One of the biggest benefits was that the bandwidth utilization has shot up. Earlier each vertical operated in silos leaving chunks of IT recourses residing in islands. By consolidating, the group could provide more elasticity while planning for a 20 percent buffer capacity.

This advantage was recently illustrated when Siva group decided to pull back their telecom business, S Tel following the canceling of their 2G licenses. "Now we have free capacity and because of a centralized model we can provision it intelligently," he says.

For a rapidly expanding company like Siva, rapid provisioning for new business and scalability was one of the biggest concerns. The new private cloud's plug and play model allows the company to quickly modify existing portfolio of services, memory and storage bandwidth and adjust it the new users.

The Siva group's private cloud went live in March 2011 and has been functioning smoothly for a year now. The company hopes to recover the ROI in another three months.