IBM eyes India market for its cloud services

Among newest IBM cloud centres to launch will be in China, the US, UK, Japan, India, Canada and Mexico

India will also be part of the $1.2 billion investment that IBM plans to invest in increasing its global cloud footprint. As part of this investment IBMs data centre will go up from 13 now to 40 in 2014.

Among the newest IBM cloud centres to launch will be in China, the US, UK, Japan, India, Canada and Mexico. This is part of the strategy where IBM aims to bring cloud to every corner of the globe.

“The data centre in India will come up in 2014. We are yet to decide the location for this. We are in lot of discussion,” said Vamsicharan Mudiam, country manager, Cloud Solutions, IBM India and South Asia. He did not elaborate on the quantum of investment that IBM will make in India for setting up the data centre.

For IBM the shift toward being a cloud services provider has been a serious one. Since 2007, Big Blue has invested $7 billion in acquiring 17 cloud companies. One of the largest among them was SoftLayer acquired in 2013 for $2 billion. SoftLayer gave access to over 20,000 customers in 140 countries.

It seems that the investments have started to show results. According to the company’s third quarter results its cloud computing revenue crossed the $1 billion threshold for the first time in a quarter.  Mudiam, believes India is an important market for IBM’s cloud strategy. “There are companies who want to build cloud for themselves and there are firms who want to tap into the cloud technology. We, at IBM will be present in both the scenarios. We have seen Indian enterprises opting for cloud services for application like SAP or ERP. We have seen enterprises taking disaster recovery of SoftLayer for backing up their data and pay as they go. We are also seeing adoption for Analytics on SoftLayer,” he added.

An India-market-first was the launch of AutoDx, an auto exchange, developed in partnership with Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers (Siam) and Automotive Components Manufacturers Association (Acma). Mudiam says this was developed as vendors found the procurement process time-consuming and not cost-effective.

Tata Motors, Hero MotoCorp, SSS Springs and Sundram Fasteners are some of the auto dealers who have integrated AutoDx into their processes. “The idea is to allow players to have accurate processing that will reduce operational cost and right products are delivered to right customer,” he added.

The acquisition of SoftLayer and the consolidation of all the acquisitions so far has allowed IBM to look almost like IBM-as-a-service player. The company has offerings in the Infrastructure space (Infrastructure-as-a-service), platform-as-a-service (middleware solutions offerings like Blue Mix) software-as-a-services (Saas), and Business process-as-a-service.

“In our Saas offerings we are working with a client for a market campaign where we are not only providing the technology for the campaign but also running it for them. And they pay us for each campaign,” added Mudiam.

According to a Gartner report from February 2014, the market potential for Cloud services in India is slated to be around $4 billion through 2017. The overall public cloud services market in India is also set to grow 29.8 per cent this year to touch $550 million, an increase of $127 million from the estimated 2013 revenue of $423 million, said the research firm.