Sergey Beloussov, CEO of Parallels Inc. gives his thoughts on the cloud computing scenario in India.
How would you define cloud computing?
There is confusion about how one should define cloud computing. I would put it as computing served to you from consolidated data centers located in remote locations .
Parallels has been increasing its focus in APAC, especially India, since the last few months. What is your goal for this region?
Currently, 15% of our revenues come from the APAC region, we expect to double this in the near future. We are also looking to expand our headcount from the current 30 employees to around double the number in the next 24 months. SMBs and the mid-level service providers are going to be our target consumers.
A point against India is the lack of infrastructure. Do you see this hampering cloud computing in the country?
Yes, the infrastructure in the country is less developed when you compare it with other countries. However, India has a very high IT literacy and that is a point in its favour. We expect the infrastructure to improve and grow rapidly once enough enterprises start showing an interest in adoption (of cloud computing).
Speaking of interest, what is your perspective on the interest level in India?
The push for cloud computing will come from the SMBs and small and medium service providers. In the future, service providers will have most of their in-house IT applications running from the cloud. This is more likely in case of server applications, when it comes to desktop applications, the move to the cloud could take more time.
One factor will be how companies like Microsoft address this issue, but the movement of desktop applications to the cloud will take longer as compared to server applications.
Do you think the various security and reliability concerns are justified?
These so-called issues are more of a perspective, really. I could give you examples of a number of banks and BFSI organizations that have their data on the cloud, in spite of being the most finicky when it comes to reliability and data security.
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