IT services vendor Wipro Technologies plans to enter the cloud computing market over the next three to six months. Wipro CTO I Vijaya Kumar laid out the strategy in an interview with me yesterday.Wipro, based in Bangalore, India, has four services in mind: public cloud services, private clouds, hybrid clouds, and helping independent software vendors design and implement software as a service. Wipro already hosts IT infrastructure for business customers in its data centers in India and the United States. The company's cloud services would be offered from those same data centers, retrofitted with new capabilities for on-demand computing such as self-service provisioning, metered IT consumption, and subscription billing.

"We find a lot of customers want a service where they don't need to specify the numbers of servers, etc.," that they might require in advance, Kumar says.

I asked how Wipro could compete in the U.S. market with Amazon, Google, Salesforce, Microsoft and other cloud service providers that have a head start. Kumar explains that Wipro will deliver "enterprise IT solutions" in the cloud, with a focus on vertical industries (retail and health care) and applications such as document management, EDI, and carbon-footprint accounting for green IT initiatives.

Wipro has built a private cloud for internal use, which serve as a prototype for customers. "We believe that in many enterprises there is a preference for a private cloud rather than putting everything in a public cloud," Kumar says. Wipro will apply its experience with a variety of virtualization technologies--VMware, Xen, Microsoft's Hyper-V--in creating private clouds. (For more on this subject, see InformationWeek's "Private Clouds" cover story and related article on GE's private cloud pilot.)

Wipro also plans to help customers design and implement hybrid clouds, which are a mix of private and public cloud services. Kumar expects the model here to be moving "non-core" apps (think CRM) into the public cloud, while keeping internally developed business applications inside the firewall, and establishing integration where necessary between those two environments.

Wipro, which has its U.S. headquarters in New Brunswick, N.J., is anticipating that U.S. businesses won't want to store certain kinds of data beyond U.S. borders. With that in mind, the company plans to use its six U.S. data centers to create what's essentially a U.S. cloud. "Certain data cannot leave the shores of the U.S.A.," says Kumar. "Document management is better done in a U.S. data center."

Wipro's cloud infrastructure will also be used to host applications, including those offered by ISVs and by Wipro itself.

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