Companies of all sizes are contending with a combination of market trends which are forcing them to seriously re-evaluate business modules. These forces include growing globalization, lower customer loyalty and widening dispersion of today’s workforce.

With increasing globalization and mobility, as well as escalating competitive forces and corporate productivity requirements, corporations of all sizes have started to rethink how they should operate. At the same time, a combination of rapidly-changing customer expectations and radically different technological advancements is driving a new generation of on-demand services, which are transforming the way organizations operate and innovate.

On-demand services and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions have become the preferred mechanisms for organizations to better leverage the power of technology. Rather than contending with the endless hassles and escalating costs historically associated with traditional, on-premise, hardware and software products, today’s on-demand services and SaaS solutions enable organizations to more quickly and cost effectively harness technology to achieve their business objectives.

On-demand services and SaaS solutions capitalize on the ubiquity and real-time availability of the web to deliver a new breed of business applications that offer greater collaboration and productivity features via a ”pay-as-you-go” subscription fee structure. These solutions also eliminate the infrastructure, installation, maintenance and support costs of the past. Organizations no longer have to acquire additional hardware or hire additional staff to support their business requirements. Instead, the SaaS provider assumes this responsibility as a part of guaranteeing the availability and performance of its solutions.

With the rapid evolution of the SaaS movement, the primary focus of individual SaaS providers has been on developing specific point solutions which can be combined into broader, transaction-oriented packages.
India is still in the preliminary phase and it is only when the people are fully aware about the concept and ready to adopt the same is when usage of solutions on cloud computing will actually pick up.

Over the past few years, we have seen our cloud-based offering grow very rapidly in India. Indeed, given the current economic conditions where budgets are stretched, we see that customer demand for such solutions is increasing exponentially.

Strategies adopted by Cloud Vendors
Cloud computing is being proposed as one answer to the challenges of IT silos – inefficiencies, high costs, and ongoing support and maintenance concerns – and increasing user demand for services. While transactional data and high-performance file share applications are best handled now within enterprise data centres, cloud computing is demonstrating its ability to handle the increasing Internet data from rich web applications, services from online service providers, large data processing jobs, and digital media creation with follow-on global distribution.

In addition, many industry analysts and businesses agree on the cloud computing opportunity. In 2008, total spending on cloud computing services was estimated to have a 27-per cent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) between 2008 and 2012, growing from US$16 billion to US$42 billion, according to IDC. Cloud services are projected to grow by five times going by the rate of current enterprise IT spending.

Cloud Computing – Transforming and improving the Quality of Customer Service
Cloud computing transforms computer processing, data storage, and software applications, allowing them to be delivered as a utility. Just like people tap into existing infrastructure for water or power, companies can now tap into a variety of services – applications, platforms, raw computing power and storage – all via the Internet.

The concept of cloud computing and its tremendous benefits for enterprises in terms of scalability and cost savings is fairly well understood now in the IT community in India. Companies no longer must purchase every piece of hardware or software that is needed to plan for potential business needs. Now, buyers can understand that this flexibility is available for software applications as well.

Concerns towards Cloud Computing
While customers agree about the benefits of cloud computing, they have concerns about cost and flexibility, in particular about security, compatibility with existing applications, lack of a migration path from existing applications to clouds, freedom of choice, federation of internal and external resources, lack of SLAs for policy-based management, and interoperability.

The good news is that these challenges can be resolved using a cloud computing approach that includes computing, network, virtualization, and storage resources. Cisco is facilitating the first step for the enterprise toward a multi-tenant cloud computing solution with a unique approach toward enterprise cloud computing: private clouds.

Companies need to move to cloud computing in a phased manner. It would not be easy for an enterprise to move all its applications from the installed model to the cloud, they will have to choose what applications work best for them and where they would need scalability of the services.

Cloud answer for need for Speed
Cloud computing, which was initially perceived by some as yet another technological flash in the pan, is here to stay. Users clearly see cloud services as an important answer to their need for speed – in terms of their businesses. But there are still certain apprehensions by the users, like stability and security of data on the cloud.

In order to reach widespread acceptance, cloud computing vendors need to be able to provide a certain level of trust, as trust is the most important reason why companies of all sizes decide to fully engage with a technology or a vendor.