Is the Cloud for real in India?

The other day, I was at a reputed college in Pune giving a guest lecture and during the break over coffee, I happened to meet a few other guest lecturers, all stalwarts from the IT industry and the topic on the adoption of the Cloud in India came up. An interesting comment that I heard was "Cloud is just too much of a talk, its not a reality in India!". Another interesting one was - "If you want to appear smart, talk about the Cloud". Where do people come from - giving these kind of statements?

Its true that many India enterprises are not exactly migrating their IT infrastructure to the Cloud as perceived, but they are definitely moving towards Private Clouds. The small & medium sized businesses (SMB's) are the fastest cloud adopters for obvious cost reasons! Some facts gathered from InformationWeek about Cloud adoption in India:

• TCS expects US$1 billion in revenues from Cloud based services for SMB's over the next 5 years.
• Zinnov projects the Indian Cloud Computing market to be worth US$ 1 billion by 2015. It is currently at US$ 70 million.
• Gartner say, India-centric IT services companies will represent 20% of the leading cloud aggregators in the market (through Cloud service offerings) 
• Gartner also says that by 2012, about 20% of all businesses will not own any IT assets - they will be hosted in the cloud.
• Over 95% of India companies are SMB's. There are close to 39 million SMBs in India & 60% of these do not have IT infrastructure.
• Tata Communications is aiming for 25% of the US$ 1 billion market share in India - it is pitching its cloud services in the SMB sector.
• Microsoft BPOS already has 1300 customers in India and are adding 50-100 customers a month!
• SAP Business ByDesign is a fully integrated business management solution available over the cloud for SMBs has about 250 customers signed up in India.
• IBM has invested in a Partner Cloud center in Pune in 2010 to showcase their Cloud offerings for SMBs.
• Ramco has been focusing on the the SME market with their ERP solution available via the Cloud and have reported consistent growth in the SMB sector.

So my friend, Cloud adoption is growing at an alarming rate in India in the SMB sector and the IT giants in India are now concentrating & competing hard to get the biggest share of the pie!

Also posted on BMC Communities page here