Organizations in India to spend nearly half of their cloud budget on hybrid over the next three years: Study

Business executives in India are increasingly planning to invest in hybrid multi-cloud platform strategies and capabilities to drive business transformation and to unlock value, reveals an IBM Institute for Business Value (IBV) survey.  The IBV surveyed Indian and global executives across industries to gain an in-depth understanding of their organizations’ current use of hybrid cloud, multi-cloud and their approach to multi-cloud management for the report titled, ‘The hybrid cloud platform advantage: A guiding star to enterprise transformation in India.’

According to the survey respondents, 17% of their IT spend is allocated to cloud at present and they plan to increase the share of spend on hybrid from 42% to 49% by 2023. The majority of their cloud budgets are being allocated to hybrid cloud platforms even as their public cloud spend is set to reduce from 50% share today to 43% by 2023. Most industries will exhibit growth in the number of clouds they will deploy, which can go up to 10 clouds particularly in insurance, telecommunications and retail as these industries will continue to expand multiple cloud deployments in the next three years.

Further, the study confirmed the return on investment (ROI) of a platform approach as respondents said that the value derived from a full hybrid, multi-cloud platform technology and operating model at scale is 2.5 times the value derived from a single platform, single cloud vendor approach. In fact, the platform approach is cited as accelerating value with scale.

Key tech trends revealed in the survey are:

• Globally, 64% of advanced cloud companies recognize the need for enterprise transformation and application modernization to go hand-in-hand, 2.6 times higher than the respondents from India
• Globally, 68% of businesses on advanced cloud journey are building an open-source cloud platform, compared to 46% of India respondents
• The survey report identifies businesses that recognize the strategic importance of Cloud, which comprise 13 percent of the global survey respondents, two percent of which are from India, as ‘Cloud Aviators’
• Organizations in India expect to be using at least 10 clouds from a growing number of vendors by 2023 but only 29% of businesses have a holistic multi-cloud management strategy
• 31% of IT executives in India say they are seeking Cloud Management Platforms for improved visibility and to control their cloud costs
• Enterprises in India are seeking an application development platform that can run on any cloud, workloads that can execute seamlessly across multiple clouds
• Indian executives get over 2.6x of their investment in cloud management over a period of 10 years.

Commenting on the survey insights, Viswanath Ramaswamy, Vice President, IBM Cloud and Cognitive Software and Services, IBM India/South Asia said, “The adoption of cloud has been a central feature in developing new, digitally-driven business models. Interestingly, the findings show that hybrid multi-cloud is the fundamental enabler of an organization’s operating model, helping them to embark on a journey to become a Cognitive Enterprise of the future. Further, Hybrid Cloud enables improved business performance and greater ROI. This is proven in the instance of leading businesses that have successfully achieved demonstrable competitive advantage through robust hybrid cloud management and governance platform.

In India, leading businesses such as Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea are achieving business transformation by leveraging hybrid multi-cloud platform technology and embedding AI.  We are betting big on Hybrid Cloud which is secure, interoperable, open and free from vendor lock-in.”

The survey was conducted from February to April 2020 by the IBM Institute for Business Value in collaboration with Oxford Economics and covered 6,000 executives globally including 412 executives from India, across industries, job titles and geographies.