From being considered the 4th wave of transformation in the IT industry and christened the ‘perfect storm' in technology and business optimisation everyone wants to get powered by ‘the cloud'.
 

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'We can watch the world go by – up on cloud number nine' sang Bryan Adams in his hit single expressing his feelings of being blissfully happy. This exactly is the sublime emotion felt by CXO's globally cutting across industries with the inception of cloud computing.

"Cloud computing undisputedly is the next big step in the IT space; it is a big step for both end users and solution providers. This technology in fact has created a new IT supply chain system all together," says Ezhil Arasan Babaraj, director, CSS Corp Labs. Though in its nascent stage, organisations on the lookout for opportunities to bring in radical changes in managing their businesses have given a thumbs-up to cloud computing.

There are many companies that have understood the importance of cloud computing and the changes that it can bring about to their business. "Organisations can now consume and pay for the IT resources as per usage. This brings down both CAPEX and OPEX tied to IT resources. Cloud enables IT to scale up or scale down as per the users' requirements while offering them better levels of service, at lower costs," explains T Srinivasan, managing director, VMware.

Considering the value seen in adopting cloud, how do we translate the benefits in our books or what is the economics behind cloud computing?  "Over half of the IT costs are just about ‘keeping the lights on', i.e. ongoing operations and maintenance costs of existing computing capability. Cloud computing can certainly optimise the management of businesses by converting capital expenditure into operating expenditure. It helps scale to the needs of the enterprise while also keeping pace with the dynamic business growth," opines Dharanibalan Gurunathan, vice president, IBM.

According to a recent survey, the total cloud computing market in India is pegged at $110 million and is expected to reach figures of $1.05 billion by 2015. This could be seen as huge thrust with mergers & acquisitions and diversification featuring high the list for India Inc. "Cloud transforms the economics of IT, makes new business models possible and unlocks revenue potential, for any business. Companies can enter new markets, respond more quickly to changing customer needs, collaborate more effectively to drive innovation and business value, and execute on strategies that might not have been cost-effective in the past," asserts Kothandraman Karunagaran, vice president, CSC India.

But how would India Inc sustain this growth if their skilled employees are not ‘cloud' ready? "The Indian IT services is on a roll to move towards the cloud and are collaborating with industry cloud vendors and providing cloud based services to their global end customers and enterprises in order to realize its full potential," explains Gurunathan. With so much confidence being shown for cloud computing in India, companies that have understood the changes that cloud computing can bring to their core businesses have already started evolving to being not just providers of software solutions but also software utility companies. This definitely translates as good news for the jobseekers to hop onto this new technology considering the huge potential seen in terms of revenue and growth.

Segments such as healthcare and education can also be transformed with this technology add several industry experts. "Cloud computing would start the concept of the actual Mobile Classrooms. These solutions will provide a hands-on training to students on the benefits and use of new technologies. The rural population could get the best of the learning/education delivered through interactive applications and can also be used for teacher-training courses," says Dr. Rameshwar Kanwar, vice-chancellor, Lovely Professional University (LPU).

"By having cloud based applications for health care, patients (and their doctors thereof) would have the flexibility to access and avail treatment anywhere, anytime," states Srinivasan.

Indiais still an evolving market in terms of adoption, and recent trends show an increased number of enterprises embracing cloud. All this substantiates the fact that cloud computing is here to stay.

- - Manoj Reddy