Public Cloud Booms In India As US Giants Seek £477m Market
Gartner sees “explosive” growth of IaaS and SaaS in India, with spending on cloud services in India to hit $1.9 billion by 2019
Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and IBM‘s plans to open data centres and cloud regions in India look like they will pay off as public cloud services revenue in the country is set to hit $731 million (£477m) by the end of this year.
This figure, according to Gartner, is a jump of $176 million (£115m) over 2014’s revenue, and is driven by high growth rates in Infrastructure-as-a-Service products, Software-as-a-Service offerings, and cloud security services.
“The explosive growth of IaaS and SaaS in the India market is an indication that enterprises in India are moving away from building their own on premises infrastructure, as well as migrating from the traditional software licensing model, to a SaaS model served up by cloud providers,” reckoned Sid Nag, a research director at Gartner.
Indian regions
Before this year, most of the world’s biggest data centre companies and tech giants alike didn’t have bases in India, but rather served their customers in the subcontinent through regions based outside the country.
But as data becomes more and more powerful and valuable, not to mention the legalities of keeping citizens data within a country’s borders, there is a land grab situation going on as cloud demand in India rockets upwards as businesses become global and increasing amounts of the 1.3 billion people in the country come online.
Microsoft opened three new data centres in India in September, becoming the first of the larger US public cloud providers to offer cloud computing regions in the country – beating both Amazon Web Services and Google.
The three data centres are located to give Microsoft and its new Indian customers the best coverage of the subcontinent, designed to decrease latency and speed up cloud services.
Microsoft said that governments, large businesses, small and medium businesses (SMBs) and citizens can use the computing power now available locally to fuel India’s inclusive growth, spur innovation and accelerate digital transformation.
Earlier in 2015, Oracle revealed plans to establish data centres in India, according to the firm’s president of product development Thomas Kurian.
Regional focus
“We don’t have (own data centres in India) today though we are evaluating it. We are in discussions with a lot of local players on it though we don’t want to give any timeline or any definite plan,” said Kurian, as reported by the Business Standard.
Amazon has also announced plans to open data centres in India, confirming that the region will be its twelfth globally.
The data centres, which will run Amazon’s cloud computing platform AWS, will open in 2016. Andy Jassy, Amazon Web Services’ SVP, said that India will be one of Amazon cloud’s “largest regions” in the long term.
Spending on IaaS, like that offered by AWS or IBM, will total $100 million (£65m) in 2015, an increase of 25 percent over last year, said Gartner. Spending on cloud management/security will grow 36.6 percent to $82 million (£53m), and SaaS such as Microsoft’s Office 365 will grow 33.4 percent to $302 million (£197m) this year.
Gartner further predicts high rates of spending on cloud services in India to continue through 2019 when the market is expected to reach $1.9 billion (£1.24bn).
According to Gartner’s latest cloud adoption survey, 61 percent of respondents in India indicated that they are currently using cloud services, and additional 31 percent plan to use cloud services by the end of 2015.
