‘I think the fear of change is the biggest challenge that companies are facing’
Which verticals are the early adopters of cloud in India?
All the verticals are considering cloud at this moment whether it is manufacturing, oil and gas, media, pharmaceutical, or finance. We have customers that include both enterprise and SMES in India. Also, many SMES in India have already adopted AWS a few years ago and there are a lot many that are rapidly adopting us. We also have many providers in the Amazon ecosystem that are providing software solutions as services that are built on AWS cloud platform such as the Erp-as-aService or Hr-as-a-service. Another category that I see here in India is that of systems integrators who are building professional practices on AWS for their customers.
With cloud, what is the biggest challenge that the companies are facing today?
I think the fear of change is the biggest challenge that the companies are facing. Apart from that, they are dealing with the myths, fears, and doubts about cloud services that have been injected into the world by other companies or by the media. I often talk to CIOS and show them the reality of the cloud.
What would be the key technology trends in the enterprise space in 2012?
The first one is what I call ‘Consumerization of Enterprise It’—where a new set of leaders are coming into the enterprise which will expect the enterprise services and applications to be equally rich and are equally customer-focused as their consumer applications. The second one is Big Data, which is already there in a big way. The third one is coming of multidevices and mobile access with different form factors and different capabilities and that is becoming more and more important to the delivery of products, both on the enterprise and consumer front.
Is Big Data coming in a big way?
It is already here in a big way. It is unbelievably big, but there is still a lot of work to be done and there are different areas that are going to be developed. If we look at the pharmaceutical industries, they are using big data techniques to dive in both safety data and information that they are getting back from their customers about the use of their medicines. For example, eharmony, a dating site which claims to be responsible for 250 marriages daily in the US, use big data each night to analyze all the data and all the information that they have about their customers to find new matches between their customers and they are hugely successful.
In this uncertain economy, what do you believe should be the approach of an enterprise’s CIO?
I think uncertainty is driven by a number of factors like: Availability of limited capital, abundance of products in the market, intensifying competition, and increasing consumer control. These 4 things together bring great uncertainty and that is why you need different resource models like cloud computing, which allows companies to be highly agile to deliver new products to the market. So, you need to acquire your resources on demand, release your resources when you no longer need them, and only pay for those resources you use, ie, the utility pricing model.
pravinp@cybermedia.co.in