'Cloud will be a big game changer'

What are your views on cloud adoption in your own organization as well as in Indian enterprises?

Over the last 2-3 years, people have seen cloud in India but there’s not much cloud adoption here. However, the adoption of cloud will be faster in SMEs and then large enterprises. Large enterprises will first look at private cloud and then maybe for some other services or application they might take on public cloud.

But over the next 1-2 years, I don’t think many large enterprises will move their mission-critical applications on to public cloud whereas small enterprises are concerned, many of them are already on cloud and will continue to move their mission-critical applications on cloud.

As far as my own organization is concerned, we have invested in cloud and will continue to do so. We have created a huge private cloud but I would not like to say it as a private cloud; rather it’s a community cloud — it’s a cloud for all our dealers for various services.

When you look at Indian industries, largely there are big numbers of private and government organizations such as PSUs. Given the situation, which kind of organizations you think will adopt cloud in India?

As I have said, adoption of cloud is bit slow. The IT companies would have adopted cloud, maybe for server, quality, testing applications and others such environments. Whereas when I look at government sector, actually I think there’s a distinct change. Governments are largely looking at private cloud in a big way than public cloud because of various reasons.

Which are the top emerging technologies that you see that will have big impact on businesses?

From my perspective, I look at 3 key technologies — social media, mobility and cloud. Over the last 2-3 years, social media may have been a consumer thing but if I see in last one year, social media has gone into the business segment and business companies are looking at social media in a big way.

Secondly, mobile phones are everywhere, but not many people really use the power of mobility for some work except for emails and not beyond that. And lastly, I think cloud will be a big game changer for businesses.

How much the current economic situation will impact IT budgets or spent of enterprises?

It largely depends on how organizations look at IT — will they see IT as something which can only help them to improve efficiency or not. For example, this particular project called Hero Honda Connect Dealer Management System (DMS), which was India’s largest IT implementation project. When we started it in 2008-09, it was actually the global recession period and at that time we spent almost 3-4 times of our annual budget.

So if the company feels that IT can really power their business, it will spend more on IT but it depends on company to company and I do know many companies, which have actually cut down IT budgets.

In the last one and half year, the IT budgets have come to normalcy; however, with the US, Europe and now even India talking of a bit of slowdown in the last 3-6 months, I think a lot of companies will have IT budget cut, but at Hero MotoCorp I don’t expect any budget cuts.

As far I know, at Hero Moto Corp, the IT budget for this year or next year will be at least 70-75 per cent higher than last year as we have planned a major expansion and IT will play a major role there.