Internal clouds to occupy CIO skyline next

MUMBAI, INDIA: Two years from now, internal cloud for global enterprises will possibly shower significant business opportunities to meeting respective CIO needs.

Quinnox that offers IT lifecycle solutions, including packaged implementations and product development services covering ERP, SCM and CRM, sees attractive business in near future in this emerging space.

Ravi Sundaram, business pursuit leader, Quinnox Consultancy Services, shared that the company's technology research group's ten-member team is working steadfastly in this area of future client requirement.

“We have seen the growth of SaaS and as cloud technology evolves further, it would be nice to see what possible direction it can take in future,” he said, adding that it is a bet for sure, but a long-term bet.

“We are hopeful that this space would translate into attractive business. As the market progresses further we will see that the traction made by external cloud companies would be simulated in the internal clouds, by global corporations,” said Ravi Sundaram.

“These CIOs would need relevant technology support as they generate massive internal clouds. They would need a host of components around that and with stuff like social networking etc added upon internal clouds, the space would be interesting to deliver for.”

The other area that the company is directing its R&D adrenaline to is enterprise mash-ups. Mash-up, in general, is a Web application that combines data or functionality from two or more sources into a single integrated application.

Business mash-ups differ from consumer mash-ups in the level of integration with business computing environments, security and access control features, governance, and the sophistication of the programming tools (mash-up editors) used. There is also a growing trend of using Business Mash-ups in commercial SaaS set-ups.

He is upbeat on enterprise mash-ups catching up. This would redefine mash-ups which so far have ruled the consumer side of the market, but he believes that as the market matures and APIs become available while Web 2.0 truly finds its way, enterprise version of mash-ups would come to rule too. “These would be another space of integration and can replace portals.”

While both portals and mash-up are content aggregation technologies, portals is relatively an older technology, and extension to traditional Web server model. mash-ups on the other hand use loosely defined 'Web 2.0' techniques.

In case of portals, traditional approach rules as content aggregation takes place on the server. For mash-ups, the content aggregation can take place either on the server or on the client. Gradually, mash-up use is expanding in the business environment and business mash-ups are useful for integrating business and data services, as these technologies provide the ability to develop new integrated services quickly, to combine internal services with external or personalized information, and to make these services tangible to the business user through user-friendly Web browser interfaces.

So far Quinnox has made inroads into domains like retail, manufacturing and BFSI with IT implementations, custom application development, application migration, application testing, enterprise application integration. It is now steering its direction acutely towards OPE (Offshore Product Engineering) which as of now makes a significant portion of its 15 per cent slice from application development. “We have already been doing work in this space and have platforms. Now we will organize ourselves more around OPE business,” Sundaram says.