This was conducted by Peter Coffee, Director, Platform Research, Salesforce.com and our mentor (of S7 Software) and who I consider good friend Sharad Sharma (CEO, Yahoo R&D, India). The session started beautifully with Peter explaining the concept of cloud computing and SaaS and his claim is that it is not in the nascent stage as people tend to believe but already in the very mature stage and people are adopting it at a very fast space. He also claimed that the on-premise software which is part of the existing infrastructure won’t be replaced over night but will be sort of used as a box in the basement to which new cloud computing and SaaS software will be built or used on top with connections done to such on-premise software (Manju, actually we at S7 Software deal mainly with legacy software and conversions and we are already working with many legacy on-premise software and wrapping them up and integrating into cloud solutions and I believe what Peter said here).

His cloud proposition was the “0 -1– infinity” is what is expected from clients which he explained as “0” as ideally the infrastructure on-premise required, “1” coherent environment where you don’t have to deal with multiple versions, upgrades, releases etc and trying to find when they will all sync up, and “infinity” capability of scalability, accessibility, customizability, and interface-ability which he says that on-premise can never come close to it. In cloud computing the time to market right from concept to idea to design to actual implementation is real fast and hence his claim is that most new developments will be going to be on cloud computing as the market being very challenging you cannot waste time in the tradition model of on-premise. Sharad explained how cloud computing is taking over the world as part of Indian software services industry we should be worried as we are getting services work from the traditional model and when the paradigm shifts to cloud, we might have issues with the traditional model. We can react in two ways, either accept it, embrace it and change our working and business (and revenue) models or fight the threat but either not but both Peter and Sharad felt that it is better to accept, embrace and find new opportunities around it. There prediction is that the non-cloud spending will flatten out and most of the investments into new development will be in the cloud computing and of course into the integration of this legacy on-premise into the new cloud. Yes existing won’t go away anywhere soon but investments into it will definitely reduce drastically. Both gave real world examples where people have used cloud computing as a development platform (say Amazon), and as a distribution platform (say Facebook) and hence was able to not only spend a fraction of the cost what they would have spent on the traditional model but also was able to acquire say first 1000 clients in no time and again at a very fast pace and at a very low cost which would have been almost impossible in the traditional on-premise model which pretty much works like invest a million dollar today to get a huge revenue after a year kinds. Of course there will be clients who like your offerings and want a similar one but an “on-premise” version because of their own policies etc and one can always convert the same into Java or other proprietary one very easily. Sharad explain that because of cloud computing and because of the non-requirement of huge infrastructure or capital the next Yahoo or Google can now easily come from say Bangalore or Mumbai!!!! Both Shard and Peter concluded that cloud is real and already prevalent in most places and is going to be the new paradigm shift happening while we speak and let’s embrace it. Pater had a word of caution that in cloud computing, companies like his cannot dominate like other companies in the past in traditional offerings as switching cost for the clients is pretty much zero and will easily shift to someone else if our standards go down.

Manjunath M Gowda, S7 Software