By By Dr Roger Newman, head of UK manufacturing and digital convergence relationship management at Mahindra Satyam

Cloud computing has all the attributes and potential to support a global outsourcing environment with lower infrastructure costs, lower energy costs from eliminating hardware boxes, and the scalability to provide computing resources to meet demand in an unpredictable global market. My view is that we are in a global delivery continuum, where many organisations will originally evolve from crude BPO environments (a lot of lift and shift), explore SaaS delivery to optimise that environment, and ultimately dabble with SaaS apps that can be deployed in a Cloud "plug-in" model.

It is worth noting that the Cloud is by no means a silver bullet to alleviate the challenges of all organisations, but it does represent a tool that can be quickly added to the mix of the arsenal for many. Large enterprises may have sufficient resources internally to accommodate routine business requirements. However, should a need arise to quickly ramp up a business unit or product line, the cloud delivery model becomes a valuable arrow to have in the quiver to quickly enable agility. For companies of any size that have a seasonal business or product line, having this capability is valuable to accommodate peak demand periods without having in-house servers sitting idle at other times. The signs indicate that we'll start emerging from this economic slump in the coming months ahead, and companies need to be ready to scale-up their support infrastructures in a smart fashion to respond.

Increasingly, buyers will reap the benefits of cloud delivery as more major providers enter the market. Many established providers with robust infrastructure, skilled staff and a legacy of delivering high quality services are finding their traditional markets saturated with competition. Cloud computing provides a logical, emerging market that offers opportunities for growing their business. The scramble to offer more benefits at a lower price could well rival the marketing wars we see today in the automotive industry. This can only result in brighter prospects for organisations seeking cloud cover in an economic storm. Outsourcing for the sake of cheap labour will generate some savings in the short-term, but these costs will quickly spring back if you don't follow-through with improved processes and technology that allow for a global operating model. Simply shipping out your ‘mess for less’ is never going to make much of a difference to your bottom-line, and will often end up costing you more in the long-haul. The bottom line is, when an organisation moves into a global outsourcing model, they have to transform the way their business deploys its technology platforms and business processes if they are to generate real cost-efficiencies. Embracing the new developments in the Cloud is a sure way to make an outsourcing experience work on a continual basis.