India public cloud to cross $1bn in 2016: Zinnov

Cloud market likely to grow at 34% CAGR, hit $4 billion mark by 2020

India's public cloud market is likely to cross the $1 billion mark in 2016 and will see a growth of over 34 per cent compounded annual growth rate to become a $3.9-4 billion market by 2020, said a study.

The study titled, "Indian Public Cloud Market Landscape", by Zinnov, a management consulting firm, said India continues to be a prominent market for cloud technology adoption. With multiple growth drivers like investments in local data centres, maturing channel partner ecosystem, and rapidly growing developer ecosystem, cloud spending will continue to dominate the market landscape and cross the $10 billion mark by 2020, including both public & private cloud spending.

Praveen Bhadada, Partner & Practice Head, Zinnov said, "Cloud market will present a $10 billion opportunity by 2020 and positions India as a strategic market for global cloud vendors. We expect technology companies to continue to make investments in innovative go-to-market strategies and partnerships to tap this huge opportunity. We will see at least 15-20 top global cloud companies to enter India market in a big way in the next 12 months."

At $2.6-2.8 billion, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) will continue to be the biggest spend category within public cloud followed by Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cumulatively accounting for $1.2 billion by 2020. While the mature enterprise ecosystem is driving significant demand, the vibrant SMB/ start-up landscape and government initiatives are indeed bound to increase the public cloud consumption going forward, said the Zinnov report.

The Zinnov study read that Public cloud adoption is gaining momentum across leading industry verticals and some of the key trends across these verticals include, IT/ITeS vertical accounts for 35-45 per cent of total public cloud spending. Manufacturing companies will leverage SaaS solutions to augment customer outreach, in the BFSI space massive investments in India datacenter set ups by technology vendors is driving the cloud adoption.

"The cloud channel partner ecosystem has evolved significantly and India currently boasts of 1,600-1,800 capable partners fulfilling public cloud demands in the market. These partners provide extensive customer reach and technical capabilities to support cloud initiatives of cloud technology providers and are helping to grow the market significantly," said Rajat Kohli, Engagement Manager, Zinnov.

The report further noted that the decision making on cloud investments within enterprises is no longer being controlled by the IT departments and is involving a lot many stakeholders from the business, product, marketing & technology groups, among others. Cloud providers will need to alter their sales & marketing approaches significantly to articulate value & ROI to a variety of such stakeholders. Cloud will soon move from being seen as a technology investment area to an approach to maximize customer, partner and employee value.