Total cloud market value in India will reach $4.5 billion by 2015 from the present $400 million. The private cloud adoption will dominate and account for $3.5 billion in revenue, growing at over 60 per cent, according to a study by EMC and Zinnov Management Consulting.

The private cloud market will create 1,00,000 jobs by 2015 from 10,000 today, the study further said. The study estimates that the skilling and re-skilling market in India will grow fast as cloud computing become critical to IT strategies.

The total cloud spend as a percentage of the total IT spend as such is expected to rise from 1.4 per cent ($0.4 billion) in 2010 to 8.2 per cent ($4.5 billion) in 2015.

The study notes that IT/ITES, telecom, BFSI, manufacturing and government sectors will contribute largest to the cloud market in India, with nearly 78 per cent of the total market.

According to the study, there is an increased preference of private cloud over public cloud over the next five years in India. It also estimates that private cloud deployments could result in potential savings of up to 50 per cent on the IT investments on average, when compared with a legacy IT model, with cost optimisation in areas such as telecom and networking, facilities and fabric, hardware, software, internal labour and external IT services.

Pari Natarajan, CEO of Zinnov Management Consulting, said, “Cloud computing will reshape the Indian IT market by generating new opportunities for IT vendors and driving changes in traditional IT offerings. There is a high chance that companies that are not adopting IT today and don’t have major investments in data centres and server farms will directly move into the cloud model.”

Manoj Chugh, president, EMC India & SAARC, said, “It is interesting to note that while private cloud will dominate market adoption in future, some organisations who are mature in their journey to the cloud are already turning to a hybrid cloud approach to get the best of both worlds – choose what resources to manage in-house and allow what to be managed externally. The hybrid approach, we believe, will be the eventual goal of customers in their journey to the cloud.”