Day two of Interop Mumbai 2010 opened up with a highly interactive keynote delivered by Manoj Chugh, President, India and SAARC, Director Global Accounts–Asia Pacific and Japan, EMC. Chugh in his keynote observed that cloud computing will be the model for the future for IT across different industries.
One of the key driving factors for this according to him was the amount of growth of information and the inability of IT to match up to this growth. Quoting industry report estimates he stated that while all aspects of a business saw pruning thanks to the economic meltdown, the amount of information continued to grow. The amount of information to be shared in 2010 is estimated to be 40,000 petabytes. Also in the next 10 years the amount would grow by sixty times.

An information growth of this level would result in storage requirements equal to the collective storage capacities of 2.5 billion Apple iPads. However, while the amount of information would grow sixty times, IT budgets would not grow in proportion but in fact see a progressive decrease. Also organizations today are spending 70 percent of their IT budgets in just maintaining their current IT investments. These investments in turn are running at utilization levels which are less than 20 percent on average.

Hence investing in additional IT resources would only add to the maintenance costs and lead to the infrastructure being further underutilized. Therefore organizations would need to turn to cloud computing to meet their IT resource requirements while justifying the IT spend.

Chugh was of the view that organizations have realized the importance of cloud and initial adoption of cloud would primarily be through private clouds. Organizations would look at moving all their business applications on a private cloud running on standardized x86 infrastructure.

Chugh’s keynote was followed by the second keynote for the day by Steven J Bandrowczak, Vice President and General Manager, Avaya Data Solutions who also observed that while IT requirements are increasing the IT department never has enough money to meet these requirements. IT departments today are expected to squeeze more out of their current investments and expected to meet further requirements within allocated budgets.

He further observed that 50 percent of the global population today uses mobile phones. The global VOIP traffic is estimated to increase by 154 percent by 2013 and video conferencing would grow by 77 percent. 2009 alone saw 247 billion emails being exchanged and YouTube streaming accounts to 10 percent of all Internet traffic.

To meet such high bandwidth organizations would require networks which are always on, efficient and scalable as opposed to the current complex, less ‘open’ and insufficient to meet the demand. He also talked about Avaya’s efforts in this area and its offerings which promise network capabilities that integrate the data center with mobile devices, allow delivering required content faster and on a variety of different communication media and enable integration with applications and hardware which is otherwise not possible.