by admin | May 25, 2021 | Business, Emerging Businesses, SMEs
By Nishant Arora,
New Delhi : With digital transformation rapidly re-defining the regional landscape in India — amid humongous amount of data being generated — many more enterprises this year looked at embracing agile, scalable and cost-friendly Cloud offerings, searching for providers with deep technological expertise to help transform their businesses.
However, while improving IT security and increasing business agility remained among the top expected benefits of Cloud by Indian enterprises, the challenges related to costs and complexities with infrastructure cannot be ignored, suggested a report by the International Data Corporation (IDC).
Compared to the Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan) markets where more than 14 per cent of organisations are in the latter stages of Cloud maturity, only 10 per cent of the Indian organisations are currently in the advanced stages, IDC said, adding that most organisations in India have plans to spend maximum of their new Cloud spending on Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications over the next year.
According to Sashikumar Sreedharan, Microsoft India’s Managing Director for Enterprise Commercial Business, end-customers are not only migrating workloads to the Cloud but also investing in Cloud to support new capabilities as they evolve their businesses.
“In fact, many customers are opting for a ‘Cloud-first’ approach in acquiring new IT assets. With this, Indian enterprises are now understanding the importance of incorporating Cloud technologies in their digital journey,” Sreedharan told IANS.
Nearly 88 per cent business leaders from India, polled in the Microsoft’s “Asia Digital Transformation Study”, acknowledge that Cloud technology is a critical enabler that will fuel their digital transformation.
“A whopping 92 per cent of them believe that every organisation needs to be a ‘digital organisation’ to drive growth and innovation for their business,” added Sreedharan.
Microsoft estimates that the move to digital is a massive $100 billion plus opportunity in India.
For Oracle, 2018 saw strong Cloud adoption by the Indian firms, both big and small.
“We expect this to pick up further pace in 2019. Hybrid IT environments are on the rise, and we expect this trend to continue through 2020 as well, with Indian businesses moving to the Cloud in a phased manner,” said Shailender Kumar, Regional Managing Director, Oracle India.
Most Indian businesses are currently looking to adopt Hybrid Cloud and the trend continued this year.
Hybrid Cloud is a computing environment that uses a mix of on-premise, private Cloud and third-party public Cloud services, with orchestration between the two platforms.
Nearly 43 per cent of Indian enterprises will adopt Hybrid Cloud by 2020 — from 13 per cent as of today — and the country will lead the world in Hybrid Cloud usage and adoption over the next two years, a global report by enterprise Cloud computing leader Nutanix predicted this month.
For India, 91 per cent of respondents agreed that Cloud computing has increased the efficiency of their IT departments.
“As billions more people, places and things become connected to the Internet, and more and more enterprises move their systems, software and processes to Cloud providers, the need to connect, communicate, manage and align these varying components takes on a new perspective,” explained Neville Vincent, Vice President, ASEAN, ANZ and India at Nutanix.
Gartner also predicted that that Hybrid Cloud solutions will continue to drive overall adoption in India.
However, according to Oracle’s Kumar, hybrid IT environments also bring to the fore security and interoperability risks. “Hence, businesses are now demanding a far more secure, next generation, truly enterprise-grade Cloud,” Kumar told IANS.
Jagjit Arora, Senior Director-Sales, VMware India, said that almost all organisations across sectors are in the process of digital transformation.
“From our conversations with customers across sectors, I know that appetite for Cloud in India is increasing and evolving. Customers’ interests are shifting to multi and Hybrid Clouds driven by the flexibility, agility and scalability,” said the VMware executive.
There may be a tectonic shift in Cloud adoption in India and the government too has joined the bandwagon.
According to Teresa Carlson, Vice President, Worldwide Public Sector at Amazon Web Services (AWS), retail giant Amazon’s Cloud arm, in just about two years’, there has been a significant change on Cloud adoption in the public sector in India.
“The state governments are moving really faster on adopting Cloud than the US state governments when they were exposed to the Cloud computing eight years back,” Carlson told IANS.
The company launched AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region with two availability zones in 2016.
“For the first time since launching the Mumbai region services, AWS has seen a 70 per cent increase in the accounts of Indian companies,” said Amazon Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Werner Vogels.
The momentum, said Cloud providers, is only going to increase, with more and more industry specific use cases coming to the fore.
