BANGALORE: Cloud computing is turning out to be a strong buzz word among enterprises large and small. For Salesforce.com, having revolutionized software-as –a service, cloud computing is yet another means of leveraging its might in the services based software segment.  Peter Coffee, Director of Platform Intelligence, Salesforce.com talks to Sigi Achappa about the company's plans for cloud computing and its significance.

Excerpts.

How is Salesforce.com planning to leverage cloud computing?

By offering the functions of business as a service over the Internet that allows businesses  -without large investment in infrastructure and businesses of every size to have same power and flexibility that was available to organizations with large data centers and technology. Now companies can get up to speed immediately, with no need to acquire large complicated process acquisitions, no need to learn the use technology .

Complicated issues like information security, protection again backup becomes part of the service. All of these are areas in which considerable expertise is required and older model   are expensive that small firms my not be able to sustain. This is the key idea behind SaaS (Software-as-a-service).

How will it impact Indian enterprises?
Now what has made this important in the Indian market is the strong alignment of this tech model and the needs of the tech market place in India. Eg: automobile industry $10 billion – spread across many small companies—suppliers to large companies. Large organisations want to enjoy efficiencies of technology, so small companies have to make investments in technology not directly related to their core business like production capacity. So when the function of enterprise software is to becomes affordable as it is for large organizations suits the business environment in India and has the entrepreneurial –capabilities to make them part of the global marketplace, so its easy to get started and easy to grow rapidly.

How is Salsforce.com proposing to offer cloud services without the vast computing resources compared to an Amazon or Google?
Salesforce is a leader in enterprise software which enables cloud computing can be able to describe various service – Google portals with which one can do computing power—what we do –extremely easy  for using –they do not have to buy the hardware—but can begin at a very high level. We provide a framework for building business applications, which means the business does not have to waste time on low-level functions. It is packaged by us concentrated on their business processes, much time spent on unrelated areas - business gets a very valuable head start and focuses on it own business priorities. There are different companies offering different services in the cloud storage - You Tube – stores and  delivers video in the Internet and in Saleforce we build business applications that tie together data of different companies, integrate different services –web services –integrating systems and exchange and operate on each others information.

When do you see cloud computing going mainstream?

It depend on whether new investments are going to be most spent on infotech systems, most spent on maintaining and managing systems which is dead money. Out of $100 spent $90 spent on maintenance, only 10 percent is spent on new capability – that balance has to change, for every $100 most of it should create new capabilities only small percentage of it to maintain that. It is an attractive proposition for companies. Many companies are shifting that perspective, Dell has adopted Salesforce as a strategic partners for their new platforms. Most new systems will be in this manner – it will be many years before this system is reversed. Interestingly in India so many companies have not already made large investments already SaaS will become dominant much sooner than older mature markets such as US or Europe. Independent research companies, indicate that spending in Saas and PaaS (Platform-as-a-service) will grow 30 per cent worldwide but 70 to 80 percent in India for the next several years.

If u think about every way that India's economy is growing today Saas is well tailored to suit that economy. Lot of organisations provide soft ware services—making investments in technology – and understanding the SaaS model . Tata has 150 developers using salesforce platform . Companies in US, which have their own development teams located in Philippines and development centers in Delhi using our Platform-as-a-service technology to build faster apps. Lot of SMBs in India that have no IT investment and do things manually because they do not have the resources required to train and operate people. They may adopt modern systems once available to modern practice to help their business grow. SMB represent 40 percent of the tech spend as well as growing at 40 percent. The domestic market place has the availability to serve the international marketplace with greater efficiencies and capabilities.

How will you address the security concerns that may arise in such an environment?

There is often concern that data stored by somebody else may not be secure—but the more they learn, the more they realize the security of the cloud model is better than businesses are able to provide for themselves. Its tested and certified by auditing firms. The systems are being run in a centralised manner and can provide detailed reporting of exactly how information is being used—and actually wind up with a better understanding of how it is being used and have better confidence that it being protected by better technology than when you are operating on your own and when customers acquaint themselves with it their confidence increases. The same goes for reliability – people will understand our systems are very safe against natural disaster as new data centers are operational in Singapore with very high level of protection.

What is your opinion on grid computing vis-à-vis cloud computing?
It is very useful to understand that the grid is one of the important models of computing but not the only one. Grid has many identical components that are individually very inexpensive and connect s them in a way which behave like one large comp much less expensive. But once you've done that all the work building software must be done. The grid solves one problem—that is making basic components capable of being modular but that is all it does. The next step is how you can u make not just the hardware function, but the software much more available and economic to SMBs? That is what Salesforce is doing –not just a flexible data center but a software. You can think of the grid as enabling technology but software applications framework on top of something that using some of the ideas of grid computing --now you have something much more applicable for businesses.