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Cloud Adoption In India

Vendors getting innovative to drive cloud adoption in India

Everybody is talking about cloud; every enterprise now wants to go on the cloud. According to an Ernst & Young (EY) research Indian enterprise customers are knowledgeable about cloud platforms and Infrastructure as a Service, but for them there are very few true cloud offerings at present.

The research shows that 68 percent of the CIOs interviewed have a positive mindset towards cloud computing, and many see this as next wave of IT innovation within their organisation to ease the workflow process and get a faster business turnaround and better business insights. This kind of scenario presents an opportunity for the solutions and service providers to create awareness and help in developing and growing the cloud ecosystem.

The enterprise customers today are looking for comprehensive solutions that help in improving the return on investment (ROI) of such a deployment. “Indian enterprises are increasingly leveraging cloud for business transformation and require sophisticated new levels of support to expand their e-commerce operations,” said Braham Singh, SVP of Global Product Management, Reliance Communications (Enterprise) & Global Cloud  Xchange.

According to EY market study enterprises perceive data security and privacy as the biggest barrier to adoption. “While organizations in India are eager to move their enterprise workloads to the public cloud, many have been constrained by business, legislative and regulatory requirements, especially in tightly-controlled industries such as telecommunications, government, and banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI),” said Oracle’s Senior Vice President of Cloud, Shawn Price.

So EY suggests that both enterprises and service providers are likely to benefit from a consultative approach and in-depth discussions on differentiating benefits of cloud services, pricing structures, financial models and ROI that an enterprise can expect from moving to the cloud. “Third-party data service providers and traditional IT service providers are being viewed as the primary channels for enterprises to buy cloud services from. Such providers should play a pivotal role in bringing the ecosystem together,” the EY report states

Pushing for cloud adoption

That is what now Oracle and IBM are doing. At the recent Oracle CloudWorld in Mumbai Oracle announced the launch of Oracle Cloud at Customer in India, a new suite of offerings that remove some of the biggest challenges organizations face when transitioning to the cloud. Talking about the need for such a solution, Shailender Kumar, managing director, Oracle India said, “Companies in India, especially those bound by regulatory pressures, can now leverage the cloud and speed up their business transformation. Oracle Cloud at Customer supports complete control over data, while facilitating data sovereignty and data residency requirements. This is the first offering from a major public cloud vendor that delivers a stack that is 100 percent compatible with Oracle Cloud, but available on-premises.” The new solution provides CIOs with new choices in where they deploy their enterprise software and a natural path to easily move business critical applications from on-premise to the cloud.

Meanwhile IBM is working with Reliance Communications to provide its customers with a complete portfolio of highly secure and scalable IaaS offerings running on the IBM Cloud. “With a broad cloud portfolio, deep expertise and data privacy, the IBM Cloud offers businesses the ability to optimize its resources and investments to drive growth. With this collaboration, we will be able to address the requirements of organizations who have limited access to enterprise – grade cloud solutions” said Vivek Malhotra, Cloud Leader, IBM India / South Asia. According to Malhotra IBM Cloud delivers fast, easy and automated access to public, private and hybrid cloud services to help clients digitally transform. The company is partnering with a number of leading CSPs in major markets including Bell Canada, Indostat, Telstra (Australia), Reliance (India) AT&T and Verizon.

“Through our partnership with IBM, customers will instantly benefit from the added flexibility and global reach to be more competitive, especially as we look at new opportunities from the “Digital India” program,” added Singh talking about the partnership.

SMBs adopting cloud to scale business

Besides enterprise, the SMB segment will also be a major focus for cloud vendors and service providers like. EY research shows that SMB segment is more attuned to the benefits and challenges of the cloud. The reason is that the maturity of the cloud ecosystem is less of a deterrent to the SMB segment. This is why SMB segment is ideal target for the cloud services providers. “Cloud is a transformative growth engine for business, both enterprises and SMBs, across industries in India. SMBs are migrating on cloud and using cloud-based technologies to scale up their operations,” explained IBM’s Malhotra.

So the IBM Cloud solution is a set of services including analytics, mobile, networking, storage, Internet of Things and cognitive computing that the enterprise and smart SMBs can use to grow their business. In fact Reliance communication will not only offer IBM Cloud infrastructure services to its customers but it has also launched new offerings designed to provide end-to-end integrated e-commerce services for India’s SMB market—all running on the IBM Cloud. “Through this alliance Reliance Communications will be able to provide enterprises, especially the SMBs, a robust infrastructure platform to run their important business applications. This will help them streamline their operations, increase efficiency and give them an option of pay as you use model,” added Reliance Communication’s Singh.

 

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