(Nishant Arora can be contacted at nishant.a@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Business, Commodity Market, Investing, Large Enterprise
New Delhi : Only one in four large Indian enterprises is able to tap into the full potential of technology-enabled innovations, with most others missing out on an opportunity for both strong growth in profits and market capitalisation, an Accenture report said on Monday.
The report, titled “How to Unlock the Value of Your Innovation Investments”, surveyed C-level executives at 840 large companies across 14 industries and eight countries, including 106 large companies in India.
It found that approximately one in four (25 per cent) of Indian organisations surveyed are generating significant value from their innovation investments as it identified the innovation approach of these high-growth companies and what other companies can learn from them.
“Our research highlights that Indian companies apply innovation more comprehensively compared to their global counterparts.
“In fact, almost 90 per cent of Indian companies have plans to increase their innovation spending by more than 25 per cent over the next five years,” said Anindya Basu, Geographic Unit and Country Senior Managing Director, Accenture in India.
“However, 70 per cent of Indian companies are focusing their investments on incremental innovation, which limits their ability to derive tangible value from their investments,” Basu added.
The research found that companies’ return on innovation investments declined 27 per cent over the past five years.
The gap between what technology makes possible and the ability of companies to realise that value is only going to grow, it added.
Globally, incumbents and start-ups spent a combined $3.2 trillion on innovation-related activities over the past five years and this trend was expected to continue.
“Almost one-half (50 per cent) of those Accenture surveyed in India expect to increase their investments in innovation by more than 50 per cent over the next five years,” the report said.
Of the 75 per cent of Indian respondents who reported increasing their innovation investments by at least 25 per cent in the past five years, more than one-third (38 per cent) under-performed their industry peers in growing profits or market capitalisation.
“The analysis shows that much of this is due to spending predominantly on incremental innovation, which is how nearly three-fourths of non-high-growth Indian companies directed their spend, rather than on disruptive innovation,” said the report.
According to Basu, high-growth companies are not only investing aggressively, but also taking a distinct, disruptive approach to innovation to reinvent their businesses.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Business, Economy, Emerging Businesses, Markets, News, Technology
Mumbai : Increasing security breaches amid skill shortage will push enterprise spending on information security products and services in India to reach $1.7 billion in 2018, Gartner said on Thursday.
This is an increase of 12.5 per cent from 2017. In 2019, the market is forecast to hit $1.9 billion.
“Continued focus on building detection and response capabilities are bolstering security spending in India,” said Siddharth Deshpande, Research Director at Gartner.
“High-impact security incidents in India, like the recent incident with Cosmos Bank, reinforce the need for organisations to treat security and risk management as a top business priority,” Deshpande added.
There are five key enterprise security product segments that will bolster growth in 2019: Integrated risk management software (26.6 per cent growth); data security (12.4 per cent); infrastructure protection (11.7 per cent); identity and access management (10.9 per cent) and network security equipment (10.3 per cent).
The security services market in India will grow from $885 million in 2018 to $1 billion in 2019 — an increase of 13 percent year on year.
“Chief information security officers (CISOs) are increasingly concerned about the quality of security services currently available, creating an opportunity for new security services providers that can offer higher quality services,” said Deshpande.
Security incidents often happen because organisations do not pay attention to basic security hygiene.
“Continued breaches reinforce the need for chief information officers (CIOs) and CISOs to view sensitive data and IT systems as critical infrastructure and prevent, detect and respond to incidents appropriately,” Deshpande added.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Business, Emerging Businesses, Markets, Technology
Bengaluru : As Indian enterprises look to embrace Cloud-driven solutions, the thriving developers’ community is increasingly preferring open, container native technologies for rapid application development and deployment.
The container-native platform enables DevOps teams to build, deploy and operate container-based microservices and serverless applications, using open source tools.
As developers understand the need to move fast, build for the Cloud but retain the flexibility to run where the business or workloads require, there is more leaning towards open source based, community driven technology stack to avoid cloud lock-in, the company said in a statement.
The company organised the second edition of its “Oracle Code” event here where developers attended keynotes, technical sessions and hands-on labs experience.
“In the Cloud economy, businesses are always searching for innovative ways to increase their developer velocity and agility to accelerate digital transformation,” said Ravi Pinto, Director-Product Management, Oracle Cloud Platform.
“Developers are increasingly preferring open, cloud-neutral and community-driven container-native software stacks that enable them to avoid cloud lock-in and to run in a true hybrid mode — so they can use the same stack in the Cloud — for that matter on any Cloud — as they run on-premises,” Pinto explained.
