NOT EASY FOR INDIAN PLAYERS TO COMPETE WITH TOP 3 PUBLIC CSPs

Ashish Varerkar, Head of Cloud Native, LTIMindtree gives a lowdown on what's new and what's turbulent in the cloud space-especially with multi-clouds, super cloud, discounts, cloud economics, reasons of poor cloud ROI, FinOps, verticalisation, bundles and poor governance.

- Pratima H

What's changing in the cloudmarket-especially with cloud costing?

Cloud market is everchanging. We see tons of services launched by hyperscalers both public and private. The initial euphoria around cloud has waned and we lot of change in customer buying pattern driven by "fit for purpose" cloud services, cloud economics/cost and service response. Talking of cloud cost, cost is the biggest driving factor for all strategic decisions, be it digital, data or innovation initiatives. Almost all the customers are aware of

Level 1 FinOps. The levers like reserved instances, right sizing, auto or scheduled shutdowns etc. have become hygiene factors. Cloud providers are enabling customers and continuously enhancing the cost monitoring and advisory tooling and innovating on usage-based services, free tiers and VM class or types.

What's happening in cloud bundles and verticalization?

Not many innovative ideas from cloud providers when we think of bundles. The service bundling for integration, or IIOT, AI/ML workloads may bring some cost impact. This is helpful for customers who are a bit high on the maturity curve. As to cloud verticalization, an industry cloud or vertical cloud combines and tailors cloud services required for specific industry vertical cases. The preconfigured cloud services with industry-specific add-ons in terms of ML/AI models, and data schema accelerate and amplify the needed business outcomes. Standardized configuration, optimal spending, and operational efficiency leading to deep customer engagements, are a few things businesses are eyeing. We have seen a mixed take on this. While verticalised cloud offerings in manufacturing/ lloT are quite mature and there is a demand. Other areas like finance, life sciences etc. don't have much pull. CSPs are constantly enhancing and adding new verticalized areas. AWS, Azure, and GCP have more than 25-30 industrialized offerings.