New Delhi: Expressing displeasure over the dominance of the cloud computing space in the country by companies such as Microsoft, Amazon Web Services and Google, Union Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar said that the central government plans to introduce an incentive scheme to help give a boost to domestic cloud technology providers.
The Minister of State for IT, while replying to a query in a Twitter Spaces chat Thursday evening, said, “We are interested in incentivizing diversity and more players in the cloud space. We don’t like the fact that currently between Azure, Amazon and Google, the cloud in India is dominated by these three companies.”
He added that there are two elements of the Cloud – one is the underlying infra, which is the data center, and the other is the cloud itself, which is the “innovation piece, the actual cloud operator”.
“We would like consumers to have more choices. We would like enterprises to have more choice, and there is certainly going to be an incentive program that you are coming up with where we encourage more and more domestic cloud innovators to create public clouds,” Chandrasekhar said.
The MoS added that the central government is also working on a program for a secure government cloud which will be done in a private partnership and the private company will be selected through a tender.
The overall India public cloud services market is expected to reach $13.0 billion by 2026, growing at a CAGR of 23.1% for 2021-26, according to research firm International Data Corporation (IDC).
The revenue for these services, including infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solutions, and software-as-a-service (SaaS), for the first half of 2022, IDC said, totalled $2.8 billion.
As per a statement issued by the research firm in December last year, verticals like BFSI, manufacturing, etc., lead the public cloud adoption. However, service providers also continued to witness increased demand from other verticals like the public sector, media and gaming.
“With more Indian enterprises working on strengthening their digital and smart capabilities, public cloud adoption will continue to be driven by the demand for upgrading legacy systems, omnichannel customer expenses, real-time data analytics, connected platforms, and applications, etc. Further, the recent launch of 5G services is expected to open up a gamut of opportunities for enterprises undergoing digital transformation, thus accelerating cloud proliferation,” Harish Krishnakumar, senior market analyst at IDC India, noted.
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