HCL Infosystems enters cloud computing business

NEW DELHI, INDIA: HCL Infosystems, the $2.5 billion Indian ICT hardware, services and system integration company, today announced its entry into cloud computing business with the launch of HCL O’zone service which will offer business applications, productivity applications and IT service solutions to the users.

“HCL O’zone will help users to concentrate on just opex model instead of worrying for capex. It will provide flexibility to our customers to use applications as per their choice and free them from paying huge license fee that is normally charged by software vendors. We have included Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) in our cloud framework,” said George Paul, executive vice-president, HCL Infosystems, while speaking to reporters on the occasion of the launch.

Paul mentioned that HCL O’zone is first cloud service in India which has infrastructure up and running where as other players are still at inception stage.

Pual mentioned that HCL O’zone is a cloud service developed by company in collaboration with partners and is evaluating if the company can club its cloud offering with other cloud service providers in India.

“We are in a business where we will keep on evaluating whether to club our service with other cloud service providers,” said Paul.

HCL Infosystems sees SMBs and SOHOs as the main target for the O’zone services and will increase its SMB channel partners in this year for doing business in this segment.

“We see SMB and SOHO as early starters for our cloud service. To capture this segment we will increase our partnership in SMB channel network. They will be more like value added resellers and system integrators in their own capacity,” said Paul.

HCL Infosystems at present has 150 such SMB channel partners which it will scale to 400 partners by the end of this year.

HCL O’zone will provide ERP, financial accounting, CRM, payroll and HR Mate, document management and Wellogic suite as part of its business application suite. In productive applications, HCL O’zone has included web conferencing, office suite, mail, project management and unified communications.

Paul mentioned that HCL Infosystems will increase its engagement with Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) to increase the number of applications on its cloud offering.

“Any ISV can come to us and discuss for putting his application on O’zone. We are constantly looking to increase this kind of partnership,” said Paul.

The company will provide thin clients to its customer for connecting there existing computing devices with cloud service.

“The thin client that we are offering starts from Rs 9000 onward,” mentioned Paul.

However, most of the services being offered by HCL O’zone are from proprietary vendors and no free applications are being offered by company at the moment. This will make tough task for the company to penetrate in to SMB and SOHO segment where customers will soon see cloud computing solution based on Open source platform.