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IaaS Helps Indian Cos Boost, Performance, Innovation

IaaS

Indian businesses are rapidly embracing cloud infrastructure – IaaS – to boost performance and innovation levels, a new research from Oracle has revealed. While negative perceptions around security, complexity and loss of control still present barriers to adoption, these factors are fast becoming outdated myths, said the study. The numbers are clearly written on the wall, as the study concluded, more than 50% of Indian companies plan to run their business on cloud infrastructure over the next three years.

In an exclusive interaction with CXOToday, Subash Nambiar, VP-Cloud Platform, Oracle Indiasheds light on the IaaS market in India with a special focus on the report, explaining why businesses not investing in IaaS will increasingly find themselves struggling to keep pace with innovation.

CXOToday: How is the cloud infrastructure market in India?

 Subash Nambiar: By 2021, the cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) market in India will exceed $2.1 billion in end user spending, according to Gartner. Clearly, IaaS is evolving as the fastest cloud offering and businesses are rapidly embracing cloud infrastructure to boost performance. There is growing adoption of IaaS in various industries, such as IT & Telecom, BFSI, Healthcare, Government and Education, among others across the country. We are now starting to see high levels of success and satisfaction from businesses that are saving money, cutting complexity and driving exciting innovation, because of cloud infrastructure.  

CXOToday: What are the latest trends, according to ‘State of the cloud infrastructure market in India’ research report?

 Subash Nambiar: Growth and profitability are the key priorities mentioned by most CIOs today, and modern cloud infrastructure is increasingly being looked at as the way to meet these demands. According to the findings of Oracle’s recent ‘State of the cloud infrastructure market in India’ research, 64% of experienced IaaS users said that the move was easier than expected, dispelling complexity myths.

– Innovation and agility: 62 percent of the respondents say IaaS makes it easier to innovate. Among our pioneers, this conviction is even more prevalent – 68 percent believe in the innovative advantages of IaaS. Further, IaaS is linked to agility—a crucial attribute in a fast-changing world—with 60 percent of respondents saying that moving to IaaS has significantly cut their time to deployment.

– Performance: 47 percent of respondents say IaaS improves their systems’ availability and uptime. A similar proportion says that it makes their infrastructure faster. The pioneers are much more likely to believe in the benefits of IaaS than recent adopters.– Adoption: To date, the top two challenges faced by businesses when adopting IaaS have been cost and data security. Now, organizations are getting better at overcoming these obstacles. Our pioneers, who have seen the full benefits of IaaS play out over time, are less likely than recent adopters to say that cost has been a challenge. 67 percent of the respondents believe IaaS has significantly cut maintenance costs. The pioneers are also more comfortable with security—instead of a security risk, they see IaaS as a security opportunity: 58 percent say IaaS represents best practice security for enterprise architecture.

–  Timely: Our survey makes two things clear – the barriers to IaaS are falling, and the benefits are becoming clearer. With ever-more sophisticated solutions appearing, it’s no surprise that businesses are seizing the IaaS opportunity. 44 percent of businesses are aiming to base all or most of their IT infrastructure on IaaS within the next three years. In total, 77 percent expect to be using IaaS to some extent in the same timeframe.  

CXOToday: What is Oracle’s value proposition for companies looking to transition to cloud infrastructure?

 Subash Nambiar: Oracle IaaS is a great platform for both traditional and modern application workloads, but is uniquely differentiated for enterprise workloads, like database applications, and intensive workloads like big data and high performance compute. Oracle IaaS offerings enable customers to quickly acquire resources to speed development, test, and launch cycles, or host existing applications on a consumption or subscription model. The services are relevant for customers from start-ups to large scale enterprises that require a reliable platform to migrate or build applications, or as part of a broader cloud strategy of SaaS adoption and application migration and modernization.

With a comprehensive offering that includes compute, storage, network, bare metal, and container services, Oracle’s infrastructure services drive business value. Our enterprise-grade cloud enables organizations to run any workload at any time, while innovative migration tools pave the way by simplifying how organizations migrate on-premises workloads to the cloud.

CXOToday: Can you share examples of a few key customers and how they benefited from your IaaS offering?

 Subash Nambiar: We’re seeing great traction for IaaS and have customers across industries such as Telecom, Banking, Government, finance etc. Key benefits cited by our IaaS customers include, such as increased revenue and saved costs by accessing compute, storage, and network infrastructure on demand and by paying only for actual usage; improved customer service and loyalty by integrating and streamlining processes and information across multiple cloud and on-premises platforms; accelerated time to market by rapidly provisioning IT resources for development, test, and hosting of customer and internal-facing applications; increased sales productivity by rapidly provisioning IT resources for service enablement, training, and product demonstrations and enabled new entrepreneurial digital services by providing a responsive and integrated platform to support modern architectures or intensive workloads.

AT&T and Bank of America are two of our key global customers. In India, some of our key customers include SBI, IFFCO ebazar and BirlaSoft, to name a few.

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