2 million new jobs in cloud computing space by 2015

A Microsoft commissioned Study, conducted by IDC, predicts that cloud computing will generate over 2 million jobs in India by 2015. The findings predict that cloud will generate nearly 14 million new jobs worldwide in the same time. More than 50 % of these jobs will be generated in the small and medium businesses. Further, more than two million jobs each will be generated in the ‘communications and media’ and manufacturing sectors, followed by banking at over 1.4 million. Pointing to the strong linkage between cloud, innovation and entrepreneurship, the study estimates that revenues from cloud innovation could reach US$1.1 trillion per year by 2015. Combined with cloud efficiencies, this will drive significant organizational reinvestment and job growth.

Cloud computing is already changing how IT delivers economic value to countries, cities, industries, and businesses. IDC estimates that in 2011 alone, IT cloud services helped businesses around the world generate more than US$600 billion in revenue and 1.5 million new jobs. Further, the spending on public cloud IT services in 2011 stood at US$28 billion, while the total spending on IT products and services was US$1.7 trillion.

The study also indicates that countries investing in key cloud infrastructure will experience greater job growth. The factors determining the number of jobs that might be created in a particular country include projected level of spending on IT, degree of automation, workforce size amongst others.

“For most organizations, cloud computing is a no-brainer when considering it enables massive return on investment and flexibility,” said John F. Gantz, Chief Research Officer and Senior Vice President at IDC. “A common misperception is cloud computing is a job eliminator, but in truth it will be a job creator — a major one. And job growth will occur across continents and throughout organizations of all sizes because emerging markets, small cities and small businesses have the same access to cloud benefits as large enterprises or developed nations.”

While sharing the findings of the study, Floris van Heist, General Manager, Business & Marketing, Microsoft Corporation India Pvt. Ltd, said, “Cloud computing poses a compelling opportunity for businesses and governments around the world. India is uniquely poised to leverage this opportunity with factors like an unparalleled ecosystem of developers, ISVs and SIs, no legacy IT systems and a high growth rate of economy contributing towards growth of cloud computing. Microsoft is playing a key role in the cloud space to help businesses realize their full potential and move governments closer to their vision.”

Microsoft offers comprehensive services across all three service layers of the cloud, viz. infrastructure, platform and software as services. Microsoft’s offerings have seen great momentum in India and across the world. Office 365, Microsoft’s enterprise-class cloud productivity suite and Dynamics CRM Online have been adopted widely by organizations of all sizes across the country. Windows Azure, Microsoft’s platform in the cloud, is fostering innovation and entrepreneurship on a wide spectrum in addition to providing a compelling option to businesses to develop, host and render applications from the cloud. Similarly, private cloud services from Microsoft are seeing good momentum with enterprises.

With all of Microsoft’s key products having a cloud offering, it is uniquely positioned to provide unmatched flexibility – from a complete on-premise solution to one completely in the cloud to any mix of the two in-between. Further, with the option to evolve this mix in any manner, Microsoft is empowering customers to move to the cloud on their terms. Embedded within is the trust of customers in Microsoft as a provider of enterprise-class services with no compromises to availability, reliability or security.

Says CV Prakash, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Gradatim, a specialist in technology solutions for businesses that offer microfinance products and services, and uses Azure: "In 2010, we evaluated a number of shared services platforms and zeroed in upon Windows Azure. We realised soon enough the Microsoft cloud edge. Azure not only gave us stronger support for geographic expansion, saved us about $2 million in operating expenses, shortened customer deployment cycles from three months to two weeks and even improved our ability to reach out to new customers, and speeded up our ability to bring solutions to market. The overall Azure experience for us was phenomenal."