Asia Pacific Enterprises are Gearing up for Cloud Services

The adoption of cloud services  is picking up pace among large organisations, with Asia Pacific expressing the greatest interest, according to a survey of more than 100 global multinational corporations across Asia-Pacific,  North America and Europe by Ovum for Cable&Wireless Worldwide.

Around 63 percent of MNCs in Asia-Pacific reporting the uptake of at least one of the cloud services categories; networking, communications, applications, corporate IT systems, as well as data management, security and backup.

The research also points to telecoms providers being well positioned to take advantage of cloud services adoption, which is up by 61 percent worldwide from April 2010, with 45 percent of MNCs already using cloud sourcing for at least some elements of key IT services.

Across the globe, enterprises have already moved significant resources to the cloud and are ready to move more application services. The dominant areas of cloud services uptake are in data backup and storage, at 51 percent of respondents, with an additional 33 percent reporting their intention to procure cloud data backup and storage services in the next 24 months. 

This research confirms our confidence in the market potential of cloud computing. We are encouraged to see that most enterprises in Asia Pacific have shown such great interest in adopting cloud services. One of the key elements of the research indicates that telecommunication providers are emerging as trusted partners and credible suppliers for cloud services, increasing from 37 per cent in 2010 to 49 per cent in 2011, which is a good indicator for us,” said Charles Kennaway, vice president of Enterprise Sales, Asia Pacific at C&W Worldwide.

Cloud uptake is permeating all sectors. Finance and insurance multinationals have adopted cloud services for some elements of corporate IT systems (56 percent), whereas manufacturing is embracing cloud components for networking and data management (63 percent and 59 percent, respectively).

Sectors are also placing different applications in cloud environments. Professional services single out Customer Relationship Management (CRM) (50 percent) while finance and insurance places strong emphasis on document management (50 percent). Manufacturing places most value on messaging (41 percent) and CRM (41 percent).

It’s interesting to see Asia-Pacific MNCs reporting such interest in cloud services. This may be because many companies in the region are relatively new and take up the latest technology more readily,” said Evan Kirchheimer, Practice Leader, Enterprise Services, at Ovum.

Seventy-five per cent of MNCs rate scalability of capacity and matching capacity to fluctuating demand as the main benefits from the use of cloud services, with increased speed of provisioning coming in a close third (72 percent). Cost transparency is regarded as least important with only (24 percent) citing this as a major benefit. Retail respondents topped the poll in viewing scalability and matching capacity to demand as major benefits (50 percent), while finance and insurance came out top in seeing improved employee productivity as a major attraction (50 percent). Manufacturing views cost transparency as far more important than other verticals (38 percent vs average of 24 percent).

By TelecomLead.com Team

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