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De-fuzzing Cloud mammals- from tusk to tail

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Pratima Harigunani
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Pratima H

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MUMBAI, INDIA: Some sneak out. Some sweat uphill. While some catwalk in the campus. Before this sounds like an intensive build-up for a swoosh-struck shoe ad, let's start talking about another intense word : ‘Cloud'.

The buzz around it in the beginning may have camp fired around the word ‘savings' but of late one can sniff a new fuel raising the temperature ahead. A word everyone loves: ‘revenues'. So can a cloud investment really leapfrog to a level where it can ink money in a new form aka revenues instead of just shaving some cost off the pencil for its customers? Is it something of a new fad for business suits to schmooze about? Or more than that?

Analysts like Sunil Padmanabh , Research Director, Gartner are shrugging off the rainbow for now. He observes that the value proposition for this kind of a potential is not strong presently. It can be like building redundancy, as he views it. Lack of strong use cases, solidify the argument further.

While the good news is that initial doubts over control, security related issues are over and thanks to a good partner ecosystem, many concerns attached to clouds are tapering off (as propensity to save costs gets accelerated); profit-spinning is still not so strong. But like he wistfully adds, in the next four to five years, industries like life sciences or auto can do something in the revenue context too, albeit not much in immediate future.

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Is that what ambitious brains like Lakshmi Narayan Rao, Chief Technologist at Technology Services at HP betting on? What makes HP interpret the zeitgeist of Cloud differently than others? Are they tying laces any differently with these shoes? Let's find out.

Why is ‘cloud' noise not ceasing yet? Are there any layers yet beneath all the hype?

The next level of communication beyond the ‘hype' is exactly what HP is trying to focus on. These are interesting times. Early adopters faced challenges, global organisations made some mistakes too and that has oriented HP with new solutions. Cloud gradually scoped in IaaS (hardware), PaaS (middleware) and SaaS (applications). The idea of moving away from application-specific stack is enticing specially when we have seen tectonic shifts from mainframes, to Client-server to Intranet etc in terms of adoption by enterprises. Siloed applications approach was not working because it did not allow optimal capacity utilization of IT investments. There was no tech tool to cross-utilise IT layers. Then Cloud happened and attracted a lot of attention given its capacity of pooling resources without locking applications. But real value of Cloud is still unharnessed.

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Elaborate?

There are some stages when it comes to how an enterprise leverages Cloud. It travels from standardization, optimization, catalogue of services to differentiated sourcing of services to ensuring high levels of uptime and availability et al. But the extreme stage is where IT can turn into a profit centre by offering its data centre to other organizations. Like a large bank spreading it all for small banks. This is where the value of being verticalised comes in. They can move away from being commoditized and can compete with other Cloud Service Providers too.

Is that palpably visible and possible?

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The attraction so far, honestly is around hype and cost savings. This has motivated organizations to consider Cloud but the fact is that real benefits are much beyond what they can see. Value in terms of flexibility, expansion, scalability, agility, and faster response times without the risk of legacy investments is immense. In fact, the whole cost arbitrage part is no longer the only top priority. It's important for CIOs to realize that Cloud is not always directly economical. There has to be a method to this approach. For instance, an application used by ten thousand users has to be architected depending on the number of users. You can put it on Cloud. But if you forget how response-hungry this application in reality is than the bigger investments in bandwidth or pipe will offset the Cloud saving equation.

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What's the formula to work it well then?

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A good workload analysis is what I would advise. Something like what HP helps with its new set of workshops or technology consulting fuelled with a ‘your cloud, your way' emphasis. Our Cloud workshops dig into our team of 5000 consultants globally and our collective experience distilled into a great offering coupled with a service management skill set. We do not do presentations but disseminate this knowledge through panels and also target business leaders. There are special sessions on tech areas for CIOs and their teams as well.

How do they promise to precisely solve the Cloud puzzle for CIOs? What's really new about this?

It helps to understand Cloud in its entirety. It is product-agnostic and gives a pure technology-oriented perspective. It helps in recognizing that a Cloud could easily be an Elephant with six blind men seeing it from six different angles. We try to juxtapose all angles to create an IT roadmap with current IT footprint. We have already done it for Banking and Telecom verticals.

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Does Cloud rhyme well with the DIY (Do It Yourself) genre of CIOs?

Everything is gravitating towards how CIOs bring in new IT without the shadow IT. Because businesses are adopting new technology faster than IT in some places. CIOs know well that if they do not offer what the users need, they would be circum-vented. It is now ‘payloads to workloads'. Cloud models' choices become crucial here.

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