At a time when enterprise is putting a lot of emphasis towards optimally utilizing their resources, cloud computing is gaining ground as a technology of choice and today’s next generation ready cloud technologies have got all the potential to reshape the DNA of enterprise community and deliver what they need the most in the form of better productivity at the same time a better return on their investments.
Revolutionizing Enterprise Alignment with IT
Today, Cloud Computing is revolutionizing IT by making it possible to run IT-as-a-Service to drive maximum efficiency. This transforms IT departments from a cost center that must react to business demands, to a revenue center that drives business agility and competitive edge.
According to Praveen Sahai, Vice President, Channels, EMC India and SAARC, the shift to cloud computing is being driven by the exploding digital universe. “As per EMC IDC Digital Universe study, digital bits captured or created each year in India are expected to grow from 127 EB to 2.9 ZB between 2012 and 2020. At the same time, gap between Digital Information generated and available storage capacity will grow from a third in 2012 to a ninth by 2020. This is driving cloud adoption among Indian enterprises. Our own study estimates that by 2020, 42% of the digital universe in the country will in some way be “touched” by the cloud i.e. stored, transmitted, or processed. Interesting, cloud adoption is gaining momentum amongst midmarket and SMB as well. As per AMI partners, expenditures on cloud-computing within India SMB ICT portfolio which is 10% currently is predicted to increase by a CAGR of 23% over the next five years,” he explains.
Today, EMC is enabling cloud migration for its Indian enterprises with the help of a three pronged strategy in the form of enabling cloud infrastructure:
1) Build your own with best-of-breed components (the model most companies have done historically),
2) VSPEX partner-delivered, proven infrastructure (proven by EMC, packaged by our partners and delivered as a solution), and
3) VCE vBlock converged infrastructure
EMC is also enabling cloud service providers to deliver cloud as service offering to enterprises. Some of the company’s partners include Netmagic, Dimesion Data and Control S among others.
According to Gartner, the global public cloud services market will grow by 18.5% to $131 billion in 2013. The highest growth rates for cloud services come from emerging Asia-Pacific countries (led by Indonesia and India), China and Latin America (led by Argentina, Mexico and Brazil), it said. Spending on public cloud services in India is expected to reach USD 1.4 billion in 2017.
As per the views of Vijay Sampath Kumar, Country Leader, Enterprise System Group, Global Commercial Channels, Dell India, organizations are rapidly turning to the Cloud to reduce costs, provide greater flexibility and quickly ramp up support for business needs. The concept of cloud computing is being well-received by enterprises as it improves speed, quantity and quality of resources available to the organization.
“As more and more data, applications and infrastructure is being moved to the Cloud, security remains a top concern. Indian enterprises have been rather slow in their uptake of the private cloud due to speculations surrounding security in the cloud. However, security concerns can be addressed with appropriate secure solutions to ensure safe migration to the cloud. Public Cloud has however seen much more acceptance amongst the enterprises. Dell’s cloud-as-a-service solutions help organizations to deliver business results and rapid time-to-value. For an enterprise, this can mean setup in days as opposed to weeks or months. Enterprises are given a host of cloud apps, turnkey services and built-in, cross-application analytics and support, designed to relieve Organizations from the hassles and costs of selecting, deploying and managing different solutions from multiple providers,” he explains.
Cloud and Productivity
Today, every organization is fundamentally aimed at trying to do 3 things: lower operational costs, increase revenue, and reduce their risk. Cloud technology can drive maximum business efficiency by transforming IT and lowering operational costs. It enables IT departments to be run IT-as-a-service and transforms them into revenue centres that drive business agility and competitive edge.
Vijay Sampath Kumar from Dell emphasizes that the benefits of cloud computing are extensive and, for the first time ever, businesses are able to compete on a level playing field. “Cloud infrastructures are very efficient and cost effective for customers to move all or some of their workload across to an outsourcing partner to take advantage of all of the benefits. It can help organizations gain competitive advantage by going beyond the limits of traditional IT infrastructure and data centers and offers more flexibility, choice and agility,” he adds.
As being put by Praveen Sahai from EMC India, cloud adoption within Indian enterprises will be a hybrid cloud model which includes private and public clouds for different applications. Larger enterprises will build greater private cloud capacity as they have the resources while smaller enterprises will build leverage public clouds more.
“EMC approach is simple. For larger enterprises that want to build their own private cloud infrastructure, we offer the VCE VBlock converged infrastructure solution. For midmarket enterprises we offer the VNX unified storage portfolio which is simple for partners to deploy within enterprises. Additionally, we are working with Service Providers and enabling them to deliver cloud solutions and As-a-Service model with our best of breed infrastructure,” he explains.
Channel on the Cloud
The enterprise IT infrastructure is moving towards the cloud and As-a-Service model. As per Gartner, by 2018 in India, a common scenario in over 80% of end-user organizations will be that of hybrid clouds.
“The traditional hardware purchase model will continue to decline limiting opportunities for the channel community. To survive and grow, partners will need to evolve and transform into cloud enablers and service integrators for their customers. The way we see it, the evolution is an imperative and not an option for the channel community. We saw that and launched the VSPEX portfolio two years back to enable the channel to benefit from the cloud opportunity,” Praveen Sahai from EMC says.
Talking about the importance of channel partners, Vijay Sampath Kumar from Dell says that channel partners play an important role in reaching out to Dell’s customer base. “We encourage our channel partners to fully understand customer needs and enable them to choose the most appropriate solutions for prospects. We enable our partners by keeping them up to date on the solutions that we offer so that they are able to suggest apt IT solutions to them. Our goal is to make our partners IT consultants than mere IT providers in order to lead to their overall growth,” he adds.
Challenges on the Cloud
We have already highlighted the need for channel to evolve to offer cloud solutions.
The main challenge we see is the skills gap that exists in the industry. By 2015, as per an EMC Zinnov study, private cloud alone in India will see a shortfall of 1,00,000 cloud professionals. This will put pressure on the partners to effectively deliver cloud offerings.
Partners need to invest in training and development and retaining their people as the talent crunch increases. EMC is already investing in bridging this skills gap through the EMC Academic Alliance Program. EAA has educated over 250,000 students since 2006, providing the industry with a ready-made pipeline of IT knowledgeable candidates.
