"The Clouds have come down to Earth ". Shree Parthasarathy, Sr. Director - Enterprise Risk Services, Deloitte, who chaired the conference, quipped, as he kick started Cloud Computing World Forum India 2011. He
may have well added, "They are everywhere". With 1100 registered
attendees, it was a Cloud jamboree, with enthusiasm reaching
stratospheric levels, amidst cloudy perceptions, driven by marketing on
steroids. Every product is cloud-centric, hovering around the
tag-cloud of benefits that every cloud vendor promises to reinvent IT
for the future. No wonder Cloud pundits have declared, 'Its official:'Cloud Computing' is meaningless.'
Ravi Pandey, Senior Research Analyst, Information & Communication Technology Practice, Frost & Sullivan,
probed into the reasons behind the palpable excitement towards Cloud
offerings. "Cloud computing market is expected to grow at CAGR of 52 %
in 5 years", he predicted, based on the results from the study conducted
by Frost & Sullivan. Enterprise Cloud penetration in India would
surge by 46% in 2016, he further added. With 85% of Cloud spending in
India on SaaS, he highlighted that Non ICT Infrastructure,
Collaboration, Federation would be the key drivers
Bernie Trudel,
Cloud CTO, Cisco Systems, Asia Pacific, delivered his keynote address
on Enterprise IT and the Cloud Disruption. Personally, I have been quite
fascinated by Cisco's vision of the Internet with the network as a
platform, providing building blocks for Clouds. "When do I get
to see the benefits of the Cloud? ", he pointed, is the key question
asked by CIOs today. He took the audience through the history of Cloud
and showcased three models, viz, On demand pools of Infrastructure APIs
for high volume, Highly scaled small Apps and Big Data Warehouse Data
Centers. He illustrated Cloud Benefits such as Lower TCO and IT Agility
which ensure that less time is needed in keeping lights on. Cloud allows businesses to fail faster, he teased the audience, as it accelerates the Schumpterian creative destruction cycle,
thus leading to further innovation. He opined that Cloud helps to
narrow the gap with the end-customers, that which we had increased over
the last 200 years with the industrial age.
He also showcased the advantages of Unified Computing System which
unifies compute, network, storage access and virtualization into a
fabric computing environment.He highlighted Cisco's recent prestigious
announcement at VM World, its 11th VMMark World Record, VMMark
2.1 result of 35.06@35 tiles, achieved using 4 x Cisco UCS C460 M2
servers, each server having 4 x
Intel E7-4870 processors.
He
averred that data center networks would flatten, with the data center
shifting the focus of the communication/network bandwidth from north/south design to east/west design. This would lead to the network
adapting to new traffic patterns. As the network core would remain
intelligent, virtualized network container would emerge and network
service APis would be exposed. He made a strong case for the network
platform as on-demand IT would be inevitably powered by turning up the
network as well. He concluded his address asking the enterprise IT
audience to introspect and find out the "cloud sweet spot" of their
organizations.
After Cisco's vision of the Cloud, the focus shifted towards the
Government department's readiness in moving towards the Cloud. Recent KPMG report[pdf]
puts spotlight on the Government sector, as the report indicates, Cloud
has the potential to bridge communication divide and increase
interoperability between government agencies, thus enabling mechanisms
to track the effectiveness of government schemes. Golok Kumar Sumli, Principal
Consultant & Head - Technology, PMU, Passport Seva Project,
Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India, talked on Cloud's
potential to facilitate services for the 'fakir(poor) and the rich'.
He presented the ambitious vision of the National e-Governance plan, comprising of 27 Mission Mode Projects (MMPs) and 8 components, to "make all Government services accessible to the common man in his
locality, through common service delivery outlets, and ensure
efficiency, transparency, and reliability of such services at affordable
costs to realize the basic needs of the common man"
He
also addressed the challenges in providing a common service center
through Clouds, unified and delivered to the villages. To an audience
question on the possibility of using Open source for its governance
projects, he highlighted that while there have been few departments such
as the Income Tax department which have embraced Open Source, it is
fraught with risk with the tenuous question of ownership and no
well-defined exit strategy chalked out so far in the Cloud.
This
was followed by an interesting Panel discussion in which CIOs shared
the lessons they learned in their journey towards the Cloud. The session
was moderated by Praveen Bhadada, Director, Zinnov Management Consulting. Tarun Pandey,
VP-IT, Aditya Birla Financial Services Group busted the myth that Cloud
is a cheaper alternative. He also pointed out the lack of well-defined
exit strategy as a major challenge in adopting the Cloud solutions.
