Wednesday, September 8, 2010

HP + Bharti intend to Offer Cloud Services to SMBs

If the deal goes through, it’ll be a good news for the thousands of SMBs / SMEs in India, who are still waiting for their 1st affordable Cloud Application. At a later stage, a few more players may pitch in to make it a more meaningful deal. It may also prompt a few other partnerships by other cloud vendors for affordable solutions for SMBs/SMEs. I bet there’s a billion dollar opportunity & there’s indeed a gap to be filled when it comes to IT implementation in SMBs. In contrast to the sky rocketting prices of traditional model of software development, Subscription based Pay-Per-Use model of cloud apps (SaaS) is the main attraction when it comes to implementing applications for SMBs. If you are not so convinced about the existing opportunities, read here Cloud Computing: A Catalyst for IT adoption in SMEs/SMBs

Cloud-Partnership-HP-Bharti

As HP is a leader in IT infrastructure equipments, it can take care of the IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) layer of the Cloud i.e. Data Center. The Indian telecom giant Bharti (It offers Telecom Services with Airtel brand name) will offer its optical fibre network and bandwidth to cloud data centers. Read press report here HP, Bharti in talks to offer cloud services for SMBs.

What we Expect from this Joint Cloud Initiative?

  • As both the player’s core strength doesn’t lie in the other two cloud stack i.e. PaaS and SaaS; it’ll be interesting to see which cloud platform (PaaS) support they are offering. There are various choices, but in my view the best option, which covers most of the development tools and programming languages is Microsoft’s Windows Azure Platform. It offers multiple development tools & languages to choose from; viz. .NET (C#, VB.Net, C++), Ruby, PHP, Python and Java. By default it supports Visaul Studio IDE, apart from that it also has plug-ins for Eclipse. Moreover, if you can have the development platform in-premise you can port your cloud app to your in-premise environment and vice-versa. Unlike in the past, it ‘seems’ Microsoft intends to make Windows Azure an Open Platform.  
  • Also, from a developers perspective, the offerings should be cheap or free till the service gets a significant number of users/customers. Pricing wise something like Google App Engine! In the long run, with a proper strategy these data centers may empower a developer or a group of developers to create their own cloud application at a ridiculously low price and offer them as a service. Power to innovate! for Cheap & Best service.
  • There are other PaaS as well which I am not so familiar with to offer my suggestions: Check here for Emerging PaaS.

What do you expect?

Cloud Articles at Techno-Pulse

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