Picture Credit: Cloudtechsite.com
APAC was a hot destination for cloud vendors last year and the trend is continuing this year too. However, it appears India could turn out to be the next stop in their journey. Last year, Tata Communications used the now Citrix CloudStack to launch their public cloud offering in India. Theirs was the first public cloud offering with infrastructure within the Indian borders. This offering was interesting from many angles. First, users in India needed an Amazon like cloud infrastructure service with local infrastructure so that they can meet any regulatory requirements put forward by the Indian government. They wanted an offering that takes away the pain of foreign currency transactions. In fact, I have been talking to startups and outsourcing providers in India about the cloud adoption trends and I found out that infrastructure services has decent adoption there after Software as a Service (SaaS). Even though the cloud adoption in India is not phenomenal till now, it will change soon for the following reasons:
- Indian economy is growing unabated for several years now and the need for massive increase in cloud adoption is going to happen sooner than later
- India’s large-scale mobile adoption and rapid adoption of smartphones are going to push the need for cloud infrastructure in a large way
- India skipped landline telephones in favor of mobile and they are going to skip traditional IT and go direct to cloud. The large scale adoption is going to happen in the next 2-5 years according to my estimate
Clearly, conditions are getting more and more optimal for cloud players to step into Indian market. Realizing this trend, NTT Communications Corporation has taken a 74% stake in Netmagic Solutions, one of India’s largest data center providers, in January of this year.
NTT Communications Corporation (NTT Com) and Netmagic Solutions Private Limited (Netmagic Solutions) jointly announced today that NTT Com will acquire 74% of Netmagic Solutions, a leading provider of datacenter services in India. The acquisition is subject to the approval of relevant authorities in India. The addition of Netmagic Solutionsâ datacenter services and sites will expand NTT Comâs capability to provide one-stop ICT solutions in the fast-growing Indian market, as well as accelerate its offering of globally seamless cloud services through expanded ICT infrastructure Asia-wide.
Now CloudPro carries a news that Amazon is planning to launch AWS in India by partnering with Tata Communications for local infrastructure. If this is true, this only confirms the trend we are seeing in India.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is building up a back-end in the emerging markets, with a plan to launch its cloud services in India, Cloud Pro discovered this week. The company has already begun leasing infrastructure from the region’s largest network provider – Tata Communications – and plans to take on the booming country for the first time.
Similarly, Microsoft has intensified its campaign to reach out Indian users with large scale marketing efforts. It is not just the public cloud providers who are focussing in India, I even heard from unconfirmed reports about Eucalyptus focussing on India to reach out to education market. The fact that UBM Media is running their Cloud Connect conference in Bangalore (disclosure: I am speaking in the conference) is a further indication that India is slowly becoming the next hot destination for cloud providers.
