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Cloud Computing: The Indian reality

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CIOL Bureau
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BANGALORE, INDIA: Cloud computing in India seems to be at a crossroads, undecided which way to take.

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On one hand, many analysts agree that the cloud computing market in India will grow to over a billion dollars by 2015 and will see a CAGR of over 40 percent, others lament the relatively low adoption and lack of awareness about cloud computing.

In reality, these are not contradictory — the low adoption is the opportunity that he cloud providers will quickly capitalize on, leading to rapid growth. So, the future certainly looks cloudy — and bright!

Also Read: Cloud computing changes nothing

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Most analysts look at what cloud computing provides, and try to map it to what the Indian industry needs, or will need. Let us take the opposite approach. Let us look, instead, at some of the typical characteristics of the Indian market, and see how some of these dovetail nicely with the cloud model. What trends can we foresee using this viewpoint?

Indian businesses have been known to favour low-cost, practical solutions. The cloud model perfectly fits this mindset. The idea of “pay-per-use” and of converting large capital costs into incremental costs is bound to appeal to the CIOs and CFOs alike, ensuring rapid adoption.

Keep in mind the growing SMB market, which does not want to lag behind on technology in spite of limited resources, and you can see why India is being touted by some as “cloud computing’s next battlefield”.

Thus, we should definitely expect to see a trend of smaller, leaner organizations becoming the “early adopters”, taking the jump into the cloud, creating innovative solutions, tearing-down the barriers to adoption, increasing awareness and causing the larger and more conservative users to join, thereby bridging the “chasm” and taking cloud mainstream.

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With maturing safeguards, we see the government sector eventually adopting the cloud, giving the industry a revenue boost, and taking e-governance to new levels.

Another interesting characteristic of Indian users is the ability to leap-frog intermediate technologies and quickly adopt the latest and greatest. We have seen this in the communications space, where India (and other developing economies) jumped straight to mobile communications, while the advanced economies were still transitioning from the internet-based-communication stage.

Luckily, mobility and cloud seem to be becoming perfect dance partners. The latest mobile devices, with their on-board computing power, are giving rise to a new generation of applications where the internet only provides the data, and all the user-experience is built on the device.

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These new generation “thick” clients rely on “always-on” services to provide them useful data that is increasingly coming from the cloud. Even more interestingly, the services they call on are increasingly becoming inter-connected, collaborating with other related services on the cloud — all coming together seamlessly to provide rich, multifaceted applications.

Thus, we will see an increasing trend where social media, location-aware services, real-time data feeds, micro-transactions, audio and video being pulled together harmoniously from the cloud to create “symphonies” on handheld devices. And India, with its volume-driven market, growing mobile-adoption, youth-oriented demographic and quick-adoption of technology, is perfectly poised to tune-into this music.

However, before we go build castles in the clouds, here’s another trend that we badly need. Internet and mobile connectivity in India would have to get faster and more reliable so as not to rain down on our cloud plans.

The author is AVP — Technology at Ness Technologies (India).

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