Samsung Electronics said it will launch its new Galaxy S smartphone on 14 March in New York, taking its fight for market supremacy to Apple Inc's doorstep after reportedly being inundated with requests from US mobile carriers. The Galaxy S IV model will heat up competition in the crucial US mobile phone market, where Apple surpassed Samsung Electronics as the top mobile phone seller for the first time in the fourth quarter of 2012. It will be the first US launch of Samsung's flagship Galaxy smartphone in three years, company spokeswoman Chenny Kim said, and comes amid a Samsung advertising blitz in the United States that has including light-hearted jabs at Apple's fans. "We introduced the Galaxy S III in London last year, and this time we changed the venue (to New York)... as we were bombarded with requests from US mobile carriers to unveil the Galaxy S IV in the country," Samsung Electronics' mobile division chief JK Shin was quoted as saying on the Edaily news website. The new Galaxy S model is expected to feature a higher-resolution display and camera than its predecessor, as well as a faster quad-core processor, media reports said. Samsung Electronics unveiled its first Galaxy S during the CTIA mobile trade show in the United States in 2010, followed by the Galaxy S II at the MWC fair in Spain in 2011 and the Galaxy S III in London last year. Samsung Electronics may have lost its lead in the U.S. handset market but globally the $210 billion South Korean giant is expected to widen its smartphone advantage over its Cupertino, California-based rival this year, helped by a broad product line-up. Apple investors have grown anxious about the company's prospects amid intense competition from Samsung's cheaper, Android-powered phones, and signs the premium smartphone market may be close to saturation in developed markets. Apple shares have slumped 15 per cent this year and the company is reportedly slashing orders for screens and other components from its Asian supplier as intensifying competition erodes demand for its latest iPhone. Samsung Electronics stock price has inched up 1.5 per cent so far this year. (Reuters)
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Sony Corp unveiled its first video game console in seven years on 20 February that will let users stream and play video games hosted on servers, hoping the move will help stem user losses, pre-empt the next version of Microsoft's Xbox and propel it back to the top of the videogame hardware industry. The company revealed its PlayStation 4 console, which will succeed the PlayStation 3, at a flashy event in New York with game developers like Ubisoft and Activision Blizzard in attendance. Sony said the console would be available for the holiday 2013 season. It did not immediately disclose pricing. The console will be up against the next version of the industry-leading Xbox console, which is expected later this summer. The controller on the new console dubbed "DualShock 4" will have a touch pad, Mark Cerny, lead system architect on PlayStation 4, said. Sony purchased US cloud-based gaming company Gaikai for $380 million in July. Using that technology, the new console will offer a cloud-gaming service, the company said. The 8GB PlayStation 4, which has been in development for the last five years, can also instantly stream game content from the console to Sony's handheld PlayStation Vita through a feature called "Remote Play," the company said. Sony has also revamped the user interface on the new console that keeps tabs on user preferences and added social networking features. Sony's announcement comes amid industry speculation that Microsoft is set to unveil the successor to its Xbox 360 later this summer. The market-leading Xbox 360 beats the seven-year-old PlayStation 3's online network with features such as voice commands on interactive gaming and superior connectivity to smartphones and tablets. Gaining a lead over Microsoft's Xbox and Nintendo Co Ltd's new Wii U could help Sony revive an electronics business hurt by a dearth of hit gadgets, a collapse in TV sales and the convergence of consumer interest around tablets and smartphones built by rivals Apple Inc and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd. Tablets and smartphones already account for around 10 per cent of the $80 billion gaming market. Those mobile devices, analysts predict, will within a few years be as powerful as the current slew of game-only consoles. After six years, Sony PlayStation sales are just shy of Xbox's 67 million installed base and well behind the 100 million units of Wii sold by Nintendo, according to analysts. (Reuters)
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Apple fans lined up in several Asian cities to get their hands on the iPad mini on 2 November, but the device, priced above rival gadgets from Google and Amazon.com, attracted smaller crowds than at the company's previous global rollouts. Apple Inc's global gadget rollouts are typically high-energy affairs drawing droves of buyers who stand in line for hours. But a proliferation of comparable rival devices may have sapped some interest. About 50 people waited for the Apple store in Sydney, Australia, to open, where in the past the line had stretched for several blocks when the company debuted new iPhones. At the head of Friday's line was Patrick Li, who had been waiting since 4:30 am and was keen to get his hands on the 7.9-inch slate. "It's light, easy to handle, and I'll use it to read books. It's