HP, Sify Meet In The Cloud

Santanu Ghose
Country Manager, Infrastructure, Software & Blades
HP India

HP and Sify Technologies have joined forces to bring state-of-the-art cloud computing services to the cost-sensitive and performance-focused customers.

Recently, Sify Technologies announced its entry into the HP Cloud Agile Partner Program. As a CloudAgile partner, Sify will be able to broaden its customized enterprise class cloud services to meet their customer's needs. Sify's pay-per-use model for the Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) services will now find greater acceptance among the cost-sensitive and performance-focused customers.

Terming the partnership between HP and Sify as 'path breaking', Santanu Ghose, Country Manager, Infrastructure, Software & Blades, HP India, says " The partnership which started two and half years back was the first of its serious cloud computing effort in the market."

Santanu says, "HP aspiration was to energise the market with cloud offering and for that we needed a credible partner who had a trust and confidence in the market. That is exactly what we found that Sify fits the bill well." 

Gaurav Agrawal, Head - VAS and Cloud Services, Sify Technologies, says,"Rationale behind signing up HP Global Cloud Agile Program by Sify is to show how two leading technology  companies have joined together to increase that option on cloud in the market by enabling future ready technologies and platform for deploying different workloads of enterprises on cloud by bringing in trust and confidence of the customers to embrace cloud and newer technology." 

Santanu is of the view that "It is important that service provider and technology provider work together to bring confidence in the market and evangelise the adoption of cloud." 

Under HP cloud Agile Program, HP has forged partnership with the some 150 ISVs in India.  HP's converged Infrastructure is powered by the industry leading HP CloudSystem Matrix and allows Sify to reduce the total cost of ownership of customers by provisioning infrastructure and applications across physical and virtual environments with the least turnaround time. 

Sify solutions built on HP CloudSystem Matrix will allow enterprises to access infrastructure and applications faster on the cloud thereby giving them a competitive edge in the market.

Gaurav Agrawal Head - VAS and Cloud Services, Sify Technologies

Sify will also have access to HP's network of channel partners, sales and marketing support to help drive uptake of its cloud solutions in India.

Cloud computing promises to provide cost-cutting offerings that are strongly appealing to SMEs. After all, the more popular cloud computing gets, the less hardware SMEs will need to buy. The compelling benefits of public cloud computing for a typical SME are: no initial hardware investments, pay-as-you-go fees, and quick time to value.

From the various data analysis, we can safely come to the conclusion that by the end of FY 13, about 36 to 40 percent of the SMB businesses will move to cloud from an ICT perspective. Santanu says, "Cloud Computing Services helps to address these issues very well and will help to address the compute requirements of SMB very significantly. With availability of fibre and connectivity across the country, the ability to connect to a service provider is no more a challenge. This connectivity accounts for the increased adoption of Cloud Computing amongst SMB's.  It is expected about 35% of SMB compute requirement will shift to Cloud by 2013.  The ability to get SLA Based service and shift from Capex to Opex are also catalysts for triggering adoption of Cloud in the SMB segment."

According to Santanu, the four target segments in the SMBs which are making rapid strides in adoption of cloud are healthcare, cooperative bank, education and retail. 

He adds, "Healthcare is a big micro-vertical in SMB which has the fertile ground for the adoption of cloud. Education sector's transition from an unorganised to organised segment is also propelling the stakeholders to move to cloud."