Cloud computing storm

India may be touting cloud computing as the next “in” thing without really considering where they stand in the pecking order of the industry. So it may sound absurd that new computing paradigms like cloud can radically diminish the profitability of India’s $60 billion IT industry. Sunset may be knocking on the door of the golden time when Indian-origin IT companies provided demand-led IT services to developed countries.

At the macro level, globalization and digitalization are affecting all industries, at the micro level, cloud computing and social networking will impact all companies. Since the Industrial Revolution, Western nations have ruled the world’s markets using talent pool from their colonies. My thinking is that global brand IT biggies will colonize the IT world leveraging their brand worth and localizing in every country by ingeniously commanding business solutions using emerging technologies like cloud computing. Aside from several emerging technologies, they will command the powerful “cloud reservoir” to become the central hub monopolizing the IT eco-system of global companies. Majors like Accenture and IBM, among a few others, have tremendous clout as they already drive their clients’ IT strategy on investment, innovation, solutions and applications at the strategic CEO/CFO and Board level. They even manage their clients’ other IT application sub-contractors, including Indian vendors, so clients can sleep easy. Companies like Google and Microsoft, who are not big “service providers” in the Accenture, IBM sense, have access to almost every PC/Internet user in the world. They too will try and leverage their position to gain traction in the cloud world. I am sure emerging players like Facebook with 500+ million members are already working on devising strategies to have their play in the new world of cloud. Thus Indian IT majors are squeezed (or perhaps sandwiched) between the global IT biggies with their brand and customer trust on one hand, and players with deep pockets and reach like Google, Facebook and Microsoft on the other. A sandwich typically ends up being lunch.

foresee global brand IT majors inventively solving today’s cloud barriers such as security risk and 24/7 service availability. Capitalizing on their brand worth and reducing their own cost to be competitive, they will gain volume by delivering business value with strategic interface. They will use several IT companies, including Indian-origin IT, to run that marathon of providing commoditized services with huge employee numbers. Clients will naturally trust the global brand as intermediary to cut their cost, reduce the complexity of synchronizing several vendors, and advance their
business growth.

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Chitra