Cloud computing is commonly perceived to benefit mostly small and medium businesses (SMBs), but a growing number of large Indian organizations including Shoppers Stop, Bharti, Ashok Leyland, Asian Paints, Maruti Suzuki, Bajaj Auto, Infosys and Tata Elxsi, are turning to the cloud, too.
"CIO of large Indian companies are quite interested in cloud computing, where most of them are exploring how the cloud impacts their IT infrastructure," Aman Dokania, vice president and general manager of infrastructure software, Hewlett-Packard Asia Pacific and Japan, told ZDNet Asia in a phone interview.
Andrew Knott, Asia-Pacific vice president of marketing, Salesforce.com, said in an e-mail that cloud computing is suitable for both large and small businesses. In India, the software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendor counts large business houses such as Tata and Bajaj Auto, as customers.
The platform offers a predictable, pay-as-you-go model for businesses to access computing resources. In an economic downturn, the appeal of this cost advantage is hugely magnified.
There are also other advantages besides costs, Knott said, such as easy access to applications from any computer or device, anytime and from anywhere. Cloud also enables seamless upgrades, where the provider manages all the updates and upgrades for multi-tenant cloud applications, and cuts deployment time, allowing companies to be up and running in days or weeks, instead of months or years.
Vikas Arora, group director of enterprise services at Microsoft India, said in an e-mail: "For large enterprises, lower total cost of ownership (TCO) is a means to achieve greater profits."
The software giant is in the process of launching its cloud offerings in India, and have signed up partners to trial products that have been launched worldwide, Arora said.
According to a recent report by Springboard, the Indian SaaS market was pegged at US$51.6 million (2.5 billion rupees) between 2008 and 2009, and is expected to reach US$100.4 million (4.9 billion rupees) by 2010.
Growing at a compound annual growth rate of 76 percent, this market is expected to touch US$248.5 million (12 billion rupees) by 2011, and cloud-based ERP and CRM applications are likely to see highest demand.
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