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May - 2014 issue

Cloud - Levelling the Playing Field for India

By Vignesh Anantharaj

Email connectivity, VoIP, file sharing, web meetings and a robust IT infrastructure has forever been the backbone of many SMEs. For many years, small companies bore the brunt of having to deal with poor tech choices. They either had the option of using software designed for large companies that were downright expensive or cheap software choices that lacked functionality. Today, the cloud is leveling the playing field.

Gartner predicts that from 2013 through 2017, $4 billion will be spent on cloud services in India. SaaS is the largest overall cloud market segment, followed by infrastructure as a service (IaaS), totally $76 million in 2014 and business process as a service (BPaaS), totally $73 million over the same period. Although these figures look promising, India is yet to live up to the confident growth predictions for cloud computing put forward by analyst firms.

Many foreign IT clients complain that it is hard to buy IT products and services considering the level of macroeconomic instability present in India. However, the ability of the cloud to drastically scale up and down makes it an attractive alternative to buying hardware, more specifically, during times of unpredictability.

During one of the many interviews for this issue, a CEO posed a very interesting argument- whether the application should modify itself according to the nature of the cloud or the cloud should transform to suit the requirements of the application?! Thoughts such as these form the building blocks of tomorrow’s success stories. Recognizing such companies who want to take the leap and change the landscape of the cloud in India is what we have tried to showcase in this month’s “20 Most Promising Cloud Computing Companies”. The list ranges from the most sought after cloud security providers to all in one business management cloud platform providers.

We also feature CRMIT, for their contributions to the space of CRM and we highlight how exactly they are changing the course of CRM in the cloud. CtrlS Datacenters, India’s only tier 4 datacenter, and CliQr, find mention as our products of the month in Datacenters and the Cloud respectively. We also showcase the journey of Punit Thakkar, who strives to bring a change in the lives of many organizations through his company, Shivaami Cloud Services.

Do let us know what you think.

Vignesh Anantharaj
Managing Editor
vignesh@cioreview.com