An industry veteran and entrepreneur, K B Chandrasekhar is well known for his pioneering initiative to form Exodus Communications, said to be the first company to offer enterprise-level web hosting. In his current role as CEO and Chairman, Jamcracker, Chandrasekhar is positioning his company to play a pivotal role in the emerging world of clouds.

Excerpts from an exclusive interview with Harshal Kallyanpur:

How do you see cloud computing evolving five years from now?

A few years ago, organizations had to hand chisel their IT infrastructure. They had to set up their own data centers, networks and application stacks. Then came the hosted data center model, where enterprises only had to host their servers with a service provider. With the cloud, organizations can plug into a virtually unlimited resource pool of IT and pay as they use it.

How do you see the cloud changing the software ecosystem?

Earlier, a software company would develop software, throw it over the fence and hope someone would catch it. In the cloud era, your software is only good if the customer uses it. If he does not like it, he will migrate to another service provider.

The cloud will make software providers think from a solution perspective and not from a point product perspective. Now the cloud service provider, and not the customer, has to worry about making specific application functionality available with the necessary technical support and SLAs.

While SMBs will be big on public clouds, in the near term, enterprises will be big on private clouds.

How will the role of internal IT change in all this?

IT will become a manager of policies rather than a technology provider. This is akin to companies abroad wherein managers manage software development by outsourced companies-instead of running development environments within their own company.

Cloud computing is a logical extension to this.

Whenever IT goes through a change, people take time to adjust to it. When IT went from mainframes to a client server environment; everybody was worried about the loss of control due to proliferation. When client server became the Internet, people were worried further. However, over time, the Internet has become a norm. It is the same with the cloud. In a few years, at least 20 percent of IT for new projects will be in the cloud

Jamcracker has been speaking in the public domain about the cloud service broker model. Can you elaborate on the significance of this model?

The cloud service broker model is a prerequisite for largescale adoption of the cloud by enterprises. If an enterprise uses only one cloud service, there isn’t much to think about.

However, if it requires multiple cloud services from a single provider or multiple cloud service providers, the complexity of managing and monitoring these services increases. As the number of points of use increase, the complexity increases exponentially.

A cloud service broker model can manage policies, billing and help desk-related issues (pertaining to multiple SaaS applications)—all from a single console.