G. R. N. Somashekar

Software as Service: Mr Shanker Annaswamy (left), Managing Director, IBM India, and Mr P Gopalakrishnan, Vice-President, India Software Labs, at a press conference in Banglaore on Wednesday. –

Our Bureau

Bangalore, Sept. 24 US computer giant International Business Machines Corp said on Wednesday it has opened a cloud computing centre in Bangalore that could be used by its customers to run pilot projects.

The company said if any of the customers wanted to build cloud computing capability after the pilot project, IBM would set up the infrastructure.

In India, the targeted sectors for this technology are government organisations, large educational institutions and the communications industry, which includes content providers, Internet service providers and telecom companies, IBM said.

Cloud computing allows better provisioning, monitoring and reporting of IT resources, said Mr Pankaj Sinha, Program Director, Lab Services and Solutions, IBM Software Group.

He said to have an application running, one must have the right operating system, middleware and the right application configured, which is generally done manually. In cloud computing, the entire software stack is installed and configured through automated means.

Cloud computing also provides real time monitoring on how resources are being used, he said.

It also enables better server utilisation because it helps to manage the capacity much more efficiently. Also, because it is automated, system administration task is made easier, he added.

Mr P. Gopalakrishnan, Vice-President, India Software Labs, said cloud computing could be used by small and medium businesses as well as larger enterprises.

He said for the smaller businesses, it would break the affordability barrier. As they would get into the software as a service model, they would not need to invest heavily in technology.

He said the larger enterprises at times retain some of their core applications in-house. He said even the applications retained in-house could benefit from cloud computing.

Mr Gopalakrishnan said the company are looking to partner with IT companies who would be using IBM’s platform to offer software as a service. He said IBM would work not only with large IT companies but also with smaller vendors who have small and medium customers.

IBM said it would work closely with an ecosystem of partners. The company said its core strength lies in its technology base, and some of the domain knowledge would come from the partners.

Mr Gopalakrishnan said the cloud computing market is in early stages and it is difficult to say how big it is. He said large scale of usage is yet to come, but added that the ramp-up would be rapid in the years to come.

At the sidelines of the press briefing, Mr Shanker Annaswamy, Regional General Manger, IBM India, said the company has not seen any slowdown in its business in India so far.

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