better than the original iPad," Li said. Read more about gadget reviews There were queues of 100 or more outside Apple stores in Tokyo and Seoul when the device went on sale, but when the company's flagship Hong Kong store opened staff appeared to outnumber those waiting in line. The iPad mini marks Apple's first foray into the smaller-tablet segment, and the latest salvo in a global mobile-device war that has engulfed combatants from Internet search leader Google to Web retailer Amazon.com and software giant Microsoft Corp. Microsoft's 10-inch Surface tablet, powered by the just-launched Windows 8 software, went on sale in October, while Google and Amazon now dominate sales of smaller, 7-inch multimedia tablets. Positive ReviewsUnveiled last week, the iPad mini has won mostly positive reviews, with criticism centring on a screen considered inferior to rivals' and a lofty price tag. The new tablet essentially replicates most of the features of its full-sized sibling, but in a smaller package. "Well, first of all it's so thin and light and very cute - so cute!" said iPad mini customer Ten Ebihara at the Apple store in Tokyo's upscale Ginza district. At $329 for a Wi-Fi only model, the iPad mini is a little costlier than predicted but some analysts see that as Apple's attempt to retain premium positioning. Some investors fear the gadget will lure buyers away from Apple's $499 flagship 9.7-inch iPad, while proving ineffective in combating the threat of Amazon's $199 Kindle Fire and Google's Nexus 7, both of which are sold at or near cost. Also on Friday, Apple rolled out its fourth-generation iPad, with the same 9.7-inch display as the previous version but with a faster A6X processor and better Wi-Fi. Both devices were going on sale in more than 30 countries. Apple will likely sell between 1 million and 1.5 million iPad minis in the first weekend, far short of the 3 million third-generation iPads sold last March in their first weekend, according to Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster. "The reason we expect fewer iPad minis compared to the 3rd Gen is because of the lack of the wireless option and newness of the smaller form factor for consumers," Munster said in a note to clients. "We believe that over time that will change." Reviewers have applauded Apple for squeezing most of the iPad's features into a smaller package that can be comfortably manipulated with one hand. James Vohradsky, a 20 year-old student who previously queued for 17 hours at the Sydney store to buy the iPhone 5, only stood in line for an hour and a half this time. "I had an iPad 1 before, I kind of miss it because I sold it about a year ago. It's just more practical to have the mini because I found it a bit too big. The image is really good and it's got the fast A5 chip too," Vohradsky said. The iPad was launched in 2010 by late Apple boss Steve Jobs and since then it has taken a big chunk out of PC sales, upending the industry and reinventing mobile computing with its apps-based ecosystem. A smaller tablet is the first device to be added to Apple's compact portfolio under Cook, who took over from Jobs just before his death a year ago. Analysts credit Google and Amazon for influencing the decision. Some investors worry that Apple might have lost its chief visionary with Jobs, and that new management might not be able to stay ahead of the pack as rivals innovate and encroach on its market share. (Reuters)
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From cutting critical ailments such as cancer risks to helping you sleep, we all know the benefits of walking. But this is perhaps the most overlooked and neglected form of exercise. Because it sounds and looks easy, most of us do not bother to walk, but prefer to sign up for expensive aerobic classes and spend a lot of time in a gym. Regular walking protects you against a number of illnesses and can be an efficient way to get around from A to B. You can easily build walk into a busy lifestyle and you can walk pretty much anywhere, at any time. It is increasingly obvious that one of the best ways to maintain good health is through physical activity like walking. Regular participation in exercise has been shown to be helpful in the prevention of such killers as heart disease, cancer, and diabetes. However, awareness alone is not enough to encourage individuals to walk more. With an ageing global population and a dramatic increase in the incidence of chronic disease, promoting healthy lifestyles is essential if people are really going to enjoy longer, healthier, happier lives. Environmental degradation and the threats from climate change are also widely recognised as some of the greatest threats to global health in the 21st century. Healthy people need a healthy planet. Taking its philosophy of “your health first”, to the next level, Max Bupa, specialist health insurance company, will host a pan-India multi-city “Walk For Health” campaign on November 4th 2012 in New Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore with an aim to encourage and motivate at least 20,000 people to walk more often and further, and to build more walking into their everyday life to make positive changes to their health. Our view is that individuals, businesses, local authorities and health professionals can all take small steps to help promote more walking to support healthier lifestyles and combat the threatened international ‘epidemic’ of non-communicable diseases such as diabetes, strokes and heart attack. According to data available till December 2011, nearly 110 million people are believed to be suffering from serious illnesses like diabetes, heart diseases and cancer in India collectively. This figure is estimated to double in 15-20 years. 