First question in context to OPD – What kind of transition is actually happening at ISV level, as (and if) they re-orient themselves to a new ‘Cloud’ era?

A lot is changing – licensing, existing customer base or offshoring subscription models. New stuff is happening on operations part, monitoring, billing etc. There is change on the product management side as well as now they have to focus on renewing subscriptions young. On the delivery side, it’s now about faster delivery in an agile way. Yes, some ISVs are working on ‘Cloud’ options, specially the ones that can leverage their ecosystem, partners and customers. I would say this would be an interesting area to watch out for.

There are many other potholes to ‘Clouds’ apart from security concerns - Elasticity, services levels, availability, control, and application latency to name a few. How are they being tackled?

Service level part would be challenging in the short-term, because most clouds focus only on infrastructure levels. They need to be handled in controlled-private-cloud environments. As to application-latency, the point is that application overloads specially with legacy scenarios have to be taken care of. A lot of public clouds have multiple-points of distribution and content delivery mechanisms. Available latency in combination of technology would be workable.

When it comes to Disaster Recovery areas or mission-critical applications, are they going to stay in –off-cloud zone?

Yes, there would be applications which are not at all suited to be going to ‘clouds’. But in a bigger picture, it’s still a small percentage.

In his book ‘Rewiring the World: The Big Switch’ Nicholas Carr alludes how the ‘Cloud’ phenomenon can put internal IT departments out of business. How strong is that contention in your view?

It is a fact actually. Sixty-to-seventy per cent of a CIO’s time is gone in keeping the lights on. So ‘Cloud’ will allow them time to focus on ‘value’ areas. IT has a different role then and it will be free to focus on forward-looking components. Still areas like security and control are around and work is happening on that front. PaaS and SaaS are catching up and these new trends won’t be show-stoppers.

According to Forrester’s 2009 Cloud Computing report, 44 per cent enterprises are slated to be interested in building their own internal clouds. Who will win the bigger slice of the pie – Private Clouds, Public Clouds or Hybrid Clouds?

When it comes to Public Clouds, a lot of marquees ISVs are beginning to line-up their offerings. Private Cloud, is surely an interesting concept. This is because of factors like trusted domain and Cloud benefits, so yes, a lot of infrastructure providers are looking at that area. Public Clouds are very much becoming a reality and at the same time enterprises have started to build upon this new option faster.

How soon can we see concepts like ‘specialised clouds’ or ‘vertical clouds’ into action?

That’s a very good idea certainly. Some are already established while some are in development stage, example, those in financial segments. So, a ‘Cloud’ provider can have a low-latency, high-performance cloud or a huge cloud which has no SLA area.