IBM LOOKS TO CAPITALISE ON UNTAPPED CLOUD OPPORTUNITY

Big Blue is seeking to bring the cloud operating model to approximately 80 per cent untapped mission-critical apps which have not moved to the cloud due to compliance, costs or latency issues

- Srikanth RP

In the digital era, it is common for organisations to have multiple clouds for different and varying workloads. Gartner, for instance, predicts that, by 2020, 75 per cent of organisations will have deployed a multi-cloud or hybrid cloud model.

Big Blue, which has over several decades watched and led the transformation of the IT industry, is now looking to tap into the huge unexplored hybrid cloud market which it believes is the next big opportunity. IBM calls this as the Chapter 2 of the cloud. While Chapter 1 of the cloud was largely about moving a lot of new and customer-facing applications to the cloud, Chapter 2 of the cloud is the US$1.2 trillion hybrid cloud market.

Explains Karan Bajwa, Managing Director, IBM India, “Cloud 1.0 in India was all about agility, scalability, time and cost savings. It helped enterprises become agile and automate processes, as organisations began their digital journey. Cloud 2.0, is more about combining the potential of the cloud with the advances of digital transformation to help organisations scale their business and grow exponentially. Building on the agility and cost savings offered by Cloud 1.0, Cloud 2.0 focuses on modernisation, management, infrastructure, security, governance and seamless integration. We see companies in India moving beyond their initial cloud deployments and realising its potential to help optimise existing business applications, re-architecting applications; modernising them and launch new business services, with levels of speed and innovation previously impossible.”