50 per cent of those with symptoms of diabetes are not even aware that they have a serious health problem. In the case of people with coronary (heart) problems, it is even more startling that a majority of them are either not aware of it or simply continue to live in denial of the severity of their condition. It is a proven fact that Indians are genetically more prone to diabetes, heart diseases and cancer. This is mainly because of our diet and lifestyle. A whopping 75% of adult Indians living in urban areas have either very little or no healthy leisure time physical activity at all. Owing to our genetic constitution and largely unhealthy eating habits, we need nearly double the exercise than people living in countries which have a significantly healthier lifestyle and diet. Most Indians work very long hours in high pressure jobs generally up to 6 days a week. This leaves us with no time for regular leisure time physical activity. Time consuming long distance commutes to work makes it even more difficult to squeeze a gym workout into our schedules. This makes walking a significant source of the minimum exercise needed by our bodies. A new study recently published on-line in the current archives of Internal Medicine combined with a meta-analysis of several previous studies has shown that moderate exercise can reduce the occurrence of serious illnesses by as much as 38 – 40 per cent. Furthermore, walkers are thrice more likely to achieve the required level of exercise than non-walkers and gym users; because it does not require special equipment, location or training. Walking is free and can be done anywhere and at any time. Studies have shown remarkably decreased risk of death in older people who walked regularly when they were young. Even if you have not done enough walking until now, it is not too late to start today and continue walking towards a healthier future. Exercising for a sustained period of time is still the best way we know to make improvements in your cardio respiratory fitness. But for many, exercising for long periods of time can be intimidating. And most of us experience days when unforeseen events throw off our schedules and prevent us from having a solid block of time for exercise. Significant health benefits can be realised by simply ceasing to sit and starting to move. The risk of developing heart disease, high blood pressure, non-insulin-dependent diabetes, and colon and breast cancers can be reduced just by becoming more physically active like walking. Lower your risk of or manage type-2 diabetes: Regular walks can keep your blood sugar levels under control which, in turn, reduces your chances of getting diabetes. Another major benefit of walking is to strengthen the heart. Walking regularly can help to lower blood pressure and levels of 'bad' (LDL) cholesterol while raising (HDL) 'good' cholesterol thus giving a healthier heart. As little as one hour of walking per week can lower coronary heart disease risk for people (including those who are overweight, smokers, or have high cholesterol). People with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) who start walking, halve their risk. Just 15 minutes a day of brisk walking can have significant health benefits, even adding up to three years to your life expectancy. This can help you build endurance over time, helping you to feel and look good. Just like the muscles in your body, your bones get stronger when you use them. Because walking is a weight-bearing activity, it's a great way to strengthen your bones. This is particularly important for preventing osteoporosis, a condition where your bones become weak and are more likely to break. Additionally, walking can also improve your muscle strength, co-ordination and balance. Lastly, walking is good for the environment too. With the increase of cars on the road, the consequential rise in pollution, congestion, and traffic accidents have created havoc with the ozone layer. By walking to places that we can instead of driving, we can reduce our carbon footprint and do our bit to save planet Earth too. Don’t disregard walking as a beneficial form of exercise; it can do a whole lot of good for a very broad spectrum of people, from the very young to the elderly with little risk of injury and almost no cost. If you haven’t been active for a while, walking is one of the easiest ways to get started. Begin slowly and gradually build up how much walking you do. It’s important that you build walking into your daily routine so that it becomes a habit. Combine a walking program with a health diet that is high in fiber and healthy unsaturated fats, and you will see positive results! Dr. Virmani is the Head – Relationship Doctor at Max Bupa Health Insurance
