Bangalore: For the most part of 30 years, Shodan Bhandari ran his fresh fruit juice business, now a chain of 25 Juice Junction outlets across Bangalore with an annual turnover of about Rs12 crore, on spreadsheets. A few months ago, he graduated to a mini, custom-made enterprise resource planning (ERP), or business, software that runs on a local “cloud” maintained by start-up Wolf Frameworks, and for which Bhandari pays a nominal subscription fee.
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Three-year-old Wolf typifies several small firms that are building new businesses on the “cloud”, an information technology (IT) term that is as nebulous as the English word it is derived from; it essentially means a network of networks delivering service on demand. Old-school computer wonks say it is all things Internet, but increasingly, the jargon-ridden IT world is using cloud computing to signal the next big thing, though it means different things to different people.
Cloud computing started off as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS); then, Software-as-a-Ser-vice caught on, which rapidly converted business processes into services, says Sharad Sharma, chairperson of the product forum at the National Association of Software and Service Companies (Nasscom). The former was epitomized by online book peddler Amazon.com, the latter by online business software company Salesforce.com. Now, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is emerging, though it hasn’t reached a level of maturity yet. “Unfortunately, cloud computing has come to be applied to all three,” says Sharma, who as entrepreneur-in-residence at venture capital firm Canaan Partners will announce his own venture in this space in the first quarter of next year.
Sharma says a handful of PaaS start-ups in the country, such as OrangeScape, AppPoint Software Solutions, Wolf and Agile Labs are providing the rapid application development framework to smaller firms to develop products for a worldwide cloud services market that Gartner Inc. estimates will exceed $56.3 billion (Rs2.7 trillion) in 2009, a 21.3% rise from 2008. Merrill Lynch last year estimated this market to reach $160 billion by 2011. Nasscom’s estimate is that the domestic market will be worth $5 billion in five years, with products and platforms accounting for $2 billion.
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Real-world examples of real-time cloud services are mounting. Wolf, which claims to be the world’s first PaaS product fully based on open communication standards AJAX/XML, allows users to develop and deliver customer-centric business applications (or SaaS) without using any technical code or programming language. Naturally, non-technical entrepreneurs feel empowered.