Infosys – Cloud Business Value Architecture

Business Value Architecture for
Cloud Computing

Sanjay Jalona, Arindam Banerji, Bhavin Jayantilal Raichura

Preface
In March 2008, in the ‘Evolution of Global Delivery Model’ paper, we have
discussed nuances of global delivery and outsourcing. The feedback received
from analysts, customers, peers and web-download analysis suggests that
those insights are very relevant to date. Surprisingly, cloud computing was
not touched upon in the paper.
Technology is indeed evolving rapidly and so are associated business models.
Cloud has entered our vocabulary, business models and debates over the
last couple of years. As Cloud computing gains prominence, an important
question remains “How do Cloud users navigate through emerging
requirements brought on by Cloud computing and related Innovations?”
What do companies focus on when they define their strategy and cloud
related business plans? This viewpoint attempts to structure consumers’
thinking around these changes and possible changes in the next wave of
cloud computing.

Nov 2010

B A C K G R O U N D
Global Delivery models have changed drastically over the years. In the beginning
we had Application Development done in a Global Delivery Model (GDM) and as
systems and processes improved, packaged applications were done in a GDM
B A C K G R O U N D

too. The third phase of GDM involves Cloud Computing... Cloud computing is
here, and hopefully will move consumers' towards Global Virtualized Enterprises,
where outsourcing and computation are integrated.

While there are many definitions of Cloud, let us however start with one that we
all can agree on to an extent:

Consumer products and business products, services and solutions,
delivered and consumed in real-time over the Internet.

Fast, Flexible and Cost-effective
The disruptive trends of Cloud Computing are expected to become a commonly-accepted model for running enterprise
operations within the next 3-5 years.
Admittedly, Cloud computing brings significant cost advantage to consumers. They can save up to 80% of IT CAPEX and
up to 50% of IT OPEX1 by moving from onpremise services to cloud-based services. For example, the on-premise Microsoft
Exchange based e-mail generally costs USD100 per user per month, whereas an equivalent cloud-based offering from
Microsoft itself costs approximately USD 25 per user per month and USD nine per user per month from Google2. On-
premise CRM systems cost USD 100 per user per month while equivalent cloud-based offerings cost USD 65 per user per
month from SalesForce and USD 44 per user per month from Microsoft Dynamics Online CRM3. Similarly, if 100 servers
are moved from private datacenters to the cloud, potential savings can add up to USD one million per year.100TB of storage
space when moved from onpremise storage infrastructure to cloud based storage, can potentially save up to USD one million
per year4.
Cloud computing also brings significant advantages for global expansion, since the underlying infrastructure of most
deployments can be provisioned on-demand and almost in real-time, thus facilitating infinitely scalable computing resources.
This gives start-ups a leg-up, encouraging innovation of new business services at significantly lower investments.
Much of these benefits are what we call first generation benefits of Cloud computing.

Moving beyond simple cost savings
IT strategists, CFOs and business owners need to look beyond the first generation of cost savings, when they think of cloud.
The business value that can be realized through cloud based approaches can be significantly larger than those achieved by
moving infrastructure around, simply consolidating data centers or even rehosting applications. It amounts to faster-time-to-
value and business flexibility as well.
For example, when moving BI/DW (Business Intelligence/ Data-Warehouse) support onto a cloud for a Fortune 500
company, the savings can go upto 50% of BI infrastructure costs (hardware and software included). The consolidation of
fragmented departmental systems into a holistic on-cloud information approach across a large enterprise, allows analysis and
decision support that were not possible before. Such shifts in decision-making abilities of Fortune 500 companies can have
large revenue and margin impact. The opportunity costs thus realized can be of strategic importance as opposed to tactical
cost savings.

2 | Infosys – View Point

So the question arises, how do companies exploit the various business models and business opportunities that the
cloud computing paradigm offers? What are the business models required as cloud computing becomes mainstream in
organizations?
The first step is to rethink Cloud computing as a logical architecture of value propositions, consisting of opportunities, ideas
and business values obtained.

