Indian firms moving towards 'cloud' at faster pace, says Salesforce India head Sunil Jose

Salesforce, one of the world's largest cloud computing companies, says Indian enterprises are moving core applications to the cloud at a faster pace than the past. Sunil Jose, an IT industry veteran, who five months ago was appointed as its Senior Vice-President in-charge of Indian operations, says that even a few years back, cloud discussion used to be in board rooms, and was limited to experiments, but now it has become more mainstream.

"Organisations understand that business today runs by technology. So adoption of technology is not an afterthought, but built ground up." The company claims that unlike in the past when IT decision used to be taken by CIO, increasingly it is business leaders like CMO (chief marketing officer) or a CDO (chief development officer) who are driving the shift to the cloud. Jose claims that companies are also moving to cloud as part of their digital transformation exercise as it address issues of scalability, security, integration of applications.

Salesforce says in India it has customers like Bajaj Finserv, UB, Urban Ladder, InMobi and Janalakshmi Finance. "Globally 88% of Forbes 100 companies use Salesforce." The company last month hired its 1,000th employee in India. "We continue to make investments in the country. India is one of the fastest growing markets for Salesforce globally. The company operates a Centre of Excellence in Hyderabad," he said.

Salesforce also works with Indian IT services companies like TCS, Infosys, Wipro, Cognizant and HCL, who implement its solutions as system integrators. "Most Indian players have fairly large Salesforce practices and we work with them both here and globally," adds Jose.