Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Interview with Vishnu Bhat, VP and Head of Cloud Services at Infosys (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Seeing that hybrid cloud trend, in general, what functions and workloads are on private cloud, and which ones are on the public cloud?

Vishnu Bhat: What we see is a trend of evolution. We see a trend of hybrid cloud evolution, and we believe that every client has to evolve its own cloud ecosystem. This is a combination of private and public cloud infrastructure. Every enterprise has its unique ecosystem – what that looks like depends from one vertical to another. At the moment we see quite a bit of core functions continuing to exist in the private cloud. But fringe applications are starting to migrate away from private into independent clouds. Non-production environments are moving to the public cloud. Organizations have already adopted some elements of this, like Salesforce.com or Infosys Edge platforms that have begun to leverage the benefits of the rapid implementation of SaaS. We are seeing some different strategies in the public cloud – a lot of free applications, etc.

But as enterprises become more comfortable with the public cloud and how it integrates, we are also seeing that more and more functions that are closer to our own core functions are also moving into the public cloud. A few months ago we saw a trend of unified communication – e-mail, storage, backups, Office 365, etc. Those are the initial ones that are starting to move into the public cloud domains. Now we are seeing a lot of business applications taking shape, as well in the public cloud infrastructure.

SM: Customer relationship management (CRM) has been in the public cloud from the beginning, right?

VB: Yes. It is definitely one of the first things in that space. But enterprises also face challenges in integrating functions in the public cloud without proper strategies in place. Typically those challenges come in the form of integration. What we see in a lot of enterprises is that the lack of integration then causes other side effects, such as data integrity and process integrity. That is why we insist that each enterprise needs to have an ecosystem strategy.  We need to have an ecosystem is that makes sense for the enterprise and know what the strategy is to integrate it to be able to be successful from a medium- to long-term standpoint. Yes, CRM has been out there, but now is the time when enterprises are really focusing on ensuring that it CRM completely integrated into their overall enterprise fabric.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Interview with Vishnu Bhat, VP and Head of Cloud Services at Infosys
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