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The cloud services business has been gathering momentum in India, with global and local players expanding their focus on the country’s market. Today, the question that enterprises have been asking is not why they should migrate to cloud, but which workload they could shift to cloud. According to players like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, IBM, and Google, Indian companies are at the forefront of adopting cloud technologies.
“From being mobile-first to largely avoiding the costly hurdle of transitioning legacy systems, India’s workforce is ahead of the curve. This advantage allows Indian enterprises to adopt cutting-edge technology with greater ease and serve as a model for digital transformation globally,” says Rick Harshman, managing director (Asia Pacific & Japan), Google Cloud.
Vivek Malhotra, cloud leader, IBM India/South Asia, thinks similarly. “With IBM MobileFirst, IBM is helping companies around the world plan, integrate, optimise, and manage their mobile IT infrastructure so that they can take advantage of the new business opportunities enabled by mobile technologies,” he says.
For starters, cloud service means resources delivered through internet. It can be broadly classified into software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and infrastructure as a service (IaaS). Facebook and Twitter are some simple examples of SaaS. PaaS is more useful for developers of software, where they can build an app, run and manage it. IaaS gives you the computing infrastructure such as server space, network connections, and hardware, etc, so that you don’t have to physically install at the place of work and maintain it.
The advantages of using cloud are many: There are pay-as-you-go option, automatic software updates, less capital cost, disaster recovery, work from home, and much more. Although there are concerns about data security, the cloud service providers are trying to address those issues with different packages like public, private and hybrid cloud.
India has the second-largest mobile internet base in the world and there is a huge number of mobile devices specific to India or with a higher market share in India than in other countries. To tap this base, the mobility team of Amazon Web Services (AWS) has included a number of India-focused devices from Micromax, Lava, Samsung, etc, in its device farm service, which allows users to test its mobility application across various mobile device.
Business across sectors – start-ups, information technology, manufacturing, banking and financial services, health care, retail and professional services are increasingly hopping on to cloud. “Lupin Pharma deployed our analytics platform in less than four weeks to help its business customers make better decisions,” says AWS India head Bikram Singh Bedi.
Book publisher Macmillan reduced provisioning time from six weeks to 30 minutes by migrating its mission-critical SAP infrastructure to AWS, informs AWS, adding BSE eliminated hours of manual time and effort for its members by providing them an algorithm trading test environment. Retail firm Future Group, similarly, is saving 40% in cost by running SAP Hybris in a hybrid architecture with AWS, and online start-up Practo is providing 60 million users across India with health care advice from 200,000 doctors and 10,000 hospitals on AWS cloud network.
According to a Gartner report, the public cloud services market in India is projected to grow 30.4% in 2016 to the size of $1.26 billion. “The GI Cloud project by the GoI to accelerate the adoption of IT to transform the delivery of eServices across the central and State governments will further open up market opportunities in the country,” says Vivek Malhotra, cloud leader, IBM India-South Asia.
According to a survey by Microsoft and leading market research firm Wakefield Research, 57% respondents from India have adopted public cloud solutions, 33% say their companies are using hybrid cloud (a combination of public and private cloud) solutions. The survey highlights that 64% Indian respondents believe that public cloud solutions are very important to connect seamlessly to their organisation’s existing data centres five years from now. “Today, 52 of the top 100 Indian companies listed on BSE use Microsoft cloud (local and global),” says a Microsoft spokesperson.
According to Cisco Global Cloud Index, 59% (2.3 billion users) of the consumer internet population will by 2020 use personal cloud storage, against 47% (1.3 billion users) in 2015. “With over 75,000 active customers in India and over 80% y-o-y growth in the Amazon partner network, we are seeing significant cloud growth in India,” says AWS’ Bedi.
A late entrant to the Indian market, Google is looking to ramp up its activity in the country. Rick Harshman, managing director, JAPAC, Google Cloud Platform, says his company has been looking to the interest received from traditional enterprises, small and medium businesses and start-ups in a range of sectors; the company’s cloud business is growing extremely fast, with customer adoption growing by triple digits. “We are hiring more than 1,000 people globally to our customer team to meet the demand and to ensure companies have a proper transition the cloud. We are excited to build on the momentum we are seeing from current and potential customers to bring the full commitment of Google Cloud to India with a Cloud Region launching next year,” says Harshman.
In the past few months, there has been a lot of buzz in the area of cloud computing. Indian IT major Wipro recently acquired US-based consultancy firm Appirio, a services company with a large offshore firm that helps companies implement cloud applications like SalesForce, for $500 million. Last month, Google announced that it would set up its first India data centre in Mumbai by 2017 to catch up with rivals Microsoft and Amazon in the cloud space. VMware, which provides cloud and virtualisation software and services, recently said it was going to have a broader coverage in India.
