Realizing the benefits of cloud, public cloud computing is gaining momentum in India Consequently, realizing the business opportunities, the Indian telecom service providers (TSPs) and Internet service providers (ISPs) are taking steps to establish firm hold as this nascent service grows in India in next couple of years.

According to market research firm CyberMedia Research, the public cloud computing market in India is estimated to reach rupees 2,434 crore or US $543.46 million in 2014 after growing at a CAGR of 53 percent between 2010-2014.

CyberMedia Research’s lead analyst Kamal Vohra stated, “Cloud computing is witnessing widespread interest from the vendor-service provider-channel community on the one hand and business leaders and CIOs on the other. This is fuelled by the strong belief that cloud computing will allow a large number of SMBs to adopt the same enterprise class software and technology solutions, which were earlier the exclusive preserve of large enterprises. This, in turn is expected to allow the market for software solutions to open up as large, upfront capital investments in IT infrastructure can be converted into smaller, manageable ‘pay-per-use’ annuity payments.”

However, CyberMedia’s Emerging Technologies’ analyst Apalak Ghosh thinks that ICT vendors and service providers need to launch awareness and education programs targeted at channel partners and customers.

Additionally, the analyst commented, “They also need to develop and bring-to-market innovative ‘cloud’ versions of their solutions to address the needs of diverse customer sets across a range of industry verticals, businesses and country- or region-specific statutory legal frameworks.”

As per CyberMedia Research’s India Cloud Computing Market Review 2011, May 2011 edition, a survey of ‘users’ and ‘non-users’ of cloud computing showed that penetration amongst Indian enterprises was 4 percent in 2010, which is expected to rise to 6.8 percent for all large and mid-size enterprises in the country by 2012.

The overall India SaaS market is expected to go to rupees 465 crore (US 103.83 million)  by the end of 2011, a growth of 50 per cent over 2010. However, a market watchers study indicates that India is still a few years away from the time when the country will see mission critical enterprise applications running on cloud platforms. 

As said by the study, some of the key SaaS applications that showed high rates of growth in 2010 over 2009 include CRM solutions, collaborative applications such as conferencing and messaging, and supply chain management solutions.

The growth of the India IaaS market is expected to be relatively slow in the 2010-2012 time-frame, but is expected to pick up thereafter. The overall CAGR for the India IaaS market during 2010-2014 is expected to be 49 percent, predicts CyberMedia..

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