The cloud with the SILVER Lining (Valedictory Session) at NASSCOM EMERGEOUT Conclave

Posted by Pradeep Chopra

at August 28, 2009

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

Loading ...

Dr. Anand Deshpande (MD & CEO, Persistent) started the session by welcoming the audience for the last session. As always, it’s difficult to keep the audience on their seats for the last session. Yet, the hall was jam packed. Without taking any time, Dr Anand handed over to Dr Jai Menon (Directory - Tech & Customer Service, Bharti Airtel and Group CIO, Bharti Enterprises), who otherwise needs no introduction.

Dr Menon made a small presentation filled with invaluable insights. The initial slides meant for mental stimulation touched upon the innovation in the ‘communication + computing + entertainment’ over the last 70 years. He said Wimax and 3G will soon revolutionalize the communication models. In his view, Tera Bytes will soon replace Giga Bytes. Talking on the Moore’s law, he mentioned how powerful Mobile Phones have become today. Talking about the power of the small devices, he shared how Bharti is doing most of the HR functions (including ratings) on the Mobile. Building applications for cloud consumptions especially for the 6.5m SMB customers in his view don’t need to wait for rich screens & high bandwidth; a dumb device with a low bandwidth is good enough to create a revolutionary application.

He also highlighted the under-estimated B2C opportunity of cloud based services. Talking about Bharti’s statistics in the B2C consumption of the cloud services, he mentioned that around 105m subscribers are making over 6b transactions.

Talking on the examples of cloud based services, Dr Menon highlighted 3 recently launched services by Bharti:

Online Desktop
NetPC
Hosted Email

He laid a hypothesis that very soon the Cloud/SaaS Industry Ecosystem will comprise of 3 players with complementary strengths:

Services Providers (Airtel etc)
Small Players (Nivio, ZOHO etc) – ‘equally important’ mentioned by Dr Jai.
Big Players (IBM, TCS, Google etc)

Dr Menon summarized his valuable presentation by listing 3 conclusions:

SMEs seek a one stop shop for their ICT stack
Industry ecosystem will have to bring in combined strengths of big IT players, small IT players and service providers
SaaS requires at least equal (if not more) emphasis on the “second S” - reach, barrier to entry, serviceability, upgrade path etc.

Once again, this session was followed by highly interactive Q & A.