“Oracle Code” enables developers get hands-on view into emerging technologies and techniques for modern Cloud development.
According to Oracle, key trends witnessed in the Indian developer ecosystem include conversational user interface, serverless computing, containers and microservices and Blockchain.
“There has never been a better time to grow Java skills for the developer community. Java remains the top choice for companies capable of handling traditional and new styles of programming,” the company said.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Business, Large Enterprise, Markets, SMEs, Technology
By Nishant Arora,
New Delhi : Several Indian enterprises have chosen Google Cloud to grow their businesses in the past few years. With the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) region now live in the country, the behemoth is one step closer to helping more local firms embrace Cloud.
The Cloud region in Mumbai — that uses Google’s core infrastructure, data analytics and machine learning — offers several services, including compute, Big Data, storage and networking.
“The launch of the Cloud region opens up new opportunities for several new partners who will benefit from building their services on Google Cloud,” Mohit Pande, Country Manager-India, Google Cloud, told IANS.
Google is bullish on India when it comes to Cloud adoption.
Hike Messenger — the first homegrown messaging platform — has migrated its entire messaging application and network as well as all front-end traffic on to Google Cloud.
Since the migration to Google Cloud, Hike has seen a 25-30 per cent reduction in latency, improving the overall user experience on its platform. Google Cloud is also allowing Hike to scale with efficiency and reduce its go-to-market time and effort.
Big enterprises and emerging businesses like Ashok Leyland, Calcutta Electric Supply Corporation (CESC), Dainik Bhaskar Corp, Reliance Entertainment-Digital, Dalmia Cement, DTDC, Delhivery.com, GoIbibo, Royal Enfield, Air Vistara, Tata Sky and Walnut have chosen Google Cloud as their technology platform.
“The new GCP region will help more customers build applications and store their data, and significantly improve latency for customers and end users in the area,” Pande added.
The Mumbai region joins Singapore, Taiwan, Sydney and Tokyo in the Asia-Pacific, making it easier for customers to build highly available, “performant” applications using resources across those geographies.
The GCP region has three zones. Developers and network admins can distribute apps and storage across multiple zones to protect against service disruptions.
Hosting applications in the new region, said the Google executive, can improve latency from 20 to up to 90 per cent for end users in Chennai, Hyderabad, Bengaluru and Mumbai, compared to hosting them in the other closest region which is Singapore.
With over 50 million SMBs, India is one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. “We have an incredible local team of seasoned enterprise and developer experts connecting with start-ups, SMBs and large corporations to understand their needs and offer solutions accordingly,” Pande told IANS.
According to Manish Verma, Chief Technology Officer at Hungama, they wanted to have a low latency and secure cloud platform to create their active-active, high-availability and load-balanced multi-Cloud set-up.
“Google Cloud Platform gave us a low latency network, better than expected SSL [Secure Sockets Layer] performance, and the ability to optimise costs further with custom machine types,” said Verma.
For Sandeep Kalidindi, Head of Technology at one of India’s largest education networks PaGaLGuy, once the company was exposed to GCP and understood the superiority of the platform, its mindset changed from “let us do everything on our own” to “let us do what we do best” and delegate the rest.
“We are always eager to see what new services are being launched and are extremely excited about what GCP can provide as part of its roadmap,” Kalidindi added.
“We really appreciate the stability and scalability of the GCP platform. As a fast-growing start-up, we can scale our platform up and down in minutes without any worries,” Gaurav Tripathi, Chief Technology Officer and Co-founder at Innoplexus AG, wrote on the GCP Mumbai webpage.
Innoplexus caters to the life sciences industry, offering Data as a Service (DaaS) and Continuous Analytics as Service (CaaS) products.
Google recently announced a partnership with Cisco to help its customers improve agility and security in a hybrid world with a fully-supported, open solution for developing and managing applications on-premises and on Google Cloud.
To meet the growing demand for industry-ready workforce in cloud computing, data analytics and machine learning, Google has also collaborated with Coursera, a leading US-based global online education platform, to launch a series of on-demand GCP training courses.
These courses range in skill levels from beginner to advanced and include topics like cloud fundamentals, operations, security, data analytics and machine learning.
(Nishant Arora can be contacted at nishant.a@ians.in)
—IANS
