SLOWLY BUT STEADILY, CLOUD COMPUTING IS FINALLY MAKING ITS PRESENCE FELT IN INDIA. AN INTERESTING CAREER OPTION FOR IT ASPIRANTS, CLOUD COMPUTING IS CURRENTLY THE TALK OF THE TOWN.

NIPA VAIDYA PRESENTS DETAILS

Let’s begin with the basics. What is cloud computing? Wikipedia says it is ‘an Internet – (“cloud-”) based development and use of computer technology’. Simplifying this definition for us, Anurag Gupta Senior Architect, Yahoo, says, “Cloud computing is a mechanism that enables management of computing and IT infrastructure to be consolidated in one or more data centers to
reduce the overall cost of operating computing facilities.” Breaking down this information to the bare basics, Vikas Arora, Group Director –Enterprise Services, Microsoft India, says, “Cloud computing is nothing but a computing technology that provides organisational abilities to access software and hardware resources from a virtual space.”

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India’s logistics sector, including ports and road transport, is glimpsing the first signs of recovery from a global recession that caused trade to shrink and cargo volumes to slump through the most part of last year.

Cargo volumes at the country’s major ports rose 12.8% year-on-year (y-o-y) to 48.2 million
tonnes in November, the latest month for which data is available, paced by growth in container
and iron ore traffic.

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Healthcare IT based on SaaS (Software as a Service) may be the way to go if you look at the recent investment trend. Nextgen eSolutions and Insta Health Solutions are two SaaS based software companies for healthcare industry who recently got venture funding. Delhi-based private equity fund Lumis Partners picked up a majority stake in the city based NextGen. Insta Health bagged about $1 million from Bangalore-based Inventus Capital.

NextGen has come up with a product based on SaaS (Software as a Service) model for hospital management services. Bangalore-based Insta Health has also come up with a hospital management software based on SaaS. These products help in management of various functions in hospitals like patient registration, inventory, billing, system administration, etc. Other such players include Karishma Software and Akhil Systems Pvt Ltd.

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Among my predictions for 2009, was that the new Obama administration would push legislation and take other initiatives to promote Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and cloud computing as part of its overhaul of the government and economic stimulus efforts.

Sure enough, Obama’’s new CIO–- Vivek Kundra- –made it clear yesterday that he is a big proponent of SaaS and cloud computing. Here’’s what he said to the Wall Street Journal, “

“I’’m a big believer in disruptive technology. If I went to the coffee shop, I would have more computing power than the police department. Consumers had better technology than the government did. I’’m all about the cloud computing notion. I look at my lifestyle, and I want access to information wherever I am. I am killing projects that don’t investigate software as a service first.””

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Mumbai: In a bid to protect itself against defaults by tenants, Phoenix Mills Ltd plans to charge daily rentals from at least some of the 120 retailers who have taken space in its sprawling shopping hub in central Mumbai.

Weak revenues have already ensured that a growing number of retailers now prefer to give mall owners a share of their monthly collections, rather than a fixed rent. The revenues are usually shared in the first week of every month. Phoenix Mills hopes to make it a daily occurrence.

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Initially, installation-installation-installation from a CD, then download-download-download from internet. We had been doing this for a while. This increases our junk in the room or in the computer. Neither of them is exciting any more. Now it is the time to access an application only when you need. It is not necessary to download or install any application software product.

I am running out of CD rack space and computer hard disk space. Every time I go to Fry’s Electronics and see any new business software or, even computer games, I ask the attendant, ‘Are you sure that this does not have an internet version?’ I hate to install every time. And, after installation of the software, I see that my rack space is shrinking. Or, even using a download version also, my disk space is shrinking. Therefore, I wish all these utilities become available on demand over a ‘compute cloud’.

At least, I am happy to find a smart product like a2zapps.com that is truly a generic on-demand service platform. Today, if I need to access my diverse sets of information and status of several events happened in last three years, I can just login to my a2zapps.com account over the internet without worrying about copying MS Outlook mail/data, contact manager/data from one older laptop to a new laptop. Even if I use Gmail or, Google docs; they may not be well-integrated and customizable satisfying my organizational needs. A2zapps is definitely one-of-a-kind integrated platform to be customized based on my need.

The future home and business applications, games, puzzles and whatever applications you can imagine will be on ‘compute cloud’ accessible over the high-speed internet.
Therefore, forget installing, downloading or, buying unnecessary application bundles many of those you will never use. Only subscribe the ones you need over the internet.

After several months, based on our customers’ feedback, we have finally changed our User Interfaces (UIs) to make the business platform more user-friendly and less click-able. It has improved interfaces into a better and colorful look. We have added expandable-collapsible sections vertically and horizontally to provide users a single window for multiple actions such as recent item viewing, quick record/multi-record creation, upcoming meetings and due tasks etc. This change in layout makes user navigations much easier.

Also, we have enhanced the look-and-feel of row display patterns with variations of light and shade. Users can change easily the skin color of the interfaces on their choice.

We thank all our customers for their valuable feedback and contributing to our product roadmap.

This is more complex than a transitive relationship. Especially, when we live in these turbulent economic times, we go through this desperation between passion for product improvement and search for monetary support. We all know that eventually customers will rule and guide everything and everyone irrespective of any external parameters. And, that is the only guiding force we have to live with.

We gave away all our energy, time and money to come up with such a beautiful and most importantly, useful product (not a research project or, experiment). And, we are 200% confident in our growth potential as our only direct competition is the new ‘force.com’ by Salesforce.com as of today. So, why don’t we work 24/7 to make our first 25 customers successful? May be, then we chase VC’s or, they will chase us. Who knows?

Just to give a highlight once more, this product is recession-proof. As a matter of fact, in recession, this product helps emerging business owners to save money. (http://corporate.a2zapplications.com/corp/benefits)

It is a fight between skepticism on not-so-long-proven concept and confidence on traditionally proven concept. Apparently, Salesforce.com and few others showed the business community the power of CRM software over the internet (SaaS ) since 1999 with phenomenal success. And, in developing countries like India or South Asia, this product can save so much time, energy and money for SME’s (Small, Medium Enterprises). Let’s first perceive it with our current customers and prospective customers.

Therefore, ‘chase customers, customers and customers’ is our current ‘mool-mantra’. (Main motto) This will take the business community along with the VC community to a proven world of perception.

“Need to buy and maintain a local generator for electricity or, connect to existing power supply line” – which one is more convenient?

Of course your next question will be how reliable and stable your power supply line is!! Assuming the power supply line is reliable and stable; everyone must admit that they will go for the second option as they had been doing it for a while in most of the developed and developing countries.

As an analogy, just replace ‘electricity’ by a useful business software application and ‘power supply line’ by internet connection (or, say information/data communication line). Assume that, reliability and stability come from a super-secure and reliable data or, information center maintained by a group of technical experts. Won’t you like to enjoy the convenience of using this business application over a secure internet connection irrespective of wherever you are or, whenever you want? Or, you want to take the pain of local purchase of hardware, the software, hire people to maintain all these IT (Information Technology) –related activities!!

“SaaS-Software-as-a-Service” enables us to live that convenient life using the former option. It brings simplicity and transparency in the usage model of a business application. The information platform is so integrated that you can have a spreadsheet data, email/phone discussion thread and different visual presentations all within single integrated database.

If you have a choice of ‘redefining convenience’ of the usage model of a business application as either an IT-savvy or, non-IT-savvy business owner; won’t you want to forget traditional software usage model and embrace the next-generation software as a service model?

And, a2zapps.com is the FIRST ASIAN SaaS platform in true sense to provide this convenience to you over the internet.