Arun Gupta,
CCA & Group CTO, Shoppers Stop, one of the most admired Indian
CIOs of the world, recounted his first experience with the Cloud, as
Shoppers Stop was one among the first users of Salesforce.com during
2004. However, the firm had to move out of Cloud in 2008 as it had
issues in adapting its business process. While the firm shifted to
another Cloud service , the service provider backed out the following
year. He also addressed the major pain points surrounding migration to
the Cloud. He expressed concern that none of the Cloud providers are able
to provide service level agreement in the Cloud, reinforcing the
commonly held concerns around lack of control and responsibility. He
also pointed out the challenges in calculating ROI for Cloud adoption
within a specific timeline.
Sandeep Phanasgaonkar, President
& CTO, Reliance Capital in his session, Moving IT to a Cloud Based
World, presented a realistic portrayal of the Cloud with its
limitations and challenges. With the Total Cost of Ownership unlikely to
be favorable in the long term, in comparison to on-premise computing,
he commented that the business case built around its benefits would
remain open ended. He expressed consternation over the lack of support
structure for Cloud ready applications in India. With the current stage
of ecosystem maturity in India, he opined that Interoperability is
possible only with the IaaS providers and not with the PaaS
providers. He stressed on the need to include migration back to
on-premise in the service level agreement offered by the Cloud provider.
"Current challenges in Cloud are engineering challenges", reassured Saji Thoppil, GM,
Enterprise Cloud Computing, Wipro Ltd, in the panel discussion which
focused on the opportunities in the Cloud space for new entrants and
existing IT incumbents amidst mounting challenges. Rajendran KB, Senior Vice President - Sales & Marketing, Data Center and Managed Services
at
Reliance Communications addressed the most crucial question when
it comes to adopting Cloud: "Is it possible to plug out the IT system
out and not affect the business process? ".
Mandar Thakur, COO, Times Music talked on the 'living reality' of trends in the rapidly evolving music industry and highlighted the plethora of delivery models around Clouds, downloads and Satellite. The discussion also veered towards the evolving role of Software resellers, with the Cloud obviating the need for a reseller in between the service provider and the end customer. To an audience question on implementing Cloud solutions for Banks, with their high security requirements, Saji Thoppil pointed towards technology solutions, low hanging fruits with minimal risk, such as the recent core banking solutions for Regional Rural Banks. Brian Pereira, Editor, Information Week also highlighted Shyam Rao Cooperative Bank's federated Cloud solutions.
The post-lunch session was taken over by Shantanu Upadhyay, Sr. Manager with the Deloitte India TMT Practice, who delivered his address on Walking on the Cloud.
He addressed the business drivers behind the Consumerization of IT. Shantanu asserted that Cloud Computing is an old idea whose time has come, recalling the prescient words of John McCarthy
who predicted in 1961 that "Computation may be someday organized as a
public utility". With the Cloud industrializing IT, enabling
pay-per-use, it has empowered lines of business within enterprises.
He
elaborated on the major shift caused by Cloud, which allows businesses
to transform IT architecture from "Inside Out" to "Outside In", based on
the insightful work of John Hagel and John Seely Brown,
Deloitte Center for the Edge. He underpinned the need for Agility with
the Cloud providing a common platform, connecting diverse external
parties along with a policy layer which enables partners to set business
policies and preferences. The benefits that accrue with Agility are
the compensation mechanisms which connect the structural layers of
business partners, providing the ability to modify interactions and cope
with the unanticipated developments.
He brought out several interesting case-studies of successful firms such as Rearden Commerce and Red Bus , which
have enabled IT to inject itself more deeply into product
functionality/business processes. The success of these firms,across its
wide partner ecosystem, lies in the Cloud's capability to provide a
large-scale, unified experience for the customer and a highly fluid
one-to-one market place. He strongly urged companies to evaluate Cloud
beyond pure IT cost-reduction and flexibility play. He ended his
session with a quote, which summed up the upbeat mood surrounding the Cloud with its unique advantages, despite its engineering challenges.
- Leonard L Levinson"A pessimist only sees the dark side of the clouds,and mopes; a philosopher sees both sides and shrugs; an optimist doesn't see the clouds at all - he's walking on them."