Indian companies need to modernise cloud infra to compete

Indian enterprises may have been late adopters of cloud technology but this is likely to change soon, said Dheeraj Pandey, founder of Nasdaq-listed enterprise cloud company Nutanix, which is targeting the domestic market aggressively.

In an interview to ET, Pandey said that Indian companies such as e-commerce firm Flipkart and ride-hailing service provider Ola will need to modernise their infrastructure to compete with global players such as Amazon

“One of the areas where you will see a lot of competition (in the cloud market) is the e-commerce sector,” Pandey said. “Industry players have to compete with Amazon and modernise. They don’t have the luxury of learning lessons for 20 years the way Amazon did. They will probably have to buy technology to compete in the market.”

According to a quarterly analysis by Synergy Research Group posted in October last year, Amazon Web Services held a 45% share of the worldwide public market for Infrastructure as a Service — greater than Microsoft, Google and IBM’s shares combined. It generated revenue of $12.22 billion in fiscal 2016 for Amazon, up from $7.88 billion in 2015.

Nutanix, which works on a hybrid cloud model that allows enterprises to buy infrastructure rather than rent it the way AWS does, is targeted at large enterprises that can predict their data centre usage estimate for longer periods, of three years for instance. “Just because you can rent an Uber doesn’t mean you will not want to buy a car,” said Pandey.

An enterprise largely makes these decisions on the basis of its predictable demands. Larger companies, which can predict their demands, eventually move from a rented public cloud to owning their own private data centres, Pandey said, citing file hosting company Dropbox as an example that migrated from AWS to its private data centre.

The public cloud, which allows companies to rent infrastructure and pay as per usage, will remain a preference for mid-market companies, Pandey said. But it will soon be competing with a hybrid cloud story, “especially if we do a good job of e-commerce,” he said.