Cloud Data Centers - Architectural Drivers

More and more data centers are moving to the cloud. It is estimated that over two-thirds of the data center traffic will be on the cloud by 2017. As per the Cisco Global Cloud Index 2013, Cloud Data Centers are seeing a 35% CAGR (Compounded Annual Growth Rate) while the Traditional Data Centers are seeing only a 12% CAGR.

So what are the key drivers for a Cloud Data Center?

• It should provide organizations with Mobility
• It should enable Cloud Management with Security
• It should enable Application Transformation
• And lastly, it should turn Information into Insights to help organizations succeed

Mobility is the key for a Cloud Data Center. Your data should be available wherever you are in any part of the world! It should be safe and secure without any compromise. Management of your data center assets should not turn your hair white. It should be easy to manage, provision, de-provision and backup.

Elaborating a little on Application Transformation - today's applications have attributes like Dynamic Instantiation & Removal, multi-cloud models including hybrid clouds, multiple nodes and have different types of infrastructure demands that were non-existent a few years ago. Today, Infrastructure needs to be application aware for Agile placements, it should identify physical, virtual, cloud integrations, it should be flexible enough for a dynamic shared resource pooling and should be able to manage application clusters.

An optimum data center should give the business an insight into all the critical components of the data center and how each component is helping drive the business. What is the value add of each component and its availability - should be clearly showcased to the business.

So what are the Best Practices for a Cloud Ready Infrastructure?

• Consolidate & document your data center assets
• Develop your data center metrics - Power Utility Efficiency, Operational metrics, People metrics
• Identify & document the data, storage & application network requirements
• Develop & plan your data center architecture - Policies, Automation opportunities, fabric for the implementation
• Plan for the upgrade of your network access & aggregation layers - 10G/40G/100G, unified fabric etc, upgrade of the x86 assets, virtualization & server requirements.
• Identify Day 1, Day 30, Day 60, Day 90 operational requirements
• Plan for how you will deal with Disaster Recovery 
• And finally, develop your cloud management road map! 

CRM Cloud in India

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is catching on big time in India and many opportunists are cashing in on this huge market.  In Gartner's view, the Indian CRM market size is about 15% of the overall Asia Pacific (APAC) market, the second largest in the region, after Australia. By2014, CRM in India is projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 16% to 19%. Yanna Dharmasthira, Research Director at Gartner said in 2009, "In the next five years, India is projected to have the second highest CAGR after China as far as CRM is concerned." Gartner revised the growth rate of the Indian CRM market, specifically for the year 2010 in which it was expected to reach $100 million.

CRM systems developed in India like Impel CRM, SageCRM, Zoho, CRM24x7.com and Smiles becoming quite popular, however they have yet to demonstrate significant market share in India where SalesForce, SAP, Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Oracle CRM are dominating in the Enterprise space. Though, Zoho is catching up quite fast with their user friendly and simple interface.

Open source software solutions like SugarCRM and vtiger have also found some users in India, however, as with open source CRM software on a global basis, these products are largely accepted by the small businesses and are not very popular as they need a lot of maintenance / customizations.

Several enterprise resource planning (ERP) software suppliers such as Ramco, Focus Infosoft and Wings ERP were found to be domestic market share leaders in the back office space and offer integrated customer relationship management solutions along with their ERP suites.

Some other vendors and apps worth mentioning are marketing based apps that provide the intelligent information to the CRM applications. Eloqua (that Oracle has acquired) is a leader in the digital marketing and automation. Another big vendor in the marketing automation space is Marketo that acquired Crowd Factory last year and is playing in the space of digital marketing & automation. A few others worth mentioning in the email marketing domain are ExactTarget, Emailvision and Silverpop. Many of these focus on small to medium sized buyers, including Constant Contact,VerticalResponse and the rapidly growing MailChimp. There's much innovation at the SMB level including Nimble and InfusionSoft, which recently garnered substantial venture backing.

So folks, CRM is coming of age, even in India where more and more small & mid size businesses are following Mahatma Gandhi's eternal rule - Customer is God!