On our pre-panel and panel discussion at Cloud Connect, Krishnan Subramanian of CloudAve brought up an interesting point about cloud adoption in Africa and India and even discusses it in his blog. To these I would also add China. Given their populations, there is a massive business opportunity there that may yet be untapped.
Essentially, the masses in Africa, China, and India are well versed in mobile communication due to its relative affordability and even prefer mobile phones over personal computers and laptops. As Krishnan points out, this platform is well suited to the delivery of cloud based services.
However, it is not the mobile end user that will increase adoption/utilization of cloud based services; it is the startups and innovators that recognize the opportunity to deliver mobile applications, and who will leverage cloud based services themselves in such delivery, who will do so.
That said, there is still a major barrier on the path to widespread use of cloud based services in Africa and India: latency (see Cedexis' analysis of cloud latency presented at Cloud Connect 2011 for details). Internet access to the African continent, Chine, and India is generally slow (in the 400ms+ range) due to the high costs of provisioning bandwidth and delivering telecommunications infrastructure, especially in the interior of Africa. This, in effect, is one of the reasons that mobile devices have proliferated: transmission towers only require power and line of sight to transmit data over long distances.
There were over 850 million mobile phones in China and 771 million mobile phones in India in January, 2011, and another 250 million more in Africa at the end of 2008. This should give some idea as to the size of the opportunity.
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