The software giant, Microsoft has come on terms with the country’s second largest software services firm, Infosys, to provide cloud-based offerings to clients. The collaboration, as noted in the MoU, will have the companies coming together on solution area development, along with technical proof of concepts, and sales and marketing initiatives to address the needs of global enterprises. The needs of global enterprise would subsequently give rise to the adoption of the cloud. This would be across industries such as financial services, manufacturing, retail and healthcare.
There might be a lingering thought in one’s mind, as to what is cloud computing? When computing is delivered over a network as a service , similar to water or electricity delivered through pipes and wires, it is called cloud computing.
Vishnu Bhat, Global Head for Cloud and Vice-President at Infosys, noted that the term ‘cloud computing’ was thought of many years ago and many had even started working on it, but Bhat noted that “it is only in the past 8-9 months that cloud adoption has picked up significantly among enterprises.”
Infosys might not be earning big from their cloud business, but around 2% of its total revenue comes from its cloud business. But the company identifies it as a major growth driver. Last financial year, the company had revenues of $6.1 billion reported.
Forrester estimates that the global market for cloud technology will grow majorly by 2020. it definitely needs time, to get companies wooing for it. At present, it is at $40 billion, but Forrester forecasts that it would move up to $241 billion by 2020. Bhat had a similar point to note, but he limited his forecast to 2015, as he said, “We believe that by 2015, 50-60 % of the enterprise workload or the activities that enterprises use IT for, will be on the cloud.”
Talking about the collaboration, one would see Infosys offering Microsoft Private Cloud solutions such as Windows Server Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center, and solutions on Windows Azure to clients. This would see Infosys accelerating its cloud computing drive. The collaboration would typify how cloud ecosystems will begin.
There has been a bifurcation noted for an Infosys customer engagement, which would be classified in the below mentioned four parts:
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identifying where customers are now
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helping customers create a roadmap
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supporting the migration to the roadmap
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managing the ecosystem
Bhat further said that there are added complications because it will be a mix of private, public and hybrid clouds. It might make things really complicated for the unfamiliar crowd.
Bhat even noted that their company would be helpful to customers, as they would get answers on questions such as: How do we best leverage the cloud and who are the best partners? How many SLAs do we need? How many contracts will be required?
Bhat concluded noting that as of now, enterprises have been putting the “low hanging fruit”, such as e-mail services and storage, in the cloud, but this is changing.