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US-based American Real Estate plans to open three multi- specialty hospitals and small clinics in Maharashtra, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh. "We are looking at setting up 500-bed hospitals each in Gujarat, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh. We have identified land near Surat in Gujarat and Indore in Madhya Pradesh," American Real Estate CEO Hasan Merchant told reporters. The company is also looking at setting up clinics in smaller towns of these three states, Merchant said, adding he will be meeting Chief Minister Narendra Modi to discuss investment plans in Gujarat. Merchant is heading three leading corporations in Chicago engaged in medical clinics and real estate activities. Merchant recently launched Merchant Capital Fund in US market to manage investors' fund. Merchant is now looking at launching international business solutions to help large corporations in US seeking SAP engineers from India. He is looking at providing seed money for start up companies in India and setting up joint venture projects or acquire small IT companies. (PTI)
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Leading private insurer Reliance Life on Thursday said its representatives would meet more than 10 lakh customers by March 2013 as part of the company's new post-sales customer service initiative, the first by any insurance company in India.Launching the new initiative, named 'Reliance Life Plus Club', the company said it would mandate an advisor or insurance agent to go back to the customer, beyond just collection of premium, with a view to maintaining a closer and long term relationship with its policyholders.The new initiative is inspired by 'Zutto Motto' (forever more service) service at Nippon Life Insurance, Japan's leading insurer and Reliance Life's strategic partner with a 26 per cent stake.It would make it mandatory for Reliance Life's 1.5 lakh representatives, including employees, advisors and channel partners, to visit its policyholders at least once in year.Reliance Life is the first company in India to introduce a structured post-sales customer service platform, which involves a continued relationship between the company and its customers through personal interactions.Through this initiative, the company targets to meet 10 lakh customers by the end of the current financial year, Reliance Life President and Executive Director Malay Ghosh told reporters here.The company sold more than one million policies in the last fiscal 2011-12 alone, while it is estimated to have a total of more than nine million policyholders.During these interactions, the representatives would review the customers' existing policies, understand the changes and developments in the customers' life and family since their last policy, evaluate current insurance needs and requirements, offer advice on suitable new products and its benefits."The fundamental focus of insurance companies in India has been more on getting new customers than servicing existing policy holders. We wish to change this with our new initiative," Ghosh said."We have just launched the drive. Over a period of two to three years we are targeting at least one personal interaction every year with each of our existing customer," Ghosh said."We expect expenses of about Rs 12 crore would be incurred this year under the initiative," he added.The domestic industry is facing issues on both orphan policies and mis-selling of products... if an agent has to go back to a customer after the sale, the chances of mis-selling reduce dramatically," Ghosh said.
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The days when computer users had to obsess over the quantum of storage are gone. Today, a terabyte or two isn't even in question and it isn't enough in any case. Users now have a multitude of devices, and a new need to access practically all their documents, photographs, music, movies and other odds and ends on all their gadgets. Start-ups, followed by the tech giants, figured out that offering online storage was not only part of keeping up with the trend of moving to the cloud, but that it was a good way to tie them in to new services. And, as is inevitable, there began a battle royale for supremacy in storage, cloud style. Send To DropboxIt would seem logical that traditional storage companies that have been making hard drives and flash drives should head to cloud services. But that didn't happen. Instead, a start-up called Dropbox dropped in out of nowhere and easy personal storage was born. It was wildly popular as it offered 2GB free storage to anyone who signed up for a free account. Today's storage-gobblers would make a quick meal of that, of course, but more storage can be had by inviting others to sign up, and bullying them into downloading Dropbox. Users can get up to 18GB. On top of that, various mobile devices, like some of HTC's smartphones, lead straight to Dropbox for 25GB of additional storage. Beyond that, you can get 100, 200 or 500GB for a fee. For businesses, there is a separate set of space and pricing schemes. Every platform — web browser, PC app, Android, BlackBerry or iOS — has Dropbox apps. And other apps support it. It's really with Dropbox that users got their first taste of the cloud. What works for it is the sheer ease of use. Just drop a file into the Dropbox folder and access it anywhere — about 50 million multi-gadget users rely on it. Now tech companies are waking up and getting deadly serious about their cloud services. A SkyDrive For AllMicrosoft's cloud sync and storage offering, SkyDrive, has been around a long time. But it hasn't been a critical part of everyday use of Windows and Office. The release of Windows 8 and Office 2013 previews, however, changes everything. One: moving from being tethered to the PC to other devices, specifically tablets and phones. Two: a shift from keyboard to touch; Microsoft's new environments are "Touch First". Three: availability of services and data everywhere. Where once MS Office was tied irrevocably to a specific machine, it's now to be tied to the user; the data must be accessible from every device possible — even those made by competitors such as Apple. By default, Office 2013 files will save to the cloud, though you can change that. Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote will save files to the cloud and allow sharing. SkyDrive has now become an essential part of Windows phones, but the full-fledged programmes offer more than the online tools. SkyDrive's advantages over, say, a Dropbox, are obvious. Here, files can be created and edited, and not just stored. Individual users can start off with 7GB free. Later, when pricing for Windows 8 and new versions of Office are frozen, individual users will pay for additional space. Many users may at first resist Micrososft's shift — from software-in-a-box to software-as-a-service. But the convenience of getting data across devices will likely be too good to ignore. Your Files, Gone Google What of Google? Google has always been about cloud in one way or the other. Google Docs, for instance, has always been a way to share files. But it's not easy to use. Nor has it been a favourite for backing up files and was, in any case, separate from Picasa for photos. But in April this year, after a wait of 5-6 years, Google launched Google Drive, integrating Google Docs into Google Drive, and then Drive into its Chrome OS. Google is tying its different offerings into cloud services as it pushes its Android-based tablets and smartphones. Google Drive for OS arrived quickly enough. Drive doesn't, however, stream your content. Sync, Save, Store, ShareApple, along with its lower-than-expectations Q3 earnings, announced that it has 150 million iCloud users. This, it says, will only increase with the launch of iOS 6 for mobile devices. Apple relates absolutely everything to iCloud: contacts, calendar, music, photos, documents and apps. Many apps also save straight to iCloud. So you can pick up on a MacBook where you left off on an iPad. But iCloud is only for Apple products, and doesn't talk to other services as easily. The companies that super-control our devices will want to tie users to their own cloud services. But users can always go for a combination of services — free or paid space, what data to put where (say, music versus work documents). There are various alternative cloud services as well. SugarSync is on several platforms and lets you password-protect files and folders. Insync syncs with Google Drive; LiveDrive allows automatic backup, albeit at a price. Box, which got a new round of funding this week, focuses on file sharing, caters to both enterprise and personal users, and offers free 5GB to start with. break-page-breakWorrisome Clouds While cloud services battle it out for users' mind space, and maybe a share of their wallets, enterprises, unsurprisingly, will want control over where their data goes. Their biggest worry: security, and rightly so. But so it is for users who store personal data. Recently, Dropbox users found that they could log into others' accounts with any password. While Dropbox's responsiveness was exemplary, the vulnerability is evident. With recent cases of massive security breaches it is obvious that even large companies are accessible targets for malware-makers and scamsters. Privacy is no less a concern. We know that Microsoft is monitoring (at least by an automated method) users' files on SkyDrive. The extent of the access and how it will be used are things we don't know. Technology's big names have not been beyond finding innovative ways to use personal information for profit. Just as worrisome is the possibility of total loss of data. Microsoft suspended some SkyDrive users' accounts for apparent violation of guidelines on what could be uploaded. This led not only to loss of data but also loss of services connected with the users' Windows Live ID. All companies have to walk the tightrope between keeping users' files safe and private and yet disallowing clearly illegal activities. And that cannot be done without some compromises. With the launch of Google Drive, there was an immediate backlash of worry over how Google will use personal data. But users soon realised that it is the same with every service. Another worry, specifically in India, is that users need predictable and ample bandwidth. They need to get what they pay for to ensure that their ‘sizeable' files are always at hand. But that is neither promised nor guaranteed and combined with the absence of Wi-Fi zones, relying on the cloud will mean hit-or-miss scenarios.malabhargava(at)bworldmail(dot)com(This story was published in Businessworld Issue Dated 06-08-2012)
