The private cloud brings the concept of virtualization to a global scale for
the company. With the private cloud, Wipro can now provide the same hardware, software and licensing to the customer in a virtual environment. 

Rapid provisioning
For an IT service company like ours, a major impact that the private cloud
deployment has made to our business is faster provisioning of resources for
projects. Today, compared to a typical four to eight weeks period for provisioning infrastructure for a project, we can now achieve the same task in just three to six hours.

The process of identifying, procuring and provisioning resources has been reduced to just sending a request. The resources are readily provisioned and available for use.

As a private cloud user, my service time has gone from eight weeks to six
hours. It has helped us significantly improve our energy efficiency and utilization
of infrastructure.

Reusability
A lot of hardware deployed for customers would never be used again.
Customers want dedicated servers to themselves but these servers would never
get reused once the project is over. Consolidating this hardware and bringing it
into a virtual environment allowed us to reuse the hardware. Once the project is
over, the whole project environment becomes reusable.

Unique challenges
A key challenge we face with the private cloud is that the project environment is defined by the customer and not us. If the customer uses an application that is not standard or tested for the virtual environment or is not compatible with newer versions of hardware, we have to take a call whether it can be virtualized or run in the traditional environment.

Today, the number of new projects getting on to the private cloud is high since customers are more open to the idea of a cloud. For existing projects, we look at shifting them to a cloud infrastructure only if there is a business case for doing so.

 -------------------------- As told to Harshal Kallyanpur