A: Some of the important concerns are related to security, performance, accessibility and availability, depending on where the cloud is hosted. Generally, the most important concern is always security; in fact, it is everybody's real concern. We put a lot of effort in ensuring that it is a very secure platform.

A: Two years prior to our launch, we invested 10 million dollars and lots of man-hours to assess different methods of delivery. We knew that the market was evolving to a more service-based utility-based infrastructure. For us, everything accelerated because of the global economy and we speeded up what we were doing.

We are looking at ways to provide services that are more flexible and valuable to our clients. It’s predominantly the reason behind coming into the market to offer a utility or a cloud based solution. Infact when we first entered the market with computing as a service, the concept of cloud computing as a service was not even popular.

A: We have had customers who have always been supported by a traditionally managed, hosted environment; they have always had a lot of peaks and troughs in their infrastructure. We have got a number of retail organisations for whom we managed their online portals, shopping carts and so on and so forth. And we have seen their traffic profile sort of goes up for one minute and then it’s down and then it’s back up. You find that the actual infrastructure itself is incredibly underutilised.

While at various points of the year it will be utilised close to capacity, sort of 70% of the year it will be running at 20-25% capacity – at which point a lot of resources are just lying idle.

A: No, not at all; I think it’s available to all the markets though certainly we have many customers from the SMB segment. There are SIs, there are small SMB organisations and so on. It appeals to lots of organisations, but sometimes in different ways. Some organisations use it for test and development; some organisations use it for web content. Other organisations use it to deliver applications or content to their application customer base which are geographically dispersed. So it really has a myriad of uses for different organisations.

A: We have different operating systems like Windows and Linux; we can set up the environment at all existing resources. If there was a certain capability or a requirement specific to the user, for instance if the customer has an infrastructure somewhere else but they don’t want to continue to invest in that infrastructure, we can actually set up Computing as a Service (CaaS) to augment that infrastructure. I would say that if a user is running a Solaris outsourced, we could actually manage that environment wherever that might be but also we can setup CAAS to augment that environment as well so that the user gets a bit of everything. The same applies to the storage and network side also.

A: So at the moment, CaaS fits into pretty much three buckets: in the cloud computing one, in the IaaS one and also elements of what CaaS is able to do could be classified as a PaaS – so it kind of fits into all those categories. We are obviously looking at ways by which we can generate more of PaaS and SaaS offerings in the future and to achieve that we might have some partnerships in place.