Companies in India will increase the adoption of cloud competing technology over the next five years. The total cloud market in India, currently at $400 million, will reach $4.5 billion by 2015. Of which private cloud adoption will dominate and account for $3.5 billion in revenues, growing at over 60 per cent, according to a study. The study, ‘private cloud landscape in India' was done by EMC Corporation, a provider of IT service and solutions, and Zinnov Management Consulting, a management consulting firm.

The study says that private cloud market will create one lakh jobs by 2015 against 10,000 now. Today, companies are under-skilled in addressing cloud computing implementations. It recommends companies to invest in competency building internally to take advantage of cloud computing technologies. The study estimates that the skilling and re-skilling market in India will grow fast as cloud computing becomes critical to IT strategies. Leading public and private educational institutions, along with IT enterprises are expected to play a key role in enhancing workforce skills to match the industry demand for cloud computing.

The growth in cloud computing market is attributed to the increased maturity of Indian enterprises towards cloud computing and the chief executive officer / chief information officer mandate for an enterprise-wide cloud strategy. It adds that with the overall environment of cloud adoption fast evolving in India, cloud computing will account for a significant share in the total IT spend of small, medium and large enterprises.

The total cloud spends as a percentage of total IT spend as such is expected to rise from 1.4 per cent in 2010 to 8.2 per cent in 2015.

The study notes that IT/ITeS, telecom, BFSI, manufacturing and government sectors will contribute nearly 78 per cent of the total cloud market, according to Pari Natarajan, Chief Executive Officer, Zinnov Management Consulting.

According to the study, there will be an increase in preference of private cloud over public cloud over the next five years. It also estimates that private cloud deployments can result in potential savings of up to 50 per cent on the IT investments on an average, when compared with a legacy IT model, with cost optimisation in areas such as telecom and networking, facilities and fabric, hardware, software, internal labour and external IT services.

Cloud computing will reshape the Indian IT market by creating new opportunities for IT vendors and driving changes in traditional IT offerings.

There is every chance that companies that are not adopting IT today and do not have major investments in data centres and server farms will directly move into the cloud model.