India is poised to play a significant role in the cloud paradigm

BANGALORE, INDIA: Adoption of cloud in various forms has been picking up momentum in the recent past. The compelling value proposition of cloud model to CXO's, at a time when the economy and growth have been uncertain, have only accelerated the adoption.

Cloud model with its inherent benefits of "pay as you use with zero capex", "capability to scale up or down based on need", "managed and assured", "freedom from obsolescence and refresh cycles", etc. are making it a compelling value proposition to business across size and vertical in various forms and flavors.

As per Gartner, the Public cloud market is poised to grow at 30 percent to $550Mn in 2014. This spend will grow to $1.3Bn by 2017. A total of $4Bn spends forecasted on cloud in India between 2013 and 2017. Software as a service forms significant portion of this cloud spends followed by Infrastructure as a service.

It's encouraging to see Cloud driving innovation in the IT space. India till now is more known for its "IT services" addressing a large portion of the $120 Bn "IT outsourcing" market over the last two decades. Numerous start-ups are leveraging "cloud" over the last 2+ years and initiating the transition for India to "product" and "IP" play.

India will have the largest population of young people over the next two decades. It's very critical for the nation to engage this large and young population in a productive way. Innovations in product and IP space is critical to ensure enough employment opportunity for all, moving forward, which can be made possible through "affordable" cloud.

The Indian IT Services story is all about "Outsourcing" non-core activities and focusing mainly on core business related ones. The cloud story will also be driven by the same concept. While the large entities around the globe adopted IT outsourcing, we are seeing the start-ups, SME and SMB driving adoption of public cloud.

The large entities are focusing on private cloud while evaluating public cloud for less critical initiatives to optimize on costs. We already see "Cloud aggregators" gaining ground to offer customers one single platform comprising of variety of cloud offerings with a single Service level agreement to make it convenient for a customer to avail from a single entity with an integrated payment option.

Most of us are already are dependent on cloud on our personal front for emails, chat - text, voice, video, storage and sharing of files and pictures, social networking, etc. Many new age business formed in the recent past are completely based out of cloud infrastructure and applications, from day one.

We will soon see most business leveraging cloud in some or other form and over time with growing confidence with accruing benefits, it will soon be mainly on cloud, sooner than later. This transition will happen fast, since cost of capital is increasing along with manpower and operating costs, impacting profitability, in a low growth, and high cost environment. This is leading to smaller IT budgets which are insufficient to cater to business needs.

With lower growth and higher competition, leveraging IT to drive efficiency and spot growth opportunity becomes inevitable choice for business of all sizes and types. Hence affordable cloud model makes business sense especially in such economic climate. With innovations becoming cheaper, we will see compelling and affordable solutions for both consumer and business segments.

Soon we will have super market for cloud based business and personal applications and infrastructure. Social media will become the primary channel to promote these offerings without any geographic boundary. Hosting and consumption will happen from everywhere across the globe. Distance for business will die and the world will become the market place.

Consolidation will start picking up steam. Many new "market place" for cloud offerings will emerge. The tremendous pace of cloud adoption will push the ecosystem to evolve new standards on service levels, security around data, data privacy, standards for interoperability and global laws for protecting rights of customers using cloud hosted by service providers from different continents.

Standard IT Hardware such as server, desktop, laptop will slowly but steadily become less relevant to consumer and business, with mobility and BYOD trends gaining importance.

It's great to see Indian state and central government making rapid strides in adopting cloud for all its citizen services. Most of the states have their own data centre which is being used to rollout internet based interface for consumer and business initiatives.

Already we see benefits on many fronts such as all tax remittance happening through e-initiatives, saving precious time and manpower involvement, for both sides. As we no longer physically visit a bank for most of our needs, we shall also stop visiting any government entity for any of the citizen needs, soon.

The next phase of internet looks even more exciting thanks to innovation around cloud. India needs to catch up big time on back end infrastructure to make business and consumer leverage the benefits of cloud with affordable, reliable and fast connectivity, both wired and wireless, not only in major cities but also in remote villages. That will ensure unleashing of real potential of India's present and future in the cloud era.

India is poised to play a significant role in the cloud paradigm for sure as we did with "IT services".

The author is co-founder and managing director of iValue InfoSolutions