Cloud Portfolio - Logical layering of Business Values
Cloud computing can be thought of as four distinct waves of Innovation and business values.
Normally, these waves would be mapped to an architectural layering of IaaS, PaaS and SaaS and this paper sticks to such a
layering. Each layer contains business values which maynot normally be associated with architectural separations of IaaS,
PaaS and SaaS.
For example, most of the customers who are making commoditized changes to infrastructure re-alignment also make
decisions around moving Microsoft exchange on demand. The first layer or wave, focuses primarily on infrastructure and
not just hardware and data-center artifacts, but also standard software applications. The second wave focuses on building an
operating environment.. Full-fledged “operating systems” which manage the cloud-ization of applications, management of
resources and additional functionalities associated with integration and tools of IT departments.
The third focuses on key processes and functional areas. These are mostly covered by ERP systems and application packages
that implement key business processes. ERP systems that have the security cocoons and multi-tenant support necessary for
working within cloud environments are already available in some cases and some more are to come.

lue Capabilities
Customer Va Leaders

10-15% Top-line impact Global Virtualized Enterprise
ISV, Auto, Finance, HR – federated collaboration • NetSuite • FedCloud
ngs

4 through new customers/ through partners, suppliers, customers • HP • RetailCloud
fferi

geographies Verticalized Ecosystems • LegalCloud
Business Food industry, Retail, Telco
dO

Cloud
iate
rent

Functional Areas
Diffe

3 Functional Best-of-breed Business Insights, ERP
• Oracle
• SAP
• Microsoft
• SalesForce
IT solutions Business Functions
Cloud Customer Service Cloud, Billing
• SugarCRM • Infosys
es

2 App Dev
rvic

30% accelerated Application Dev Platforms
d Se

• Cordys • GoodData
Cloud deployment of enterprise
Azure Application Dev Tools, VMforce

Portal Consolidation • SalesForce • Microsoft
itize

apps on cloud Collaboration
mod
Com

1 Infrastructure Infrastructure Services
30-50% reduction in
Cloud IT infrastructure
Data Centers, Virtualization • Google • vmWare
Infrastructure Management • Amazon • Microsoft
spend Simple App Migration

Finally, some companies and organizations are beginning to think about moving entire business areas that are entirely cloud-
based. According to authors, this will represent the biggest shift in revenue models, wrought by the emergence of cloud
computing.
The next few sections delve into the specifics of each wave or layer and what can be expected.

Infrastructure Cloud - IaaS and beyond
Infrastructure cloud focuses on providing computing power as a service, with flexible pricing options. The customers
are given complete access to desktops and servers and are charged in terms of CPU hours, storage space and
bandwidth consumed and applications.

Infosys – View Point | 3

Customers get significant cost advantages and can save up to 80% of the IT CAPEX and upto 50% of IT OPEX.
There are three distinct components within this layer to build business value:

1. Data Center and infrastructure consolidation
Movement of data and resources to ensure cost advantage and carbon footprint savings

2. Infrastructure Management
Remote and autonomic management of infrastructure towards global scalability

3. Simple Application Migration
Movement of mail servers, basic web infrastructure to cloud environments, such as through MS-BPOS (Business
Productivity Online Suite) and Google Apps.

Existing industry efforts involve traditional hosting service providers offering cloud-based hosting options to survive
in the market. A range of varied-sized hosting players are evolving such as Rackspace, Flexiscale, Go Grid, Amazon,
Google, IBM and Microsoft. There have been significant investments from large players to build clouddatacenters. For
example, Microsoft is planning to invest USD 20 billion over next 10 years to build 20 datacenters, each costing USD
one billion each5 - four of these have already started operations.
By and large, most SIs are building internal cloud infrastructure to host internal services and creating alliances with
vendors to give themselves a broader set of customer services; vendors such as CA, BMC, NetSuite, Eucalyptus and so on.
Virtualization and outsourced management offerings are also available from most of them.
Innovations in this space are quite significant. Some large players like Google and Sun (now Oracle) have opined about
a datacenter strategy that puts computing infrastructure in shipment containers so that datacenters can be hosted in the
middle of the sea6 and power these data centers through electricity generated from waves. This is changing the definition of
a green datacenter. Another area of innovation will involve optimization and autonomics. This involves selfchanging cloud
configurations for cost management and green footprints.
Some other relevant industry examples include:

NASDAQ adds 30GB to 80GB of trading data everyday at Amazon S3. The initial monthly bills received from Amazon
have been as low as USD 5.
Source: Azure Journal7, Amazon8, InfoQ9
Eli Lilly reduces server deployment time from 7.5 weeks to a few minutes by leveraging Amazon AWS on-demand
server provisioning.
Source: InformationWeek10, GenomeWeb11
Volantis saves USD 30 million in rolling out a new service for users by not having to purchase, deploy, and manage a
new storage infrastructure.
Source: Microsoft Case Study12, Volantis13
Animoto Productions on Facebook scales up from 40 virtual machines to 5000 in four days using Amazon cloud.
Source: PCMag14
Federal Agencies use Microsoft Azure to store data for Open Government Data Initiatives as part of Data.gov.
Source: RedDevNews15 Azure - OGDI16


Application Development Cloud - the operating environment as PaaS
No surprises, that Cloud environments also need “operating systems.” Most grid systems and cluster computing systems have
eventually moved towards supporting some form of operating environment software and so are cloud deployments. Full-
fledged operating systems for the cloud are on their way and recent editions have gained significantly in their sophistication,
particularly, Azure from Microsoft and VMForce from SalesForce.com. The key business value here is twofold. Firstly, these
environments reduce the cost of operating clouds and make optimization a matter of simple configuration.. Secondly, this
layer allows accelerated deployment of applications with simple contextualization for customers and essentially allows
for better responses to the marketplace and customer demands. Expected analysis on such accelerations show a 30-40%
improvement for customers. Strategic scalability and business agility are key benefits here.
There are 4 key aspects to this layer of the business value architecture:
• Operating Environments: Operating systems and Cloud programming APIs are being introduced to allow for cloud-
ification of applications or creation of new applications custom-created for the cloud. As stated, Azure and VmForce
are the main proponents here although smaller players exist. Load balancing, security, exploitation of multitenancy are
part of the services offered.
• Development Studios and Sandboxes: Many companies are introducing visual development studios as well as testing
sandboxes to safely test cloud-based applications. Migration tools are also available to simplify this process.
• Infrastructure tools: These tools are coming up in the market. BI/DW tools, collaboration & social computing tools
would also be added to most of the cloud operating environments. Some of these are from operating environment
providers, while in other cases standard BI/DW and collaboration tool providers cloud-enable their tools.
Nontraditional players like Cisco are also jumping into this fray, as exemplified by the introduction of Quad.
• Integration Environments: Integration as a Service has been around for a while, but they’re now getting tied to cloud
environments. Some take the shape of Application Exchanges such as at Salesforce, while others take very specific
form of data migration services such as those provided for by Informatica.
Innovation is a common factor in each of the four aspects Many of the functionalities introduced in the operating
environments and tools will make the work of Layer-1 (Infrastructure Cloud) easily configurable. Infrastructure cloud will
see many development and infrastructure tools as well. BI tools for cloud environments is a key addition that will increase in
significance as vendors provide more functionalities in this space.
For SIs, this layer affects the application development work. The focus is on acquiring capabilities in specific application areas
and each capability is converted to develop and build special migration tools. Platform offerings and application offerings is
expected from ISVs and SIs.
Some industry examples include:

CA acquiring 3Tera, NimSoft, NetQoS etc service performance platform. Source:Journal17
SAP bought BusinessObjects and oCo for the on-demand business intelligent platform offering. Source: SAP18
SalesForce offers ecosystem for ISV Cloud/SaaS Onboarding and claims applications development five times faster and
at half the costs on Force.com platform. Source: SalesForce.com19
GlaxoSmithKline reduces 30% of the IT operations cost by standardizing on Microsoft Online Services. Source: MS
Online Blog20
GSK Annual Report21, GoodData delivers SaaS Business Intelligence for USD 500 per month. Source: GoodData22
Tata Motors, Citibank, ABB etc use Cordys BPM cloud. Source: Cordys23


