The past few days have seen a variety of cloud-oriented news come from the Indian market and reveal some intriguing trends. What are the highlights?

• The cloud market in India is on the verge of being worth $1bn, according to consultants Zinnov
• Public cloud – a hitherto nascent market in India – has increased significantly and should only go higher
• Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) “have started taking advantage of the cloud” in terms of economic benefit yet exercises caution overall

The report from Zinnov, entitled “Public Cloud Opportunity in India”, has found that cloud services overall in India hit their highest value of between $860m and $912m at the end of 2011.

Zinnov elaborates on why the market has significantly expanded since 2009.

They cite reasons such as an increase in using local infrastructures, increased outsourcing leading to greater cloud adoption and adoption from both large companies and SMEs, leading to …