Indian gaming and mobile app startups leveraging cloud

By Amrita Premrajan, TimesJobs.com Bureau

The next revolution in the Indian startup ecosystem -of gaming and mobile app businesses -is being slowly fuelled by the availability of PaaS solutions. Here is how…

In 2014, a market trend that strengthened was the increasing popularity of smartphones coupled with the fact that 65 per cent of India's population which is under 35, are tech savvy and hungry for different kinds of mobile apps.

Tech entrepreneurs were swift to tap this trend and started experimenting with PaaS ( Platform as a Service) to create, test, host and roll out their mobile apps without much investment. Catalysed by PaaS, the mobile games and app market in India, projected to be worth Rs 2,700 crore by 2016, is growing at an unimaginable pace. Here is a look at how gaming and mobile app developers are leveraging PaaS to come out with fresh offerings.

Impetus to startups

Previously a gaming entrepreneur would take not less than a year to build a gaming app in his gaming studio with a lot of time spent in building a robust backend which could support traffic from large number of gamers. But PaaS (Platform as a Service) is throwing open opportunities for Indian gaming startups to build games within the shortest possible time span, without worrying about the infrastructure.

With the number of casual gamers set to increase eight times by 2015, in India, this trend is only set to intensify. "PaaS enables developers to build multi-player games and apps without worrying about the backend -server, storage etc. The developer just has to concentrate on building their app logic and write client code on top of the powerful APIs provided by the cloud solution provider," said Siddhartha Chandurkar, CEO and Founder, Shephertz Technologies.

Lowering time to market

A major contributor to the growth rate of mobile app market is the availability of PaaS solutions. The mobile app development companies as well as independent developers are leveraging this to pitch their apps into the market.

"To carve a niche in the highly competitive mobile app market, app developers are leveraging the PaaS solutions to primarily reduce the development time, effort, cost and time-to-market. Neither do they have to invest in building a backend, nor do they have to worry about scaling up or scaling down infrastructure, when the app experiences peaks or dips in consumer traffic. Because of this the developer can build great products by focusing completely on sharpening the app's features and it's UI/UX," adds Siddhartha.

So if you have a dream to build your own gaming or mobile app, all you need to do is hold that fire and subscribe to a PaaS solution provider on a monthly subscription model. Generally, there is no vendor lock-in and you are free to experiment with different PaaS players - as the payment is subscription based. Some of the key PaaS providers in India which you can evaluate are AWS, IBM, Oracle, Red Hat, OrangeScape, Microsoft, Shephertz and A2Zapps.