Only 4% of the enterprises (companies) in India have taken advantage of cloud computing, with the SaaS market reaching Rs 465 crore this year, according to Cyber Media Research.
“This is expected to rise to 6.8% for all large and mid-size enterprises in the country by 2012,” it predicted.
The key SaaS applications that showed high rates of growth in 2010 over 2009 include customer relations software such as Salesforce.com, collaborative applications such as messaging, and supply chain management — all of which are used by out-of-office or multiple-office staff.
Cloud services are those which are accessed through the Internet — such as a web-based email service — as distinct from a ‘local’ service like a mail client that downloads and stores emails on your laptop.
Cyber Media — the erstwhile franchisee of IDC in India — said cloud applications (SaaS) is growing at a whopping 50% this year in India, touching the Rs 465 crore ($100 million) mark. In comparison, the non-cloud application market is estimated in a few billions of dollars by other vendors.
Cyber Media predicts Cloud services to keep growing at around 53% every year for the next five years, reaching Rs 2434 crore (around $550 million) by 2014.
Cyber Media, which recently ended its franchisee arrangement with IDC, named Reliance Communications, Tata Communications and state-owned BSNL telecom operators as those with strong focus on emerging cloud ecosystem. These firms, it pointed out, are trying to enable the Cloud revolution by providing the basic infrastructure needed for such services.
Due to the heavy load on applications accessed by thousands and millions of users at the same time, such applications are built over a collection of large number of servers (known as the Cloud) instead of just one server as is traditionally done. Telecom operators are supplying these servers or server farms to house them.
India has seen both foreign cloud players like Salesforce.com and Indian ones like Ramco fight it out for the emerging market. While foriegn players have found price to be a stumbling block, Indian players are yet to match the brand recognition of foreign players.
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