India’s Cloud Opportunities
There’s a fascinating article by Reuven Cohen
about cloud development in one of the fastest-growing and most interesting markets of the world: India. The country’s immense population (1.17 billion people) and growth of the middle class is spurring technological development. It’s like watching weeds sprout through pavement.
Cohen quotes Janakiram MSV (a fellow blogger and IT guy who works with Alcatel Lucent, Bell Labs-India) about why India is poised for significant cloud computing growth. He says that the Indian sub-continent is a “very unique and a potent geography” for cloud platform vendors due to the presence of an end-to-end IT ecosystem.
But beyond infrastructure, other trends are shaping cloud growth there, among them:
- Untapped market potential. Unlike the U.S. and Europe, India hasn’t hit saturation levels yet. So there’s opportunity at every level, such as enterprise or public sector.
- India is a test ground for piloting strategic adoption techniques, for example, engaging with ISVs in order to develop a platform or working with a mature developer community to pilot an SDK adoption plan.
- Small and mid-size Indian companies are eager customers for cloud vendors and services, due to the promise of low IT costs, data storage and a pay-as-you-use strategy.
Just to give you an example of the level of interest and development in cloud computing in India now, there’s a CloudCamp (an “un-conference” where early adapters of Cloud Computing technologies exchange ideas) India Tour going on right now that features five CloudCamp events throughout the end of February in some of the country’s largest cities.
I suspect we’ll be seeing a lot of cloud-related news coming out of India in the coming months and years, and it’s clear that the demand for cloud services should be skyrocketing, too.
