A Look Back: Cloud Computing Is Here to Stay

WHY WE DID THE STORY: The main stimulus came from a conversation with Sharad Sanghi, CEO, Netmagic, a company that provides cloud computing solutions. He spoke about a VMware conference on cloud computing in Scandinavia that had an attendance fee of $1,600 and yet was booked completely. This was in early December. The main problem was that it still didn’t look too hot in India. Once we began to research this a little more, we found that a clutch of companies were indeed experimenting with this technology. Some of these were reasonably large, like IndiaInfoline and Welspun, while others were smaller, like Wildcraft, Redbus and Zoho. We also understood, in the course of working on the story, that this technology was being adopted by smaller companies before the bigger companies placed their trust in it. 

(You can read this story here)


WHERE THE STORY STANDS: The clamour around the cloud has only grown. Shortly after we did the story, Gartner published a survey of top CIOs in the country. The survey showed that cloud computing was indeed one of the top 10 technology trends for Indian CIOs. “In India, CIOs expect to adopt new cloud services much faster than originally expected. Currently, no one reports having the majority of IT running in the cloud but over the next four years CIOs in India expect this number to increase to 67 percent,” said the survey. Around the same time, TCS, the largest IT company in India, announced ION, its cloud computing platform for small and medium businesses, and regional rural banks. TCS said it was looking at revenues of $1 billion from this service in five years. TCS has already signed up many subscribers for this platform. As for Sharad Sanghi, the guy who led us onto the story, he has now put his own disaster recovery servers on the cloud. “Before I ask large corporates to trust me with their important data on the cloud, I must show them I can function completely on the cloud if my normal IT systems were to suffer an outage.”