Mahindra Satyam may push cloud for small firms

Mahindra Satyam may at some point enter the 'promising' business of offering cloud computing services for small and medium businesses.

"We already provide infrastructure-as-a-service, virtualisation-as-a-service and security-as-a-service, to name a few.

Earlier this year, Tata Consultancy Services, the country's largest software exporter, launched iOn, a cloud computing service for SMBs.

Narayanan said MS was looking at working on such segments through aggregators.

For example, the Union ministry of small and medium enterprises has a programme to identify industry clusters and to work with IT providers to come up with cloud solutions dedicated to a particular cluster.

"Right now, we are putting a lot of emphasis on those kinds of cluster offerings.

"In the context of going directly to SMBs and offering them cloud . . . that is something which is currently under consideration. We will enter that market as and when it is appropriate," Narayanan said, while refusing to draw any time line.

The overall cloud market, inclusive of the various licences and services across all the key layers like IaaS, platform-as-a-service and software-as-a-service, should be around $70 billion this year, a growth of around 20 per cent over last year.

Of this, SMBs account for 15-20 per cent, which holds a lot of potential, he added.

MS has had a cloud offering for some time, including a 'centre of excellence' dedicated for this within the company.

"Catering to our customer needs, as well as meeting our internal requirements, happened hand-in-hand," Narayanan said.

Adding, the first major cloud implementation was for a financial institution in Australia, where it put in place a private cloud providing desktop-as-a-service, currently serving 8,000-odd users.

MS, said Narayanan, acts as an adviser, provider (intellectual property-based out-of-the-box offerings like iDecisions) and an integration broker (bringing in various elements of the cloud through partners like Amazon Web Services, and Oracle).

He said it was identifying accounts among existing customers.

"Our strategies to tap into the cloud market are manifold. One is through 2X, by quantifying the benefits that the existing clients get when they move to cloud and take that to pitch to the CEOs and CFOs of those organisations.

The other is to bid with alliance partners like Amazon and Salesforce.com, where we do joint initiatives to win new logo acquisitions," he said.

He declined to divulge the number of clients the company had or the contribution from its cloud practice to overall revenues, because of confidentiality reasons.

"All I can say is that it is a growing percentage year-on-year.. .with a triple-digit growth rate."

Narayanan said the company was leveraging the presence of the Mahindras in various multifaceted sectors through its MCube initiative.

And, with the combination of CanvasM's (a joint venture between Tech Mahindra and Motorola) focus on mobile applications, Tech Mahindra's focus on teleco service providers and Mahindra Satyam's enterprise applications, mobility on cloud has been gathering a lot of momentum over the past year, he said.

"This (mobility focus) started soon after the acquisition of Satyam (by the Mahindra group) was done," he said.

MS is implementing a virtual cloud for location-based services in Singapore, wherein an application programming interface is used to identify and locate a person using his/her mobile phone number.