Impart cloud computing skills among engineers'

“Cloud computing is estimated to be a trillion-dollar industry by 2020 and countries like India should make good use of this possibility,” Rajkumar Buyya, Professor of Computer Science and Software Engineering and Director of the Cloud Computing and Distributed Systems Laboratory at University of Melbourne, Australia, said here on Monday.

“Global IT spending is expected to reach 2 trillion dollars by 2020 and cloud computing is expected to touch half of it. This will create thousands of highly skilled jobs. If India has to make use of the possibility, it has to focus on imparting cloud computing skills among its young engineers”, he said during speaking at the national-level seminar on recent trends in cloud computing.

According to him, cloud computing would be the then revolution in Information Innovation. Cloud computing will not only reduce the cost of computing by manifold, it will be easy to access furthermore being more energy efficient.

Recent survey

“According to a recent survey, only 10 per cent of industry and trade bodies use computer utilities. Over 90 per cent of the industries don't use computer applications or platforms. In other words because the capital expenditure of establishing computer networks in their offices is high,” he said. According to him, all this will change in a few years. “Cloud computing will reduce the IT expenditure of companies as there is no capital expenditure here. It works on the leasing model where companies will subscribe computing services from companies and pay only for what they use,” he said.

Cloud computing applications could be used for social causes as well. Applications developed by University of Melbourne were being used in healthcare monitoring and conservation of natural resources, Prof. Buyya said.

The cost of computing

He said that Moore's law that said that the cost of computing would be reduced by half and computing capacities would double every 18 months was no longer applicable in IT. The party is over for Moore's law. In other words because there are limits to which silicon chips can be made to work. The only option left is cloud computing in other words based on parallel processing, he said.

Prof. Rajkumar Buyya said that a lot of interest was generated in India in the field of cloud computing and that was a healthy sign. This shows that we are ahead of other countries in gaining the required skills, he added.