"Cloud computing gives an edge to enterprises as they can add capabilities and increase capacities on the fly without having to invest in infrastructure, training or licenses. One of the most important features of cloud computing is automated management and reallocation of resources. This means that a user can work on a platform without worrying about adaptability, scalability and elasticity," says Kaustubh Dhavse, deputy director of ICT practice at Frost & Sullivan, South Asia and Middle East.

In addition to online players such as Amazon, Google, Akamai, 3Tera, etcetera, software giants like Microsoft have begun to take note the new concept that might create a seismic shift in the way IT is deployed and consumed.

Window to the Cloud World

Microsoft is not only introducing HPC-related enhancements in its development platform but also service-enabling a host of its enterprise apps to run on a cloud-computing environment. "We strongly feel that people are going to choose the best of both worlds (software and services). Practically, SaaS is just a delivery mechanism. It is not a platform paradigm. Software plus service is actually a platform paradigm and will reflect how people are going to consume software going forward," says Tarun Gulati, GM, marketing and operations, Microsoft India.

Conventionally, HPC has always been the ruling ground of open source software. Now, Microsoft wants some of that action. "Microsoft has made significant inroads in HPC in the last few years. MS Windows has started to fit architecturally with this grid model," points out Staten.

This is giving an unparalleled boost to Microsoft's cloud initiatives. "With our online suite of offerings, we are currently talking about online versions of our Exchange, SharePoint and Unified Communications stacks of software. Going forward, most apps will slowly start to have services-component built in. This will give more choices to enterprises in their decisions to consume software. Whether they want to have full control or if they would like to consume software as a service. Or may be, they would like to choose a hybrid model, where certain elements will be deployed locally and the rest is hosted on a cloud environment. We have, for example, MS Exchange online, which has shared APIs and configurability built across to be deployed as a service to enterprises. Going forward, we will have our CRM enabled for online computing," says Gulati.

Are the Clouds Ready?

"For a service to be ready for enterprises to consume, it must pass from the early-adopter phase (few enterprises using it with most deployments being experimental and used in non-business critical projects) to early majority, says Staten. "Evidence of being at this stage comes from a sufficient volume of direct enterprise customer references using the service for business-critical purposes. We were not able to verify enough customer references (even off the record) to conclude that cloud computing has crossed over from early adopter to early majority. However, platforms are maturing and will start to better meet enterprise needs in the next two to three years."