5 Cloud Platforms to Watch Out in 2024

Summarize with:

Cloud platforms will be the backbone of the IT infrastructure for most enterprises in 2024. Be it scalability, flexibility, productivity or cost efficiency, cloud platforms and services are bound to give enterprises optimal benefits during this year. No wonder, Gartner predicts enterprise expenditure on public cloud services to increase globally by 20.4% from $563.6 billion in 2023 to $678.8 billion in 2024.

The growth in India is anticipated to be even higher highlighting the cloud sector’s immense growth potential. While cloud computing has become an all encompassing term, there are different facets in cloud and quite a few players operating in each of these facets. APAC News Network explores the 5 companies to watch out for with their cloud platform offerings.

A(mazon) W(eb) S(ervices): De-facto Cloud Leader

India will continue to be a key market for AWS in 2024 too. AWS has 200 + services spanning across storage, compute, databases, networking, AI/ML, analytics, IoT, security and mobility. These include the likes of Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon SageMaker, and Amazon Lex. The paradigm of discussion with enterprise customers has been changing and will continue to do so in 2024.

Enterprise consumers will keep on consuming AWS in India across the breadth of its offerings. AWS will remain a compelling choice for most enterprises seeking reliability, scalability, and cutting-edge technology, buoyed with the likes of AWS Lambda for serverless computing, Amazon S3 for scalable storage, and AI/ML services.

One plus point for AWS will be its cloud storage solution for enterprises leveraging integrated web services, including Elastic Beanstalk, Relational Database Service, and others. What will remain as an AWS benefit is its flexible and different pricing models based on enterprise needs. Enterprises can also customize their infrastructure requirements, making it a cost-effective option for most organizations.

With AWS planning to invest $12.7bn in cloud infrastructure in India by 2030, the momentum is expected to continue and even gather steam in 2024. The growing adoption of cloud across enterprises will lead to an emergence of 131,700 cloud skilled workforce in 2024 only.

Microsoft Azure: Contender Gaining Ground

Microsoft Azure will continue to be a close #2 contender for cloud platform market share in India during 2024. Azure has more than 200 services and solutions, including Azure Bot Service, Azure Virtual Machines, Azure Storage, and Azure Machine Learning. What will continue to push Azure’s case is its billing structure based on resource consumption, and not reserved capacity. Pricing will continue to vary between different types of services, storage types, and the physical location from which the Azure instances are hosted.

Azure offers traditional cloud offerings such as virtual machines, object storage, and content delivery networks (CDNs) besides services such as Azure Kubernetes Services, Azure Blockchain Services, Azure Digital Twins, Azure IoT Suite, HDInsight, Azure Redis Cache, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Search and Azure Media Services among others.

As part of its Azure GTM strategy, Microsoft will primarily continue to follow a One Commercial Partner model. The One Commercial model allows all ISVs and start-ups and other solution providers to use Microsoft Azure as the foundation and build solutions and products on top of it. Microsoft helps these ISVs in selling and marketing the solutions. The model is a win win for all stakeholders—Microsoft, the partners and the enterprise.

Azure’s seamless integration with Microsoft’s other on-premises products, such as Windows Server and Office 365, will continue to keep it a popular choice for enterprises with existing Microsoft environments. The close integration with Microsoft’s ecosystem will enable seamless transitions and robust support for diverse applications. Simultaneously, Azure’s commitment to sustainable operations and heightened security measures would pave the way for an eco-friendly, safe digital future for Indian enterprises.

Google Cloud: Leveraging on Overall Ecosystem

Though Google trails behind AWS and Azure at the beginning of 2024, it is expected to continue on a fast catch up with Indian enterprises in 2024. Google Cloud though will be the leader in cloud AI services. The overarching approach therefore for Google sales strategy in India in 2024 will be to start conversation with enterprise customers to sell their analytics services and then offer ML. What we are seeing in India is the sales cycle starts with analytics and goes into core infrastructure computing, and networking services.

The launch of Anthos, the hybrid multi cloud solution will continue to provide a positive push for Google’s cloud campaign. This will be a major step for the whole growth strategy of Google Cloud in 2024. Anthos is built on top of Kubernetes and Istio and this will make installation easy drawing more enterprise users. The partnership with Airtel will help Google to offer G Suite to more and more SMBs as part of the telco’s ICT portfolio in 2024 too.

Google provides Indian enterprises more than 100 services and solutions, including Google Dialogflow, Google Cloud AI, Google Compute Engine, and Google Cloud Storage. The key advantages for Google would remain its advanced data analytics and AI-driven solutions like BigQuery and TensorFlow, Kubernetes-based container orchestration and integration with the overall Google ecosystem.

In 2024, Google Cloud will train over million professionals in Gen-AI knowledge and skills. Additionally, Google will also provide security-related training to 1,000 government workforce during the year. Google will use government data sets to train models using Google Gen-AI technologies and the government’s Bhashini will train them further in Indian languages using its own technology.

IBM Cloud: Committed to Open Standards

IBM Cloud will continue to gain traction amongst Indian enterprises with more than 170 services and solutions, including IBM Cloud Pak, IBM Cloud Virtual Servers, IBM Cloud Object Storage, and IBM Watson. Its specialized solutions around blockchain, edge computing, and quantum computing will continue to find quite a few takers amongst Indian enterprises in 2024 too.

IBM’s traditional outsourcing models will continue to blend seamlessly with its cloud delivery models in 2024. IBM has developed an infrastructure-as-a-service cloud built on its hosting experience as the world’s largest provider of IT sourcing services. Cloud is the natural evolution of IBM’s virtualization and software expertise and consequent relationship with Indian enterprises.

IBM will also be leveraging its huge middleware business as well as its deep understanding of how software platforms work to deliver software in the cloud even in 2024. While IBM might not overtake Microsoft Azure and AWS in the public cloud domain in 2024, its comprehensive and end-to-end cloud solutions suite, right from bare metal servers via SoftLayer to all in IaaS will still present an impressive alternate for enterprises in their digital transformation journeys.

As like previous years, IBM will continue to champion its commitment to open standards for cloud. IBM has long been a champion of open standards (e.g. Linux, Apache, Eclipse) in the enterprise and is a platinum sponsor of OpenStack, an open-source cloud platform backed by industry heavyweights that support open standards, including AT&T, HP, Cisco, Intel and VMware. This momentum will keep IBM Cloud in the radar of Indian enterprises in 2024 too.

Salesforce: Banking on Generative AI

Salesforce will continue to emerge as a strong contender in the top echelons of Indian cloud computing environment of 2024. Salesforce will offer more than 100 services and solutions, including Salesforce Platform, Salesforce CRM, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and Salesforce Einstein. Where it will find more Indian enterprise takers include cloud-based app development and deployment platforms, CRM and marketing automation products and services.

Salesforce is laying its bet on the demand for generative AI driving the cloud adoption amongst enterprises in India. Especially the cloud adoption amongst PSUs that has been stymied till date due to security concerns as well as lack of understanding, will receive a major impetus through generative AI. Quite a few generative AI use cases from Salesforce are expected to go live between February and May of 2024.

Salesforce is also focusing on educating a cloud savvy workforce and training personnel with relevant skillsets to gain traction in 2024. The grants allocated by Salesfirce NGOs across the country, including Teach For India, TNS India Foundation, Youth for India Foundation, Malligavad Foundation, and Green Yatra focusing on education, workforce development, climate justice, and community resilience will stand the company in good stead during 2024.

Rajneesh De, Consulting Editor, APAC News Network