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Prasanna Gogwekar has bet his future on the cloud. The managing director of the six- year-old Pune-based startup, QID Solutions, is building an application that allows restaurant owners to track the movement of stock into their outlets. The solution will be delivered via a virtual centre, which will allow his clients to keep track of their inventory without having to invest heavily in their own hardware. Gogwekar's company is a pioneer in offering RFID or radio-frequency identification solutions via the cloud and he has built similar solutions for other clients and industries too. Gogwekar charges his clients on a pay-as-you-go model. And he hosts his solutions on the Microsoft Azure platform — a pay-as-you-go service that the Seattle-based giant offers for independent software vendors (ISVs). In Mumbai, Sumeet Vaid, CEO of Ffreedom Financial Planners, has also adopted cloud computing wholeheartedly to cut his IT costs without compromising the service his 70-odd financial managers provide to the firm's 600 clients. Vaid has not chosen any of the Microsoft services though — he swears by the rival platform provided by the $2-billion cloud services company, Salesforce.com. Meanwhile, Prakash Bhaskaran, CEO of the Bangalore-based security applications company Pawaa Software, has built his new solutions using the Google App Engine. He believes that Google offers him the best platform for development of his services. India is slowly moving to the cloud. And even as that movement gathers momentum, a number of heavyweights — from Microsoft and Salesforce to Google and Amazon, and from IBM to HP — jostle to become market leaders in different segments of the cloud market. Others such as SAP and Oracle, who are late to the party, are drawing up aggressive plans to carve out spheres of influence in the fledgling market. In terms of size, the Indian market is still quite small — barely $900 million or maybe just a bit more currently, compared to the global market of $109 billion, according to Zinnov Management Consulting. It also estimates that the Indian market will be worth about $3-4 billion by 2015. On the other hand, IT industry body Nasscom and consultancy firm Deloitte conducted a study recently, which said the Indian market could grow to as large as $16 billion by 2020. @page_break@ Despite being a minuscule market at the moment, India is considered a huge potential market largely because there are millions of small and medium businesses who cannot afford to invest in expensive hardware and software solutions and are, therefore, customers ripe for the cloud computing movement. Also, as competitive pressures force chief information officers of enterprises to cut costs without losing out on performance, the enterprise market for cloud is expected to grow exponentially. "About 60 per cent of enterprise workloads will be on the cloud in five years, from the current nonexistent levels," says Vishnu Bhat, head of cloud services at Infosys. Finally, there is the hope that many of the government's IT-based services will move to the cloud. Add all those up, and you have a market rich with promise. One of the startups banking on the government for giving a boost to business is Inube Solutions in Bangalore. It makes browser-based apps for insurance agents, which will help them record premium, sales and settle claims on mobile devices. "The government has a plan to reach 40 million below-poverty-line families in four years and we are helping insurance firms use the cloud to reach these people," says Vinod Iyer, CEO of Inube Solutions. He adds that the cloud can capture any amount of data and solve its complexity, especially when the government aims to reach 40 million people. No wonder all the big guns of the cloud world want to play in India, though even market leaders are making little money currently. "Globally speaking, India is a greenfield nation for cloud services," says Praveen Bhadada, director of market expansion at Zinnov. He says the market for education, financial services and mobile banking was going to lead the cloud revolution in India. "The primary driver of the cloud is to keep costs low and to drive manager productivity," says Dharanibalan Gurunathan, vice-president, offerings management and development, global technology services, IBM India. He adds that globally, cities are moving their IT onto the cloud and that all the data needs real-time analytics. "The cloud makes all this possible," says Gurunathan. break-page-break The Marketplace Though the cloud market potential is huge, it is hardly a homogeneous market. In fact, you could look at it as a group of overlapping markets, all of which have only one thing in common — the fact that the services are delivered to end users, largely on a pay-as-you-go model, and probably via the Net. (Though, there are also parts of the cloud business like private clouds, which follow neither of these rules.) The services could include apps, storage space or even things such as enterprise resource planning services. Click On the graph to view an enlarged image Currently, there are four different types of market opportunities that have cropped up — though more are likely to come up in the future. Roughly 25 per cent of the market in India is in what is called the "private cloud" business though a survey showed that 75 per cent of CIOs of big firms preferred the private cloud because of security reasons. The private cloud involves helping organisations move their physical infrastructure, IT services and networking to a cloud or cluster of servers, which are dedicated to that organisation alone. The private cloud can either be managed by the organisation itself or a third party. Microsoft, IBM, HP, Oracle and several others are vying for this market, as are several Indian players such as Infosys and Wipro who, in turn, build their solutions around hardware and software provided by the US giants. The other three opportunities lie in the "public cloud". These are SaaS (software as a service), PaaS (platform as a service) and IaaS (infrastructure as a service). SaaS includes both big corporate offerings such as Microsoft's Office 365 and Google Docs, as well as