Cloud Computing - MIT Technology Review Magazine.

In the last two years cloud computing as a service offering has gained quick momentum in India. While the big players such as Amazon, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, Google, and IBM are in the lead, many private companies are ready to mushroom to grab the market share. Netmagic Solutions, a private organization and hosting partner for Sun Microsystems, is one of them.

Every company irrespective of its size or categorization can benefit from cloud computing. The technology is suitable for large enterprises, mid-sized Internet service companies, small and medium businesses(SMBs) as well as traditional enterprises in verticals such as banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI), and manufacturing. Based on the nature of its operations and size, every company has different cloud computing requirements. Currently cloud computing technology is being touted as a service that can offer distinct commercial and operational advantages

“The opportunity in India is big and cloud is still in the early stages of adoption. We have a great opportunity to work with other vendors to help accelerate the process of developers, startups, enterprises and service providers leveraging the cloud. There is room for many vendors to be successful,” says Sanjay Sharma, Worldwide Director, market development for cloud computing, Sun Microsystems. “Sun has been working with a number of hosting partners such as Joyent and Netmagic that leverage Sun technology for their own cloud-based offerings. With the Sun open cloud platform in India, we will be able to offer even more value to our hosting providers that want to deliver clouds,” says Sharma.

Net magic is one of the very few private companies to offer cloud computing ser vices in India. It engages customers across various verticals through services that are tailored to meet their requirements as its services are vertical agnostic and can be deployed for varied applications and OS platforms. Sharad Sanghi, Managing Director and CEO, Netmagic Solutions, says, “Netmagic has a large and powerful pool of infrastructure that is ‘abstracted’ or ‘virtualized’ for various customers. This allows our customers to scale their infrastructure rapidly by provisioning servers in near real-time and using them only for the duration required without the disadvantage of long-term contracts. Customers can scale elements like CPU, memory, disk, and bandwidth literally on the basis of a few clicks. There are added elements like firewall, lad balancers, LAMP servers, and many other managed services that customers will be able to start and stop whenever they wish, through a secure user panel.”

Some of the key services Netmagic offers:
Cloud Serve provides disposable server resources to customers. Servers can be configured and reconfigured on an on-demand basis, depending on varying business needs. The service is ideal for hosting business applications for SMBs.
Cloud Net service provides customers with the ability to create a complete IT infrastructure including servers (web/database/ application), firewalls, load balancers, and switches by deploying ready-to-deploy cloud appliances. The service is also called Infrastructure Computing for the Enterprise (ICE). Netmagic proclaims it will address the needs of mid-size Internet companies for hosting portals, and data recovery and testing needs of traditional enterprises.
Private Cloud addresses large Internet companies and enterprises application requirements. PrivateCloud is a dedicated cloud infrastructure for large individual enterprise requirements. Netmagic provides hardware and managed virtualization platform to its customers so they can run virtual applications without worrying about ITresources. It also provides a console to allow customers to create various applications and upgrade or downgrade resources on the cloud instantly as per their requirements.


Compared with offerings of private companies such as Netmagic, the big players have the advantage of vast technology base, infrastructure, capital, and resources. Sun Microsystems, for example, intends to bring best practices from its open source technology to cloud computing. It has opened its cloud API for public review and comment. Currently, Sun offers consulting services to partners, developers, startups, and enterprise customers that want to build their own private clouds to achieve significant cost savings and added flexibility. Besides consultation, Sun customers also get the best in Sun’s world-class open source technologies such as OpenStorage, MySQL, OpenSolaris, and Java as well as the Sun xVM virtualization portfolio, identity management, and Web 2.0 programming platform tools and industry-leading servers to build their own clouds.

“With its open source roots, a lot of relevant technology and the vision of ‘network is the computer’ Sun brings a lot of value to customers in the cloud market. With our expertise in data center and virtualization services, we can effectively partner with customers to help define and implement their cloud strategy,” says Sharma.

In 2008, IBM too opened its cloud computing center in Bangalore to focus on helping local customers understand and implement cloud computing solutions. “The technologies on which cloud is based are technologies that IBM invented or lead in today – like virtualization, automation, open standards, and Web-based computing. IBM started delivering remote services to mainframes in 1968 so we’ve got a pretty extensive resume and have been building our arsenal in preparation of this new computing model for decades,” says Dr. Nataraj Nagaratnam, CTO, IBM India Software Labs.

However, in competition with big players Netmagic has spent 25 man months in developing cloud computing services and it is confident on the robustness of its infrastructure, managed services support and its ability to offer entire IT infrastructure in a cloud. While it refrains from indicating the exact price of its services, it says through its services its customers will be able to cut costs by at least 20-25 percent.

Currently, most cloud computing service providers in India are not willing to share information on what they are going to charge their customers. Dr. Nagaratnam of IBM says, “While the cost of consuming the ‘software as a service’ application from IBM is on a ‘pay per use’ model, the cost incurred by customers building private cloud for either internal uses or as a service provider would be subject to the individual requirements and size of the solution. A one size fits all approach will not resonate with enterprise clients that almost always have heterogeneous platforms.”

Considering the security issues around cloud computing services, Netmagic believes there’s nothing to worry about. “Enterprises will have to remain cautious in adopting cloud computing services in critical areas due to concerns about the maturity of offering, customization, and integration needs in addition to security issues and the extent of control over operations. Some of these security concerns are misplaced as the cloud platforms that are being deployed are secure platforms. Netmagic does continuous capacity upgrade and also has policies that ensure that individual customer utilization does not impact other customers so that each customer enjoys a dedicated resource experience,” says Sanghi.

Adding to this, Dr. Nagaratnam feels “It’s important to distinguish between public and private clouds. Private clouds are the behind the firewall already, so we have a great deal of control over security. As for public clouds, it is important to remember that like the Web they may never be completely secure and there are certain degrees of tolerance based on workload.”

Since cloud computing in India is an emerging technology platform, more and more companies such as Wipro, Yahoo, and TCS are foraying into the field. In this situation, both big and small companies, such as IBM and Netmagic respectively, face competition from global players like HP, Cisco, Oracle/Sun in some of its offerings associated with cloud solutions (such as software/ hardware bundling) and from local players like Infosys, Wipro, TCS, HCL in areas of system integration and consultancy, that is, helping end customers build private clouds.

The competition is going to be tougher for latecomers.