Could a potential cloud computing boon be blooming in India right now? According to many industry experts, it’s very possible that the upcoming year will see a huge uptick in the number of companies embracing cloud within India, which currently has over 100 million people accessing the internet through smartphones.
According to Shradha Sharma, who founded the popular Indian website YourStory.com, cloud technology holds a “particular allure” for Indian entrepreneurs, especially those who are looking for ways to cut their overhead costs by as much as possible. Rather than having to rely on pirated software, cloud solutions allow businesses to pay as they go, which can help keep the costs of doing business low, and help distribute those costs more evenly.
Currently, India has more than 10,000 tech-based start-ups, and the industry has an expected future growth rate of about 25% each year. The opportunity for businesses to pull ahead using cloud hosting services is enticing, and the cloud boom is only in its beginning stages.
Although there are about 50 million small businesses and start-ups in India, 86% of those companies, or 43 million, are not even using the internet yet to conduct their business. The companies that do end up adopting cloud can experience a significant boost that propels them beyond the competition that might otherwise have fairly comparable offerings. “There’s a huge opportunity for them to go online and start interacting,” Sharma explains. It’s a potential market that many businesses in crowded U.S. industries could only dream of.
Many Indian consumers aren’t waiting around for businesses to start adapting their technology. A fair percentage of the 900 million mobile subscribers are using mobile phones in order to access cloud technology, and international venture capitalists are paying attention to this trend.
A recent survey of Indian business owners showed that there is a lot of interest in cloud, even if people are not uniformly taking to it yet. “In the start-up space, people are very eager and hungry to adopt,” Shradha says. It seems likely that, within the near future, cloud solution providers will start to experience more demand from India than ever before.
Do you see cloud computing becoming a popular technology in India? Let us know in the comments. More.
