Indian companies wishing to adopt cloud computing services have much to cheer now. One wonders why and the reasons are as follows. With the  increased maturity and the number of global cloud service providers now entering India, Indian companies now have multiple options to shop for the most suitable cloud services, whenever they want and however they want.

knitting services into solutions

While the good news is that enterprises have started adopting point cloud services such as email, messaging, collaboration and CRM mainstream but the challenge remains around how to knit and integrate these SaaS services into solutions. Enterprises are now expecting cloud services providers to provide Solutions as a Service.

Enterprise IT budgets will either be shrunk or reallocated to more strategic  projects

Such providers will move the complexity of integrating multiple cloud services behind the scenes and provide enterprises with not only power of choice from multiple cloud services but also help adopts solutions  delivered as a service.

That brings us to the question - is there a growing trend among  companies, or departments of larger companies to buy select products and services off the cloud (well, literally!) the e-Commerce way? The answer is YES.

The consumerization of IT

The essence of e-Commerce seems to have touched upon every aspect of online shopping be it for ‘consumer' goods or services or ‘business' goods or services. In the realm of B2B purchases, we are witnessing a consumerization of IT, the cloud solutions that users have brought into the enterprise are changing the way IT organizations are responding to the demands of these users. As consumerization of cloud computing has emerged in the enterprise, it has brought with it varying levels of confusion about the options and the needs they best meet. This provides an opportunity for providers offering cloud services especially the ones specializing in the ‘cloud aggregator or brokerage model' to step in and address this confusion, by providing customers a portfolio from which they can choose the best options that meet their needs.

Given the economics of the cloud and the new business models emerging around the delivery of cloud-based services, organizations could create and deliver these new ICT services at a potentially lower cost compared with conventional approaches.

The Cloud broker

This is a great challenge for the CIOs who are highly concerned with returns on investments, but at the same time provide the best and most secure mechanisms to manage and protect the corporate IT and business data. In this scenario, having an able and unbiased consultant who can understand the company's business needs and associated IT requirements; and then suggest the best options that meet the above, can definitely provide the CIO much needed business support. This is what is known in the industry as the Cloud broker.

An interesting finding as predicted by Gartner states that by end of 2012, 20 percent of businesses will not own any ICT assets. This means enterprise ICT budgets will either be shrunk or reallocated to  more-strategic projects; enterprise IT staff will either be reduced or re-skilled to meet new business requirements, and/or asset distribution will have to change radically to meet the requirements of the new IT hardware/software usage points.