Diwana Hua Badal

For those who remember, diwana hua badal is one of the most melodious songs from the 1960s and was sung by Mohammed Rafi and Asha Bhosle for the 1964 hit movie, Kashmir Ki Kali. That movie starred Shammi Kapoor, Sharmila Tagore, and Pran. For Bollywood fans, heres some trivia: Sharmila Tagore signed up for the flick when she was only 14, and the film was released when she turned 18.

The badal in that song referred to clouds bringing the hope of romance; the badal in this column refers to the hype that cloud computing portrays to users worldwide. Is that only hype, or is there some real hope as well?

The hope is in PaaS, or Platform as a Service, which is the delivery of a computing platform or a solution stack as a service. There are now a slew of companies with PaaS offerings, including Amazon Web Services with its EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), Google with its App Engine, Microsoft with Azure, Netsuite with SuiteCloud, SAP AG with Coghead PaaS, Red Hat with Makara PaaS, and others.

PaaS is the middleware in cloud computing. PaaS sits between the underlying system infrastructure (operating systems, networks, virtualization, storage, etc) and overlaying application software. PaaS includes application containers, application development tools, database management systems, integration brokers, portals, business process management and othersall offered as a service.

PaaS is also giving rise to another layer that specifically integrates all the apps and tools seamlessly. One such offering comes from Boomi Inc, which was recently acquired by Dell. Boomis AtomSphere sews up applications built in the cloud, and functions as a central hub from which PaaS providers can view and manage customer integration activity and deploy updates.

The leader of the PaaS pack is Amazon Web Services. With AWS, users can requisition compute power, storage, and other services, gaining access to a suite of elastic IT infrastructure services. Gaining speed fast is Azure AppFabric, which offers a cloud middleware platform on the Windows Azure cloud.

How does all this concern Indian enterprises? According to IDC, the cloud computing market in India is set to grow 40% a year from 2009 to 2014, and will cross $100 mn by 2014. Given the wide prevalence of technical and solutioning skills in India, PaaS may take off faster in India than anywhere else in Asia.

As for the Asia-Pacific region outside of Japan, spending on IT cloud services will jump 400%, and reach $4.6 bn by 2014. IDC says that the rapid emergence of cloud services, and the cloud computing model underpinning these services, will usher in a new era of growth and competition in the IT market. On a global level, cloud computing will jump from $17.4 bn in 2008 to $44.2 bn by 2013. Of the 27 bn in net new IT revenue in 2013, 27% will come from IT cloud services.

It will then be appropriate to listen to another cloud-based song on YouTubeaasman se aya farishtafrom another hit movie that debuted in 1967, An Evening in Paris, which also starred Shammi Kapoor, Sharmila Tagore and, of course, Pran.