smaller, more specialised offerings of the kind QID Solutions develops for clients. The ERP solutions that SAP expects to deliver also fall in the category of SaaS. PaaS is aimed largely at independent software vendors, who use these platforms to build their own software services. The Microsoft Azure and the Salesforce platform fall in this category. The last one — IaaS — involves offering storage space and taking care of other infrastructure needs of corporate clients. Here, Amazon Web Services and others such as Oracle, Hitachi and HP are competing. Over a period of time, the public cloud market is expected to become an even bigger opportunity — largely because millions of small and medium firms will use the public cloud, and not private clouds, to keep costs low as they go for more software services. Both Microsoft and Salesforce, by far the most aggressive players in India, plan to tap the small and medium businesses, both directly and indirectly. The former involves offering solutions directly without any intermediaries. But given the sheer size of the potential client base, Microsoft and Salesforce are also tying up with hundreds of ISVs (think Infosys, Wipro as well as Indian startups), which in turn reach out to small clients. The business model, roughly, is a tripartite or dual agreement between the user, the ISV and the platform provider. On an industry average, the entire cost is borne by the user, the ISV makes 20-30 per cent of this charge or there is a revenue share. But companies such as HP and SAP also depend on ISVs to tap the market. "Our road map is to help ISVs build applications that can enable customers to participate in the converged cloud. The converged cloud will include IaaS, PaaS and SaaS solutions which will be managed by HP," says Santanu Ghose, country head for converge infrastructure solutions for HP India. There are some 3,000 ISVs in India, and Microsoft has tie-ups with 450 of them while Salesforce has joined hands with around 400. Microsoft and Salesforce are, in some ways, a study in contrast. The Microsoft platform is proprietary, but holds great appeal to most enterprises, simply because its legacy systems have been built around Microsoft enterprise software. The logic also attracts ISVs, who know that building on top of the Microsoft platform gives them greater acceptability with clients who have been using various Microsoft solutions for many years. "About 80 per cent of the world's businesses use Microsoft software. On an enterprise level Microsoft has the ability to move large customers to the cloud," says Sameer Bordas, founder and CEO of Icertis in Washington. "Microsoft ensures interaction between on-premise core data and data on the cloud seamlessly, while other cloud providers only move processes of enterprises to the cloud," says Bordas. The Seattle-based giant is also going after the start-up market, and is willing to make little or no profits in the present, provided it gets big revenues in the future. Currently, Microsoft has deployed the platform among 1,000 startups for free in India and a 1,000 more companies are using it on a pay-as-you-go basis for computing power and storage of data. "This is just the tip of the iceberg. We focus on solving the IT adoption problem with SMBs," says Srikanth Karnakota, director of ISV and platform strategy at Microsoft India. Of the millions of small and medium businesses (SMB) in India, he says, only 800,000 have broadband and 1 million have computers. "Any cloud service for an enterprise should be integrated into mobile devices too," he says. Microsoft is pushing Azure as the ideal platform to build solutions for different industries. This Microsoft platform is being used in the garment industry in Tamil Nadu's textile city of Tirupur, where a bunch of 15-odd companies is using ERP systems on the cloud. The Azure platform is also bought in bulk by the ISVs and integrated across various industry verticals, where the payment is based on a pay-as-you-go model and the storage used. Globally, Azure costs $280 a month for computing, data management up to 10 GB and 1 TB of storage. The government of India, too, became one of Microsoft's big wins recently. Live@edu is the leading cloud suite for education, with more than 22 million people using the service worldwide and it recently got picked up by the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), which is part of the HRD ministry. At 7.5 million users, the AICTE deployment is one of the largest cloud deployments ever. @page_break@ break-page-break Microsoft also has other household names which are using solutions built on its Azure platform. In the last six months, 300 diabetes clinics of Apollo Hospitals moved to the cloud. Idhasoft, a company that makes cloud-based applications on Azure, has transferred all transactions and patients' health records of the hospital to the cloud. "Chains of hospitals and clinics have many insurance claims. With data being virtual, it can be pulled in quickly to settle a case," says Satya Adari, head of the healthcare division at Idhasoft, a $100-million ISV. Salesforce, which had started with its own proprietary platform initially, has moved to offer a platform based on the Open Source movement, after it took over Heroku in the US. There are plenty of software vendors who swear by the Salesforce platform. Many ISVs prefer Salesforce to Amazon primarily because it is an Open Source platform, which many people consider more flexible. NationWide Primary