Dubai: Momentum is building up in the Middle East for cloud computing, but the current focus seems to be more limited towards infrastructure with many small players entering the market, said a top official at India's Hindustan Computers Limited (HCL).
"Cloud computing represents the biggest disruptive trend in computing this decade. In this cluttered market where cloud has become a fuzzy subject and is holding everyone's attention, HCL as always has taken a lead in defining the core fundamentals of a "cloud computing model" and bring lot of crystallisation around the fundamental underlying philosophy of cloud service model so that the industry can take the benefit to adopt cloud in a systematic and appropriate way," Virender Aggarwal, Executive Vice-President and Head for APAC & MEA, Hindustan Computers Limited (HCL) Technologies, told Gulf News.
He said we differentiate through our strategy on cloud through a lot more holistic. HCL has end-to-end service capabilities in cloud computing which helps organisations in advisory to execution of coherent cloud strategy and services. The services portfolio includes — cloud consulting and assessment, cloud implementation and migration, cloud management and operations.
Current scenario
Keeping in view of the current economic scenario, Virender said that it can safely be inferred that outsourcing jobs will continue to maintain the momentum. India, known for the many advantages it has been delivering to the customers worldwide, will continue to attract outsourcing engagements and offer competitive results.
"We at HCL have been optimistic about the growth trends and opportunities. Even in difficult times, our redefined solutions and innovative offerings have helped us fare well. This year we foresee two trends which will define the new momentum in our market space. The first one flows from the required mandate of reduced IT spend by organisations world-wide, given the recent recessionary phase. While the budgets will have to be efficiently planned and spent, there is growing emphasis toward outsourcing and off-shoring; therefore such benefits will drive the trajectory of growth.
"The second interesting trend is that there is a glimmer of hope of the economy recovering soon. With this background, CEOs are getting ready for making some investments and those investments are largely in the areas of discretionary spends so that the businesses can become more competitive and efficient," he said.
"The discretionary spend is a welcome sign for HCL because our last cycle of growth was driven by application development and by infrastructure services, and we believe our next cycle of growth in the next five years will be driven by engineering services, business process outsourcing and by enterprise application services." The Indian IT services firm has signed a seven-year first of its kind deal with Saudi-based Al Majdouie Group recently.
Regarding this, he said that it is indeed a milestone in many ways. We have been selected as the ‘partner of choice' for the IT transformation project. By undertaking this end-to-end IT services agreement, we will enable streamlined business processes and seamless integration across all group companies and points of presence of Al Majdouie.
"This agreement marks the largest Oracle ERP implementation project for HCL in the Middle East. Also, this will be one of the largest projects for HCL to run on the MTaaS platform in Middle East. MTaaS is the business-ready hosted platform for enterprise tools which runs on the ‘plug and play' mechanism and ensures a highly scalable environment with complete control and flexibility. This hosted tools platform service by HCL is based on pay per use model that ensures cost benefits," he said.
