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According to IDC, spending on ‘cloud services’ is expected to grow over five times that of traditional on-premises IT (information technology), informs Mr Ramakrishnan.
“All the analyst predictions aside, at Cumulux, we strongly believe that as an industry we are just taking the first steps in this area. Even though IT budgets are being slashed, enterprises cannot afford to stop investing in IT because IT is what helps them gain and maintain a competitive advantage.” Excerpts from the interview. Can you explain the technologies that constitute cloud computing? How have they evolved over time? Cloud computing is a paradigm that is composed of several strata of services. These include services like infrastructure as a service, storage as a service, platform as a service and software as a service (SaaS). Different cloud providers have developed various access models to these services. The access to these services is based on standard Internet protocols like HTTP, SOAP, REST, XML; and the infrastructure is based on widely-used technologies including virtualisation, hosting. Cloud computing is the maturation and coming together of several prior computing concepts like grid computing, ASP, server hosting, utility computing and virtualisation. Does the cloud concept make the traditional systems department redundant? Is there still a role for the CIO (chief information officer)? I don’t think it makes IT redundant. Instead of the CIO’s core focus being the infrastructure and keeping it running, cloud will truly empower the CIO to focus on information management. IT departments will have to focus on developing solutions and supporting business functions, rapidly using information to react and to develop new offerings instead of managing servers and infrastructure. There will be a need to build architecture roadmaps and information strategy that IT can step up to handle. In essence, IT as we know will change to being more business-focused than infrastructure-focused Talking of CIOs, what should be the right metrics for their performance? CIOs have business and technology metrics today. The technology metrics are more skewed towards planning and management of IT from an infrastructure perspective than business requirements. Cloud computing can allow CIOs to focus on translating the business metrics end-to-end and map that to technology metrics – meaning, translating business goals in application to architecture goals. CIO can have revenue goals instead of cost management goals. The ROI (return on investment) of the application portfolio is one of the key metrics and this is an area in which cloud computing can have a direct and pronounced impact. And finally, the performance of CIOs will not be measured by the size of their IT budget, but the effectiveness of IT in supporting business functions. You speak of a cloud maturity model. What’s that? Cloud computing is in its infancy today and it will take 5-10 years for this to be a reality – and by that I mean, significant adoption in the enterprise even for critical line of business applications. So we have developed a maturity model for how cloud computing adoption will be in different phases. Today the adoption has started with small and departmental applications experimenting with cloud services. In the next phase this will move to a hybrid model, where the cloud services will integrate with data centre applications or services for infrastructure capabilities like security. This will mature to integrating with other data centre based business applications. And in the final phase of maturity, line of business applications will migrate to the cloud, tipping the adoption of cloud platforms. From a client perspective as well, the application models will mature from today where they are only Web-based applications to a combination of Web and rich-client applications and finally reaching the state where rich, Internet, mobile or any other future applications types are all first-class application models. Which of the applications lend themselves for cloud computing right away? As I outlined in the cloud maturity model, small new departmental level applications or Web applications that need to scale over time will be the first set of applications to adopt cloud. These will also include a class of applications that are already external-focused. The key requirements of these applications are abilities of rapid application development and the elastic nature of the cloud. Are there major issues that cloud computing has to resolve before it matures? There are several hurdles that need to be scaled for the successful adoption of cloud. At the base level, it is winning the mindshare and driving businesses to even experiment in this area. Resolving that only opens the door for other real challenges like lack of control, security and data privacy, service level agreements, compliance, data loss and new application model costs/adoption. While it might seem that these are large and hairy issues, cloud providers are working to address these in collaboration with the ecosystem. On successful cloud computing applications… There are several cloud applications that have demonstrated that this is viable and worth the hype/buzz. SalesForce CRM, Zoho, Amazon S3 are among some of most prominent cloud services that have gained both mind share and market share. We have just begun this journey and we will see businesses both small and large capitalise on this phenomenon. On a personal note, how do you see entrepreneurship the second time around? Interestingly, my earlier start-up was focused on subscription based software (SaaS), which was clearly early for its time. I feel that I have come a full circle! Overall, it is easier now in many respects. I was purely a technologist the first time around, but now I am well-rounded professional with technology leadership and business acumen. My previous start-up experience and the corporate experience since then have helped me implement several best practices for both business and team management. Being a self-funded company, I now have the luxury of placing bets and taking risks along with the agony of living with its consequences.
The cloud offerings, he avers, will help enterprises to continue to invest in IT without having to take up big-budget and long-term IT projects. “Investment in IT changes from being a capital expenditure to operating expenditure. Enterprises can become agile and harness the power of IT to drive unprecedented customer value.”
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