India will not only see a surge in consumption of cloud services but companies all over the world will look to India to support their transition to cloud computing.
Gone are the days when you needed a big investment, infrastructure, services, servers and software to start an IT company. Now the whole lot is available in the cloud and start-ups only need talented techies and a few computers to start their new venture. After captivating Silicon Valley, cloud computing is all set to become the hottest property in the Indian IT industry.
India is a leading IT hub and has proved to be a magnet for attracting the biggest IT giants in the world. India has one of the largest pools of educated and trained techies and is a provider of end-to-end software solutions from development, service provision and maintenance. Steve Ballmer believes it to be the next biggest destination for cloud computing “India will not only see a surge in cloud computing services but companies all over the world will look to India to support their transition to cloud computing.”
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Microsoft, like IBM, Amazon, Google and many other established names, are betting high on cloud computing. Although losing its position of most valuable technology firm to Apple, Microsoft is hoping to regain its crown via cloud computing. Ballmer, on a recent visit to India, highlighted the importance of the company’s Azure platform and its benefits in the Indian IT scenario. Microsoft already has some 600 clients of Azure in India and is trying to lure more customers in; Microsoft believes that India will be a catalyst for the worldwide adoption of its cloud services.
Ballmer underlined a report from global management consultants, Zinnov, which estimated that the global cloud computing market will reach over USD 70 billion by 2015. According to the study 30%, or approx 7 billion, of the global demand might outsource to Indian businesses, thanks to the country’s talented pool of nearly 1300 independent software vendors (ISVs), 1.4 million developers and over 11000 system integrators. The Zinnov study also emphasized the fact that cloud computing will bring 300,000 jobs to India in the next 5 years.
The world’s biggest software maker has a lot of expectations from India as Ballmer considers “India among the top five or six countries in terms of talent and market potential” and a better bet for cloud computing, “piracy is reducing and intellectual property protection is better than in China”. Microsoft launched cloud services in March for companies to share software and storage facilities, touting a reduction in their IT expenditure of 50%.