BANGALORE, INDIA: It may sound bit odd, but that is the scenario like! Even as cloud service provider Salesforce.com is talking about the next stage of cloud computing, with its Cloud 2 concept, India is still shy of the first stage. However, that does not prevent cloud players from tapping the possibilities in India.

Also Read: Choosing the right cloud platform

Shane Owenby, managing director, Asia Pacific, Amazon Web Services, talks to CIOL about the mobile cloud opportunity and what it has in stock to cater to India-specific needs, over an e-mail interaction. Excerpts:

CIOL: What is the kind of momentum that you see in terms of uptake of mobile cloud services in India? How are you catering to it?

Shane Owenby: The proliferation of mobile devices and wireless broadband has opened new opportunities for businesses and developers in India.

Mobile is an important platform in the future of business and with Amazon Web Services (AWS) developers have the flexibility to build applications the way they want with multiple programming languages and operating systems.

They are also not limited to a set amount of storage, bandwidth, or computing resources and only pay for what they use.

Indian companies such as Dialify, Hungama Digital Media, Mediology and MarketSimplified use AWS cloud platform to develop apps, which have enabled ubiquitous access of their services on mobile devices.

With the recently launched AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Java developers in India can accelerate their development process by simply uploading their application in Elastic Beanstalk and not worry about deployment-oriented tasks such as provisioning servers, setting up load balancing, managing scaling or application health monitoring.

While Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the set-up and scales the infrastructure, developers still retain full control over the AWS resources powering their application.

Using AWS Elastic Beanstalk will allow mobile app developers in India to focus on their core competence and accelerate speed to market, which will drive the momentum of cloud services even further.

CIOL: Studies say that India Inc is not an aggressive user of cloud services. What is holding them back?

Shane : The top two major obstacles to adoption for cloud computing are:
Psychology of control: Most large enterprises have several thousand applications, and CIOs/CTOs are responsible for their performance and security. There is a certain amount of comfort in knowing you can take some action if there is a problem, and relinquishing that control and ability to take action is understandably hard.