Functional Cloud - SaaS for ERP
While Layer1 and Layer2 of the business value architecture deal with infrastructure and applications Layer3 is around
functionally focused cloud-support. Examples include CRM cloud, Service cloud, Billing cloud, SRM cloud, and software
distribution & licensing and so on. Tactically, such applications and process support in a cloud environment allow enterprises
to try something new with almost no CAPEX and pricing systems.. Contextualization for individual customers and scenarios
become easy and innovation costs get amortized. Long lead ERP modifications or process changes become simpler. This leads
to accrual of global virtual enterprise benefits for small and medium companies. Technology enables companies to monitor,
measure, customize, and bill for asset-use at a much more fine-grained level. Asset owners can therefore create services
around what have traditionally been sold as products.
Key focus areas include:
1. ERP applications: Various functional applications and even verticalized applications, such as CRM, Billing, SRM and
others fall into this category. Larger companies will prefer such services and go into a private cloud, while others may
opt for an Amazon or any other deployment.
2. Processes: Entire processes, such as order taking or service request processes may move to the cloud. Such steps have
already happened to some extent in customer care New generation platform BPO offerings has elevated maturity of
process outsourcing giving superior service to clients.
3. Rapid BPI: Due to superior instrumentation and multitenancy support in upcoming cloud based systems, consultant-
only based approach to process transformations will see significant changes. Rapid tools-driven detection of process
and functional changes on a per customer or per customer category, will enable more agile organizations.
Not surprisingly, the ability to transition enterprises from custom, fragmented functional support that they currently use to
more centralized, partial or full cloud based ERP processes and functional support are a determining factor. Companies like
SalesForce have demonstrated that such models work.
SIs like Infosys offer platform BPOs that are essentially functional cloud offerings in the areas of: Procurement, HR, Legal
& Knowledge Services. Flypp from Infosys is a functional cloud offering geared for telco service providers. Most SIs are
expected to partner with large ERP vendors like SAP, Oracle, Microsoft and SalesForce to offer configuration, deployment,
customization, maintenance and migration services on ERP offerings.
Some of the industry examples:

SalesForce offer Service Cloud, Sales Cloud and Custom Cloud apart from CRM cloud offerings. Source: SalesForce24
Pitney Bowes intends to collaborate on delivering Its
dMail™ solution (corporate digital mail & document processing solution) via Microsoft’s Cloud Platform. Source:
Microsoft25
Large ERP players like SAP, Oracle as well as other small ERP players like SugarCRM have started offering ondemand
ERP solutions on cloud. Source: SAP26, Oracle27, SugarCRM28
Also in a press-release, the French auto manufacturer Renault28a, stated that the company has taken global
collaborative product engineering approach to boost innovation & productivity of its global work-force.

Business Cloud - entire businesses as Services
Layer4 Business Cloud is showing signs of early emergence. As components of a global virtual enterprise develop, the
next step is to move entire business models and business segments to the cloud. So in a manufacturing cloud application,
processes, support and sales could move to a cloud infrastructure. Entire IT ecosystems of a particular business sub-vertical
or industry segment could shift to a cloud environment. For example, an auto business cloud could offer endto- end business
processes & application ecosystems for car manufacturers, suppliers, dealers and customers. Features and IT capabilities in
this layer are hard to enumerate and specific examples of such business clouds, include:


Retail Clouds
Early versions in Amazon’s support for small retailers were found but are now being pursued by several large OEMs. The
focus is to support different demographics of buyers and buying patterns across the globe and also use such clouds to
provide OEM retail operations, supporting better global inventory management and optimizing responses to shift in orders or
supplies.

Agri-Connect Clouds
As the need for agricultural productivity grows, several companies in this space are aggressively chasing plans to create
business clouds that provide a variety of services to their customers, from device-based access to precision farming needs to
better connectivity between buyers and sellers of large quantities of produce.
Innovation here is the driving factor and several kinds of business clouds will be tried. Most of which will fail, but some key
ones in the supply chain and retail space are expected to succeed.
Existing examples of business clouds or efforts which are close to the concept of business clouds include:

FedCloud29 will offer the whole ecosystem and infrastructure as well as applications for all Federal Services. Similarly,
LegalCloud30 offers an ecosystem for legal businesses; NetSuite31 offers Manufacturing ERP on cloud. Finacle from
Infosys is an early example of what could become a business cloud offering for the BFSI sector. HP has recently
implemented the Manufacturing Cloud32 for food-industry in Canada & Australia.

