Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Interview with Vishnu Bhat, VP and Head of Cloud Services at Infosys (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: We have been hearing about hybrid, public and private cloud for a while. We talked with all sorts of thought keaders in this space. We would like to hear some insights.

Vishnu Bhat: Let me give you a view of our evolution in the space of what we call ecosystems for enterprises and enterprise integration. What makes our approach unique in today’s setup? When we look at a hybrid ecosystem, for example, it poses a significant challenge for enterprises. First of all, the hybrid ecosystem fragments your workloads, data, processes, applications and governance. It represents a challenge for most enterprises to get into in the first place, because it is difficult to govern, you have different ways of how the ecosystem behaves, your application is still across multiple environments, your data is still across multiple environments, and it becomes difficult to manage that ecosystem.

We took on the challenge of saying, “We have to make this hybrid ecosystem work for enterprises.” We need to address three key challenges: What is the fragmentation of the ecosystem itself? How can we integrate data, how can we integrate applications and processes and, more important, how can we give it governance?

Last year we launched our flagship solution called the Infosys Cloud Ecosystem Hub, which unifies and helps organizations build, manage, and govern an enterprise cloud ecosystem. This solution has three key modules to it. One is that it has a private cloud module, which brings extreme automation to the private cloud. To put it in simpler terms: Can we bring Amazon-like capabilities onto your private cloud in the form of cataloguing, self-service, usage patterns, etc.? Amazon of course is a private cloud. That actually sets organizations to start looking at your private cloud live cloud. What we often see is that they have a private cloud strategy, but it typically stops at virtualization or optimization. But cloud needs a lot more than that and we can enable private cloud to deliver on that promise. Let’s say self-service, for example, is something that is not very well accepted from a process perspective. You can promise services in 30 minutes, but the approval process takes three weeks, which defeats its purpose. It all goes with the automation of the private cloud, including the automation of your infrastructure and other layers as well as organizational collaboration that provides the necessary efficiency of how the private cloud should be used. The second complement is governance. The entire ecosystem across your private cloud, public cloud, and SaaS functions. It exposes catalogs, whether it is on the private cloud, the public cloud or SaaS – something that becomes a one-stop shop for enterprises to look at.

The third thing is brokerage, where organizations can look at best-of-breed cloud setups and make sure that the workloads that are being deployed are best of breed for the given scenario – application, compatibility, security, cost optimization and long-term benefits. All of those are taken into consideration to make smart recommendations. Organizations can use the framework to bring the entire hybrid cloud ecosystem to life.

Engagement is another thing. We use the Cloud Ecosystem Hub as the key enabler to deliver services and bring this hybrid cloud ecosystem to life. For one of our clients in North America, a telecommunications giant, we are using the Cloud Ecosystem Hub and bringing their public cloud infrastructure to life to deploy their Internet sites, which are heavily traffic oriented. This solution helps them integrate their public cloud into the private cloud and makes it seamless in the way their workloads function in a hybrid cloud environment.

All of our engagements look at how to make the hybrid cloud seamless. There are some cases we have seen, as the case of Europe, where the focus is to create a best-of-breed private cloud that is completely automated. We use the Cloud Ecosystem Hub to do that. At the same time, it allows for building containers that can be used for applications to be deployed as SaaS-like applications within the enterprise. That becomes their gateway to start building an ecosystem beyond their private cloud. At this starting point, we enable the creation of an enterprise cloud ecosystem. I hope this gives you a differentiated view of how we approach clients’ problems.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Interview with Vishnu Bhat, VP and Head of Cloud Services at Infosys
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