As the buzz of the cloud begins to make waves within corporations, Indian telcos are beginning to wake up to new possibilities. As the sector attempts to shrug off a scam-ridden year, and seeks greener pastures beyond the low-ARPU voice regime, Indian telcos have a great opportunity to cross over to a robust high-growth data era in the huge but under-served small to midsize enterprise (SME) sector. The Indian SME sector demands a complete suite of apps, from basic website-builder and HR applications to advanced productivity and collaboration suites that will be easier to position and sell in the cloud mode.

Service providers are keen to extend their basic hosting capabilities to deliver software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications. A possible operator strategy could be to position as SaaS aggregators and provision these services alongside their service-level agreements (SLAs) as one-stop shops for enterprise software.

Indian government initiatives, such as the Aakash low-cost tablet, will create a sea change in device base as data demand is expected to soar exponentially. Mass adoption of services in an emerging market such as India will most certainly be triggered by cloud-based pay-as-you-go models, which operators will be forced to deploy.

Customers have concerns about data privacy and security issues. As fast-growing applications such as online banking, travel and e-retail applications penetrate further, the cloud will become the dominant model of service delivery especially among small enterprises. Larger enterprises, however, will challenge privacy/security levels and typically move only non-critical applications to the cloud and maintain a hybrid model.

Indian telcos are still behind Web cloud service providers, such as Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq: AMZN), and will have a battle on hand as they build out their own ecosystem of services to match their varied enterprise customers tier by tier. Indian telcos have to take on a more aggressive position in entering the cloud services market and accelerate service offerings to capitalize on the immense opportunity ahead of them.

The latest Heavy Reading Insider, "Carrier Cloud India: Opportunities & Challenges," provides insight into the emerging carrier cloud ecosystem, the level of awareness/readiness among carriers to the opportunity, current cloud service offerings and the big trends in the space. Competitive positioning of Web service providers and multi-service carriers, indicative tariffs and government initiatives in the market are highlighted. Operator strengths in the cloud business, their challenges and current strategies are detailed.

The report also covers the cloud infrastructure vendor view, including their suites of current and planned offerings and operator partnerships. This report focuses largely on carrier cloud services to enterprises and not utilization of cloud infrastructure for captive usage.

— Sridhar T Pai, Contributing Analyst, Heavy Reading Insider

Carrier Cloud India: Opportunities & Challenges, a 17-page report, is available as part of an annual subscription (12 monthly issues) to Heavy Reading Insider, priced at $1,595. This report is available for $900. To subscribe, please visit: www.heavyreading.com/insider.