Some of the industry examples include:

Federal Government launched Apps.gov that provides a library of SaaS offerings for agencies to procure via credit card
and also supported by US GSA eBuy. Source: Apps.gov33
Microsoft, Google and IBM are working on developing various applications for Healthcare Cloud with various health-
care clients. Source: Internet Evolution34
Infosys cloud-based solution for the automotive industry would simplify the process of sharing inventory and other
data between dealerships in a network. Source: Infosys35
Retail Cloud brings simple to manage retail management POS system. Source: Retail Cloud36

Summary
The business value architecture outlined sets the categorization and drivers for various layers of opportunities in the cloud
space. Interestingly, what Infosys finds is that this model of thinking structures innovations in the Cloud space. The focus is
determining when (and where) to engage in Cloud Computing in order to maximize benefits. At the end of a business value
architecture, there should be sufficient information and analysis to develop a vision and reach a decision about adoption
approach.
Businesses are realizing that there is no one way to support Enterprise Architecture (EA). Decisions may be heavily influenced
by business context and the organization’s business landscape, people, experience. Hence organizations could treat Cloud
Computing as a standalone program and make others comply, or link Cloud Computing with existing enterprise initiatives.
Such an alignment would be good, but it may delay the rollout of cloud computing to the enterprise. The reality is that most
organizations do not apply a single approach to EA in a pure form. Rather, a number of different approaches in different areas
are used, resulting in a blended reality that truly meets the needs of business. This seems like a good fit wherein, one selects
the right candidate project, creates a roadmap, identifies gaps, and incrementally implements and rolls-out a computing
program towards the defined vision of the organization.


About the Authors
Sanjay Jalona is the Vice President and Head of the Hi-Tech & Manufacturing unit at Infosys for North America. In this
capacity, he is responsible for strategy, growth, customer satisfaction and operations at one of the top business segments of the
company with more than 100 clients. Sanjay has been part of Infosys’ leadership team since 2000. During this period, he has
held various client facing and delivery management positions. Prior to his current role, he headed the delivery & operations
function for EMEA region, establishing and scaling the operations to make it one of the fastest growing units. Sanjay has over
two decades of professional experience with leading Indian and global organizations. He has been instrumental in developing
and implementing the offshore strategy for many organizations and has led the endeavours of a French multinational in
setting up and building software development and R&D centre in India. Sanjay participates in the steering committees of
many of Infosys’ key client relationships. He also serves on the Industry Advisory Board of the Tauber Institute for Global
Operations at the University of Michigan. His mail ID is
Sanjay_Jalona@infosys.com
Arindam Banerji Arindam Banerji heads Technology and Solutions consulting for the Manufacturing unit at Infosys. For
the last 18 years, Arindam has been a technologist of some visibility within the industry. As one of the visionaries and chief
technologist behind E-speak at HP, Arindam in the late-nineties laid the foundation for the next generation of computing,
now broadly known as web services and Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA). He was also one of the early pioneers of
semantic search.
In the past, he has been the Global R&D head for Hewlett Packard’s Web-Services (then called E-Services) product lines,
Principal Scientist and Head of Strategy Research Organization for HP’s Services business, Architect at Sun Microsystems and
the CTOfor several tech. startups in the Manufacturing space.
At Infosys, his group focuses on providing technology strategy and advisory services to Manufacturing customers globally,
while providing intellectual property driven solutions in the supply chain and engineering collaboration spaces.
He has a PhD from the University of Notre Dame, over 30 publications and 6 patents. His mail ID is
Arindam_Banerji@infosys.com
Bhavin Jayantilal Raichura has 13+ years of experience; he has worked in multiple industries, different organizations of
varied cultures, different domains and products & services organizations. He has successfully led large, strategic & complex
technology-consulting engagements for multiple Infosys clients. His interests include leading new technology CoEs,
conceptualizing technology-focused business-solutions and leading strategic IT transformation programs aligned with new
business & technology trends. His mail ID is Bhavin_Raichura@infosys.com

References
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