Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Interview with Vishnu Bhat, VP and Head of Cloud Services at Infosys (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I would like to spend some time on three of your clients. Explain some interesting trends and applications of cloud computing you are seeing.

Vishnu Bhat: We have seen the interest in cloud computing and the setting up of an ecosystem around it. It started out with retail initially, but we are now seeing that it is happening across the globe. To give you an example, we started setting up a cloud environment for one of our clients in Canada, helping them to implement a private cloud, extremely automating it. We helped them build and integrate their entire test embedding environment on Amazon, which is the first approach of getting into the public cloud. That saved them significant time and cost to market.

We had initial perceptions from the client that cloud is about cost saving. Soon we realized that the clients are also keen to obtain benefits of reduced time to market, agility and implementation. These are the key things we take into consideration when implementing strategies for the hybrid cloud. This is one example where we were able to provide significant benefits from a time perspective, a cost-to-market perspective, and an agility standpoint, bringing down the delivery time and cost of projects significantly by leveraging the public cloud.

In another case, for a retail client in North America, we allowed the process of migrating hundreds of applications onto Microsoft. We used these initial assessments to migrate fringe applications. We have seen the first set of workloads to move onto a public cloud were production applications.

We believe, especially in those two examples, that there is no perfect starting point. Whatever works fine for any enterprise to start building this ecosystem at any point in their evolution. Generally for financial services, we are migrating several of these applications onto Microsoft. Another interesting case study is one of our financial services client, where we are actually creating a complete ecosystem from ground up, migrating to an extremely automated private cloud and at the same time leveraging Amazon and the public cloud environment. At the same time, we are migrating some of their key applications, building a business case for the next five years, building an ecosystem for this client and giving them integrated end-to-end opt-in based capability, leveraging cloud for the next five years.

I believe this is going to be a template for how the cloud will be leveraged in the outsourcing environment, with a long-term objective, long-term contracts, and opt-in based scenario.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Interview with Vishnu Bhat, VP and Head of Cloud Services at Infosys
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