The small and medium enterprises in India have started to use cloud services despite of the innumerable challenges that prevents them from fully capitalizing the economic benefits of the cloud, according to the industry experts.

Nitin Khanapurkar, Partner, Management Consulting, KPMG India, said:

"The use of cloud computing has just started. For example, the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications were earlier prerogative to only big organization. It used to take several months and required huge investments. But today the entire enable infrastructure and applications are provided to you.”

Mr. Nitin further said that the SMEs today have more advantage than what was available a few years back. On the issue of network connectivity, which is believed to be a strong hindrance in cloud services adoption, he said that the network challenges are resolved at a great speed due to the continuous development in the telecom infrastructure.

He added, “[SMEs are able to adopt cloud services], as that is the need of the hour for the SME sector to get the most cost-effective and state-of-the -art infrastructure and cutting-edge technology available to them at their doorstep."

Dassault Systemes India, Managing Director, Dr Chandan Chowdhury, opined:

"First of all, if they (SMEs) want to be competitive, they have to deliver quality. They have to deliver goods on schedule." "SMEs in India need to be competitive if they have to deliver experience to customers. If they want to do this, they should have their own physical infrastructure to manage it. For SMEs, the cloud becomes a very important channel of using technology.” "If you look at the developed economies you will see that they have strong bandwidth. Bandwidth is very affordable and it is available for them. In India, it is expensive and not readily available. There are several ongoing projects in India which is directed towards making bandwidth available to the remote places. We still have a wide gap."

According to Vikas Gupta of Tech Mahindra Limited, SMEs have no dearth of mechanisms in India for the adoption of cloud. However, the key is to first adopt those mechanisms. Once this takes place, SMEs can swiftly mitigate the challenges and bring their business on the road to growth.

Adapted from an article, 'SMEs have started taking advantage of cloud computing', published in SME Times.

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