Despite a slowdown this year in the Indian economy, job creation is not slowing down.
According to a study conducted by IDC and commissioned by Microsoft, cloud computing will generate two million jobs in India by 2015.
These jobs, according to the survey, will be created in manufacturing and ‘communications and media' sectors. An additional 1.4 million jobs is set to be created in the banking sector.
Cloud computing is growing in India and according to a study conducted by Nasscom and Deloitte last year, predicted the market to clock revenues of $16 billion by 2020.
Further, the study pointed out that of the two million jobs, 50 per cent of it will be created in the small and medium businesses.
While the cloud has been hailed as a ‘level playing' technology enabler, a sizeable number of people view it as a job eliminator.
Dispelling the myth, Mr Floris van Heist, General Manager, Business and marketing, Microsoft Corporation India, said, “Up to 75 per cent of the employees indulge in IT infrastructure-related jobs and the adoption of cloud can free up these resources for a company to concentrate in new revenue generating areas.”
Despite India not having a huge IT legacy ecosystem like the West, Mr Heist is of the view that companies can move their applications faster to the cloud and will be able to innovate and bring products to the market quickly.
The IT/ITeS sector has been in the forefront of job creation and in FY11, employment in the IT/BPO sector reached 2.5 million with an addition of 2.4 lakh employees and indirect job creation was estimated at 8.3 million.
However, with increasing use of technology in traditional sectors like manufacturing, concepts such as cloud computing are increasingly getting accepted by companies.
According to IDC estimates, in 2011, cloud services helped businesses around the world generated $600 billion in revenues and 1.5 million new jobs.
Further, the spending on public cloud IT services in 2011 was estimated at $28 billion, while the total spending on IT products and services was $1.7 trillion.