-40 per cent in costs, according to industry estimates.
Other than the global players like Amazon, Salesforce, Google, Microsoft, IBM, Hewlett Packard, Cisco and Oracle, and Indian players like Wipro, and Netcore offer these services. The cloud computing market in India, according to a study by Zinnov Management Consulting, is around $400 million and expected to touch $4.5 billion by 2015.
So what’s different with TCS iON? For one, iON is part of TCS’ focus on a set of three strategic growth business initiatives to drive non-linear (other than headcount-related) growth opportunities. The other two initiatives include software products and platform-based BPO services. Second, it’s a branded solution focused on SMBs. “TCS was known to serve large customers. We took a decision to reach out to SMBs – companies with a turnover between Rs 10 crore and Rs 500 crore and with anywhere between 10- and 1,500 employees. For this, we needed special handling, and hence a special brand,”says Ramaswamy.
The branding symbolism does not escape attention. iON, for instance, represents a charged particle on the cloud (metaphor for the internet). iON also stands for ‘Information ON’ – again representing the 24x7 nature of the internet. The logo also has a ‘switch’ symbol placed with the ‘O’ of iON. “It represents the utility model of the solution,”says Ramaswamy. He adds that the iON solution is further customised to cater to industry verticals such as ‘iON manufacturing’ and ‘iON retail’.
“We conceptualised iON somewhere in 2007. In early 2008, we began having extensive discussions with SMBs. We realised that they were fed up with mulitiple vendors who lacked coordination. They also did not understand compliance (iON has embedded all statutory requirements in its solution). And all of them were wary of increasing their capex. Hence, we came up with this third-generation model, iON,”says Ramaswamy.
TCS has two data centres – Mumbai and Hyderabad – where it hosts the data of its customers. “There’s only a two-minute lag between these centres that also have a disaster-recovery plan,”says Ramaswamy. But why did TCS wait till 2011 to make noise about the product?
“We wanted at least 100 customers before we spoke about the product. We have done many events in smaller towns and cities. We will soon have TV and print ads too,”says Ramaswamy.
