Cloud To Deliver Up To 50% Saving To Indian Cos

EMC Corporation and Zinnov Management Consulting, a leading management consulting firm and today announced findings of a study on the “Private Cloud Landscape in India”. According to the study, there is an increased preference of cloud adoption over the next five years in India. The total cloud market in India, currently at US$ 400 million will reach a market value of US$ 4.5 billion by 2015; of which private cloud adoption will dominate and account for US$ 3.5 billion in revenues, growing at over 60 percent.
The study also brings to attention that while private cloud market will create 1 lakh jobs by 2015 from 10,000 today – an opportunity for students and the workforce – companies today are under-skilled in addressing cloud computing implementations in India. It recommends companies to invest in competency building internally to take advantage of cloud computing technologies. The study estimates that the skilling and re-skilling market in India will grow fast as cloud computing becomes critical to IT strategies. Leading public and private educational institutions, along with IT enterprises are expected to play a key role in enhancing workforce skills to match the industry demand for cloud computing.
According to the study, the cloud computing market growth is attributed to the increased maturity of Indian enterprises towards cloud computing and the CEO/ CIO mandate for an enterprise-wide cloud strategy. It adds that with the overall environment of cloud adoption fast evolving in India, cloud computing will account for a significant share in the total IT spend of the small, medium and large enterprises. The total cloud spend as a percentage of the total IT spend as such is expected to rise from 1.4% in 2010 to 8.2% in 2015. It notes that IT/ITeS, Telecom, BFSI, Manufacturing and Government sectors will contribute largest to the cloud market in India, with nearly 78% of the total market. (Refer to Table B)

Click on the tables to enlarge

According to the study, there is an increased preference of private cloud over public cloud over the next five years in India. It also estimates that private cloud deployments could result in potential savings of up to 50% on the IT investments on average, when compared with a legacy IT model, with cost optimisation in areas such as telecom and networking, facilities and fabric, hardware, software, internal labour and external IT services.

“Cloud computing will reshape the Indian IT market by generating new opportunities for IT vendors and driving changes in traditional IT offerings. There is a high chance that companies that are not adopting IT today and don’t have major investments in datacenters and server farms will directly move into the cloud model. There are ample opportunities in every industry. Be it retail, manufacturing, banking, education or government. Customers for IT-ITeS companies are also fast evaluating cloud offerings and are looking for partner competencies. It’s in turn forcing IT-ITeS companies to invest in talent pool creation, test labs with cloud infrastructure and consider best-of-breed converged infrastructure. This is a big opportunity for cloud vendors – especially those who are strong with consulting services for private cloud deployments, and offer a robust customer service,” said Pari Natarajan, CEO, Zinnov Management Consulting.

“This first-of-its-kind report has brought to attention a very important but unnoticed aspect of the cloud computing market in India – for cloud computing to deliver its promise, customers need human resources with cloud computing competencies, both as vendors or as internal resources. Today, the Indian market has technology vendors offering the best technologies and facilities for customers – such as the EMC-Cisco Cloud Experience Center in Bangalore – to make informed decisions. What we need more of is a focus on building competencies to leverage cloud computing technologies. EMC recognises this and has introduced Cloud Architect certification that focuses on architecting and designing infrastructure for virtualised and cloud environments,” said Manoj Chugh, President, EMC India & SAARC.

“It is also interesting to note that while private cloud will dominate market adoption in future, some organisations who are mature in their journey to the cloud are already turning to a hybrid cloud approach to get the best of both worlds – choose what resources to manage in-house and allow what to be managed externally. The hybrid approach, we believe, will be the eventual goal of customers in their journey to the cloud,” added Chugh.

The study was commissioned by EMC and executed by Zinnov Management Consulting. The findings are based on a comprehensive survey of over 100 CIOs & IT decision makers in India across industry verticals conducted during Jan. 2011 to May 2011. Zinnov also conducted in-depth interviews with key stakeholders in the Indian IT ecosystem and secondary research to validate the findings and arrive at conclusions highlighted in the report.