Healthcare has built services on the cloud; it uses Salesforce's Force platform to run and analyse transactions. This chain of nine health centres moved to the cloud 18 months ago and all the transactional data of patients are on the cloud. "The cloud helps us ramp up the number of clinics and all we have to do is pay for the extra number of users in each centre," says Anuj Pandit, head of technology at NationWide Primary Healthcare. Salesforce says it has 104,000 firms using its platforms and services globally. The company did not want to divulge its India plans, but close to 1,000 firms have subscribed to Salesforce over the past year or so and the number is growing. "India has been one of the fastest growing cloud computing markets for a few years now," says Lee Thompson, senior vice-president for corporate sales for A-Pac at Salesforce. The service cloud in Salesforce charges $260 per month for 11 GB of storage, for unlimited customisation and development of custom applications. Though Amazon and Google are not nearly as aggressive in India as Microsoft and Salesforce, they have their own loyalists. The action in the SaaS space is also hotting up as a few global leaders have jumped into the market. SAP, which has started offering ERP and other solutions via the cloud, admits it has moved into India late. "We need to build more channel partners to push our cloud-based products. Our competition in India has more partners and is really out there capturing the market," Bernd Leukert, executive vice-president and head of application continuous innovation at SAP. Currently, SAP has 200 partners in India and has 3,900 SMBs using its legacy applications. And just this week, Oracle said it was getting serious about India in the cloud sphere. Currently, Oracle has one household name as a client — Flipkart. The e-tailer has shifted its entire CRM operations to a cloud solution provided by Oracle. "Our strategy is to help clients move to the private, public and hybrid cloud. Secondly, also help companies to use our own platforms and applications in the cloud," says Dhruv Singhal, cloud lead, Oracle India. In this war for India's SMBs, Google cannot be ignored. It claims that there are 4 million users of the Google App Engine globally. As it runs free applications, its penetration among individuals is the highest. Google, too, did not divulge its India plans. "It is clear that legacy systems are moving to the cloud. We have to find the early adaptors," says Vinay Goel, head of products in Google. He adds that firms are moving to Google to run their email and office solutions. "We moved to Google apps to consolidate and share reports within the organisation, instead of them being isolated on desktops," says Gautam Mishra, director at Indus Valley Partners. He says even their New York office was not left out of the cloud. Google charges $130 for 1 TB of data on a pay-as-you-go basis. There are other competitors to Microsoft, Google and Salesforce. Wolf Networks and OrangeScape are still small firms, but have built up a sizeable reputation here with more than 100 customers each and are rapidly growing. Citrix Systems is very active in the desktop virtualisation space as well as in mobility and collaboration solutions. Gordon Payne, senior vice-president and general manager, desktop and cloud division, Citrix Systems says: "Imagine in a banking industry where companies have to invest in servers because of thousands of applications that need to be maintained, sometimes many of these applications are not used by the entire workforce. With our mobility solutions in private and public clouds, we can give access to certain applications for specific individuals and this allows companies to save on maintaining and running their own hardware." Mobile Revolution "We have seen a massive shift in cloud computing over the last few years," says Thompson of Salesforce. He says this shift is witnessed by a rising social media revolution that has changed the way billions of people around the world communicate with each other. What he means is that mobility has unleashed the need for real-time collaboration within enterprises. Increasingly, businesses are using applications to create employee social networks so that their workforce can collaborate in a private and secure way. Even Microsoft and Google have already put big money behind this, as sales of mobile devices such as the iPhone, the iPad, Android-based smartphones outstrip those of personal computers. "We see a developer revolution under way," says Karnakota of Microsoft. Thompson agrees. Developers have fallen in love with real-time, multi-tenant app development platforms. A report by Springboard Research says that India's enterprise mobile workforce is expected to grow from 134 million in 2011 to 205 million in 2015. Nearly two-thirds of India's mobile workforce is likely to own a smart mobile device by 2015. According to a Nielsen report, Facebook has more than 32 million active users in India alone. In 2010, India was the fifth largest country for Facebook and in 2012, it will be the second largest. The small battles are now taking centrestage. Perhaps, there will be no single winner. The cloud will allow new entrepreneurs to question old processes, and the race will be won not by the largest force, but those with the most nimble ideas. vishal(dot)krishna(at)abp(dot)in (This story was published in Businessworld Issue Dated 06-08-2012)
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