The Cloud Ascends in Emerging Markets: Highlights of IEEE CCEM 2013

W ithin a relatively short time, cloud computing has emerged as a dominant and transformative paradigm in the world of IT, sparking a revolution in enterprise sectors ranging from telecommunications, finance energy, and retail to government, education, utilities, and transportation— with uptake in both mature and emerging markets. Especially important for emerging markets is the tremendous boost the cloud offers to leapfrog traditional legacy IT systems. Enterprises in emerging markets can go directly to the cloud, just as they have bypassed landline phones and entered the mobile environment directly. Cloud computing accelerates development in the promising world of services on demand and presents impressive opportunities for embracing computing’s power on a scale never before possible. In a country like India, for example, national-scale clouds can foster e-governance, providing the latest economic data and legislative information, making services accessible to the widest number of people, and encouraging full participation in all aspects of civic life. To encourage adoption of cloud computing in emerging markets, the first annual IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing in Emerging Markets launched in October 2012, bringing together experts from industry, government, and academia to address the unique challenges and opportunities cloud computing offers for emerging markets, particularly of the Asia-Pacific countries and India. CCEM 2013, which took place in Bangalore, India, this past October, featured prominent keynote speakers, an extensive technical papers program, two expert tutorials, and a broad-based panel discussion, as well as a startup showcase, during which select companies highlighted individual approaches to cloud-based innovation. In addition, during the conference the Computing Innovation Council for India released an important white paper on cloud computing adoption and innovation in India. Here, we present conference highlights and key insights derived from the presentations.