In a bid to help businesses, break away from the shackles of myths associated with Cloud, Zinnov hosted its Cloud Commune 2010 summit in Mumbai. The event comprised of a number of panel discussions, which included eminent personalities from various industry verticals. At one of the panel discussions titled–Cloud, the technology driver, the panelists which included Anand Deshpande, founder & MD, Persistent Systems, Rohit Madhur, director, SAP By Design and Ajay Thakur, business head, Sony Entertainment Television discussed the potential cloud holds to drive business growth in India.

The first question posed to the panelist by the moderator, Praveen Bhadada, manager-global consulting, Zinnov, was how India is moving from being India Inc to Incredible India. To this Madhur said that in spite of divides such as social and educational, India has still grown and has innovated much more than its peer countries. Thakur added that in India consumer requirements varied with regions, hence it is not possible to deliver to the entire population from one platform. Here, Despande mentioned that except mobile, the penetration of PCs and broadband was very low in India. Till date IT spending in the country has been low and the growth we have so far seen is by improving the non-IT processes. However, Despande further cautioned that going forward it is automation that will keep the growth momentum going for which we will need to invest adequately in IT.

Next the discussion was on how will technology enable smaller business to grow. Here Deshpande said that industries such as retail, healthcare, hospitality and education are the ones using cutting edge technology. However, SMBs do not have the resources to leverage such technology because of which they could be left out. In such a scenario, cloud is a solution, where they can access the latest technology.

Next, Bhadada asked how has IT enabled businesses in India. Here Thakur citied an example from his own organization, where earlier they required to courier tapes of the television shows to their broadcast center in Singapore, which was time consuming. However, now they just upload the content via the Internet, which has not only saved time and money but also offers them the flexibility to change the content as and when required.

Cloud has always been positioned as being cheaper option, however when the panelists were asked if this was true they disagreed. For instance Deshpande said that vendors have over-provided and oversold equipments to companies so unless these solutions are not optimally utilized, it makes no point for businesses to go to the cloud if it is just for monetary gains. Supporting, Deshpande, Thakur remarked that cloud is still being deployed by organizations and its ROI has still to be reviewed, so it is too early to say if cloud is a cheaper option or not.

On the challenges of deploying cloud, Deshpande said that CIOs are currently so used to having their own team that they feel threatened that the cloud could eliminate their entire IT department. He further added that it is not so easy to migrate from the cloud of one vendor to another as the data will be integrated in the applications. This will only be resolved when applications and data are stored separately.

The panel discussion concluded on the note—cloud computing is here to stay and as it evolves the current challenges will be resolved. However, businesses will need to prepare themselves for adopting it.