Opportunities unfold for HPC biz in India

Sanghamitra

According to IDC, the HPC market is growing after a period of sluggishness. It’s now around $10 billion and is expected to grow this year and steadily through 2019. Also, the collision of HPC and big data has perhaps been bigger than expected.

Few of the top HPC trends in 2015 outlined by IDC are: Big data combined with HPC is creating new solutions; Growing influence of the datacenter in IT food chain; HPC in the cloud gaining traction.

Witnessing huge growth and potential in the Indian HPC market, Darius Wilke, general manager, Global High Performance Computing Business, Fujitsu, shares some insights on HPC's demands and the company's developments.

He says, "HPC being our key focus and India among the three markets for us apart from Germany and UK, it is a significant market for us which has been continually growing and gaining traction. Although the market here is still maturing, we have already seen a significant triple digit growth. All segments of businesses are now realizing the potential of HPC and are ready to pick it up."

He added that 80pc of Fujitsu's HPC revenue is attained from Government, Research and academic institutions and automotive segment but now enterprises and SMEs are too picking up quite fast so its building a huge opportunity in the Indian ecosystem. And to keep the growth trajectory, the company plans to increase its investments in multiple areas including sales, infrastructure, technology. Globally, we will be spending 5pc of our investments on R&D only."

"The challenge for us right now is to address the different maturity levels of customers from different regions. The experienced ones want to have only compute power to manage and hold infrastructure while few customers are not even aware how to benefit from this technology."

The demands and challenges differs based on the size of the businesses so meeting all the expectations with different offerings is quite critical.

"We are continuously enhancing our enterprise portfolio's offering with power consumption, density etc and will soon be launching liquid cooling option to address demands."

"We aim to simplify the choices for our customers and the offerings according to their needs and demands and let them deploy within hours," he said.

Elaborating the trends and demands of HPC and its market, the experts of Fujitsu said, "20pc of the customers have started using HPC on cloud and so we are focusing in bringing more offerings with cloud technology. Enterprises demand more of a private HPC cloud while SMEs prefer using public cloud. So bringing in hybrid cloud models is more preferable to meet the demands of the market. Our 'cloud bursting' offering in HPC business will also help them enhance the efficiency of their cloud technology."

With the convergence of big data and cloud emerging, the customers now do not make a difference between big data and HPC so picking up the trends and transforming them into offerings is a new challenge, the company is facing which inevitably makes the process of decision making also quite difficult.

Darius Wilke further added, "Converging HPC and big data is a global trend now. Secondly the trend that we have been observing is cloud based deployment model although it is at a nascent stage. Overall, I can say we have laggards who are yet to understand the technology and few early adopters who are demanding cloud and optimization. This clearly helps us infer on the diversity and maturity of the market."

But, he asserts there is a major incline to adapt the technology which will inevitably accelerate the growth of the business in a span of next few years.