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K.V. Kurmanath

Cloud computing is the buzz word. While IDC pegs spending on IT cloud services at $42 billion by 2012, Gartner foresees 25 per cent of new business software will be delivered as a service by 2011.

There seems to be no difference of opinion on the benefits of the cloud — that it brings direct access to software and hardware with minimal or no upfront investments. It reduces the total cost of ownership and maintenance.

But wait, Microsoft seems to be sounding a new note.

“We see the beginning of a transformation of the new computing model. And it is not cloud computing alone. Not every thing is in the cloud,” asserts Walid Abu-Habda, Corporate Vice-President (Developer and Platform Evangelism) of Microsoft Corporation. “So, we propose the S+S (Software plus Services) model, a combination of software on-premise and software as a service,” he explains.

He says about 8 million small and medium enterprises in India could benefit from the cloud services. According to him, there are certain applications that could be sourced from the cloud and certain things that could be run on the specific, more secure applications. “The model we propose gives customers the best of both worlds (the cloud and specific solutions for specific needs),” he says.

“While enterprises will be open to shifting most of their applications on to the cloud, there will still be a bunch of mission critical applications that will reside on the client desktop,” says Vikas Arora, Group Director (Enterprise Services Division), Microsoft India.

“We offer a range of products through the S+S model for enterprises. In the hosted offerings space, Hosted Dynamics, Hosted CRM, Hosted Windows Server and Hosted messaging and collaboration are a few examples,” he says, talking of Microsoft’s view of the emerging computing model.

Targeting regular consumers and small businesses, Microsoft offers software products such as Xbox Live, Windows Live and Office Live Workspace on the cloud.

“We launched our first operating system on the cloud, Azure. It provides an operating system and a set of developer services that can be used individually or together,” he says.

Azure could help build new applications to run from the cloud or enhance existing applications with cloud-based capabilities. It is the developer community that is going to benefit as the cloud platform encourages it to innovate on an open platform which is free, says the company.

Vikas, however, has a word of caution for the adopters. “One should have clarity on what one wants to move to the cloud. Enterprises should analyse and decide which applications need to be moved to the cloud.”

Services offered through the cloud require a strong steady broadband network to operate. It is also essential for enterprises to cross-check on the security features offered by the vendor. Service providers would need to ensure that customer data is safe and access to data is restricted and secure.

“The India market has a huge potential for the growth of S+S business model. An early adopter of Microsoft’s Hosted ERP Service is Mysore-based Raman Fibre Sciences,” Vikas says.

kurmanath@thehindu.co.in

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