According to India based research firm Zinnov, the Indian cloud computing market is going to experience a ten fold growth by 2015. According to the firm, the current cloud computing market is $110 Million today with, approximately, 66 Million in the SaaS market dominated by applications such as collaboration apps, CRM and ERP. The remaining $ 44 Million is shared by the PaaS and IaaS. 

According to the Zinnov report, by 2015, the cloud computing market in India will reach 1 Billion with SaaS capturing 650 Million dollars while PaaS and IaaS cumulatively get around 440 Million dollars. This data sort of mirrors our understanding about the Indian market (I am a partner in a consulting company based in India and I brainstorm with them on the Indian market scenarios). We do see a more widespread adoption of applications than platform or infrastructure. Along with the traditional enterprise apps like CRM and ERP apps, we are seeing Google Apps gaining strong traction.

According to Zinnov, the main areas where cloud computing will be used extensively are

• Banking and Financial sectors
• Telecom
• Manufacturing
• Government

Also, so far we haven’t seen many successful cloud vendors from India. Infrastructure was always a weak point in the Indian market. However, on the SaaS side, we have Zoho (disclaimer: Zoho is the sponsor of Cloud Ave) operating from Chennai and there are a few smaller SaaS vendors with operations in India. Recently, I came across a PaaS provider called Orangescape and they offer what can be termed as the equivalent of Visual Basic for the cloud. The next few years are going to be interesting in the market and I am keen to see more cloud based vendors coming out of India. However, I also want to warn that there will be too much cloud washing going on by the Indian Outsources and we have already seen some of it in the last year itself.