Indian IT firms strengthen Cloud practice as digital adoption picks up

Source: Business Standard, Jun 17, 2020

Bengaluru: Indian IT services companies are gearing up to cash in on opportunities in the Cloud services space as the Covid-19 pandemic pushes organisations to increase the pace of digitisation across the board.

Large Indian IT firms such as Infosys, Wipro and TCS are seen strengthening their Cloud offerings by forming joint ventures with global platform providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and IBM Cloud, and growing their team of specialists in specific cloud platforms organically. Wipro, for example, has tied up with IBM to be able to provide hybrid cloud offerings to clients.

In March, Infosys had also announced a similar partnership with IBM.

Noida-headquartered HCL Technologies has set up a dedicated business unit for Google Cloud with over 1,300 professionals. The company has plans to expand the team count to around 5,000 professionals. Companies such as TCS and Infosys are also learnt to have set up specialised cloud teams for various platforms.

“Cloud related service offerings contribute around 10-15 per cent of the revenues at tier-I IT services firms. The current pandemic is accelerating cloud migration among enterprises, opening up fresh opportunities for IT services firms,” said Pareekh Jain, an IT outsourcing advisor and founder of Pareekh Consulting. In its latest estimate, global research firm Gartner has said that even though global IT spending in 2020 is expected to decline 8 per cent, “sub segments such as public cloud services will be a bright spot in the forecast, growing 19 per cent in 2020.” It also said that cloud-based telephony, messaging and conferencing will also see high levels of spending growing around 9 and 24 per cent respectively.