Amazon, a big daddy in information technology's hottest area -
cloud - has 8,000 customers in India but does not have in this country a
key element of cloud infrastructure - data centres. That's because no
foreign customers would let their data be stored in centres in India,
and only their Indian customers would use it, making it less feasible.
Given the state of infrastructure and data security laws in the country,
customers did not want to take a risk.
So,
instead Amazon stuck with its data centres in Singapore, just like
Google, Rackspace, Citrix, and Facebook who all serve their growing
number of Indian clients from the city state.
Shane
Owenby, Asia-Pacific managing director of Amazon Web Services (the
ecommerce firm's cloud arm), said the company would not comment on
speculation regarding the placement of its data centres and that it was
always looking at geographic expansion.
Even
so, industry observers and participants think that India, the sourcing
hub for the world for technology services, has the potential to become a
hub for the global cloud where digital information is stored, processed
and accessed via the internet. With more and more components of
technology being offered as a service, it is only logical for India to
be the place from where it could all be delivered to the world.
Thanks
to uncertain power supply and patchy infrastructure, India is losing
out on the hardware and storage side of the cloud, but can still be the
nerve centre that helps stitch together various parts of cloud-based
technology solutions and delivers it to enterprises across the world.
India
can still become hub for global cloud computing According to Sid
Deshpande, a data centre analyst at research firm Gartner, companies
such as Amazon, Google and Rackspace have invested significant amounts
of money in innovative designs to be able to provide cheap computing
services using the cloud. "Unless Indian providers are willing to invest
in bleeding-edge technology and skills that enable similar outcomes, I
do not see them as viable competitors in the commodity public cloud
space."
But Deshpande does see the Indian IT
industry playing a role in helping enterprises manage the various
offerings they do buy over the cloud.
The
cloud-computing model makes it possible for corporations to not worry
about the ingredients - be it computing power, storage capacity or
software applications - that go into technology-enabled solutions.
Instead,
they can now consume these as a utility and pay for it based on usage.
It is for the system integrators such as an InfosysBSE -2.19 %, TCS or
WiproBSE -1.05 % to piece together components from a legion of ecosystem
partners and stitch it all together seamlessly to match clients'
specific requirements.
"Indian firms have
reached a maturity in the total outsourcing space, taking away entire IT
needs of large organisations end-to-end. In the cloud scenario they
will take this story forward, forming new partnerships and new business
models," said Srikanth Karnakota, director of Microsoft's server and
cloud business.
Indian IT companies are
increasingly partnering with cloud platform providers to put together
the products an enterprise has chosen from the vast array of cloud
offerings, and tie those products into the parts of the corporation's IT
infrastructure that have not moved to the cloud. And the new job is a
lot like the old one, except the modes of delivery and payment will
change. The challenge will be when clients' expectations for
technology-led innovation increase and IT recedes into the background,
much like plumbing.
"While a lot of companies
offer the infrastructure and the platform, Indian IT service providers
will use the skills of system integration in process and applications.
We will play a strong role in putting the three components together,"
said Atul Sood, global head of cloud enablement at Wipro.
This
new-age version of system integration is called cloud brokerage
services and becoming big business. Gartner predicts that the segment
will be worth $100 billion ( 6 lakh crore) in 2014. As cloud service
brokerage grows, Indian IT players are getting ready to shift with the
inevitable change in business models, partnerships and job
requirements.
"There will be new partnerships.
Even the cloud providers would need partners. An Amazon, for example,
which provides the infrastructure and platform as a service, would need
partners to manage the back-up, network connectivity and applications,"
said Kalyan Kumar, chief technology architect for HCL Technologies.
Infosys,
the number two IT services company in India, said it expects majority
of the workload in global enterprise IT to move to the cloud and expects
both the global cloud providers and Indian IT services companies to own
parts of the infrastructure that makes the cloud possible.
"It
will be a combination of ownership, depending on the organizational
strategy. At Infosys, we will continue to be asset-lite and an ecosystem
integrator. We have already established deep partnerships with over 30
organizations such as AWS, Microsoft and others," Vishnu Bhat, vice
president and head of Infosys Cloud and Big Data business, said in an
email. IT companies are also beginning to consider the need to re-skill
employees to manage cloud services and infrastructure.
