Public and Private Cloud Use in Asia Pacific Sees Steady Growth: IBM Survey

Survey indicates high level of cloud readiness in most AP countries; Malaysia sees growth in Private Cloud deployments

Kuala Lumpur, 7 June 2012 – IBM today announced new survey results with a leading IT market research and advisory firm indicating a high level of acceptance and understanding of the business value of both public and private cloud in most Asia Pacific countries excluding Japan (APeJ). According to the IDC APeJ Cloud End-user Survey 2012, many of the organizations in Asia Pacific are researching and testing private and public cloud, while some of them plan to use it in the next six months.

To better understand APeJ organizations’ preference for the different cloud platforms and their priorities in using cloud computing, IBM, in collaboration with IDC Asia Pacific, surveyed close to 900 organizations across the region, including over 350 organizations in ASEAN and Malaysia. The participating organizations constituted from diverse sectors, including financial services, manufacturing, retail, and governments, among others. (L) IBM Rich Lechner, Ku CC & (R) IDC Chris Morris

The survey shows the growing preference of organizations for Business Process Outsourcing (BPOs) and IT Outsourcing (ITOs) and their investments in new IT Service Management (ITSM) and Business Process Management (BPM) tools. These are indicators of the increasing readiness of organizations for cloud adoption.

For Malaysia, whilst overall cloud adoption is still at an early stage, Private Cloud deployments are on the rise and will be a growth area for the country. There is a significant shift in this area in Malaysia as compared with other countries in APeJ. Although only a small proportion of respondents are currently using Private Cloud, they have indicated that they plan to increase the usage greatly during the next 12 months.

Of those that currently have a Private Cloud strategy, 42% have indicated that they are planning to use Private Cloud in the next year. Construction of private cloud infrastructure is the typical first stage of cloud adoption, with the next stage being the sourcing of business applications from the cloud, being witnessed in Malaysia in 2012.

In terms of Public Cloud and Virtual Private Cloud (a subset of Public Cloud), there is currently only a small proportion of uptake. More than 40% of respondents have indicated that they currently have no plans to use or deploy Public and almost 50% have no plans to use or deploy Virtual Private Cloud services. This low uptake is in relation to the uncertainties of legislations, service management (process) readiness – moving from simple infrastructure services to the delivery of end-to-end business service management – and the lower engagement of outsourcing in the country.

“There has been a keen interest in cloud computing over the last few years and an increase in deployments, especially amongst larger organizations such as the government and financial services sectors,” said IBM Malaysia Country Cloud Leader, Ku Chuan Cherng. “Different organizations across industries are at different stages of research and adoption. However, whilst there organizations recognize cloud as an important technology or platform to drive business growth, the full potential of what it offers remains relatively untapped.”

Cloud Computing in Asia Pacific
On the other hand, for other countries in APeJ the survey showed that legislation did not significantly affect any of their cloud plans. The majority of the APeJ organizations also took into account areas such as security, information storage and archived management when considering their cloud infrastructure, and around core business applications like CRM and ERP, when looking at their cloud applications.

Chris Morris, Associate VP, Services Practice Asia Pacific, Cloud Services Asia Pacific IDC Australia, said, “The findings revealed that most of the APeJ companies were confident enough in cloud computing services to favor off-site and hosted virtual private cloud delivery, a sign that the public and virtual private cloud environments available in the APeJ market were considered robust and trusted enough for deployment of some types of enterprise workloads.”

Rich Lechner, Vice President, Cloud and Services Marketing, IBM, said, “Forward-thinking companies are rethinking IT and reinventing how they do business to receive business benefits of agility, improved economics and dexterity. They are discovering that cloud can help expedite this transformation, to deliver further innovation and in select cases, a new profit opportunity.”

The survey also predicts:
• By 2015, most business computing categories will be available from the Cloud, reinforcing again the future widespread use and acceptance of cloud computing in businesses of tomorrow.
• A number of today’s cloud vendors will not be able to sustain themselves if they do not have a long-term, viable cloud strategy. So, the choice of a strong, long-standing IT vendor with staying power is key.
• Cloud supplier selection and management will impact service delivery processes hence deliberating on the supplier’s expertise in this space would help.

Cloud Adoption Models
Through numerous discussions with customers and sifting through the results of this cloud computing survey, IBM have developed four cloud adoption patterns of the growing ‘Client Defined Cloud’. This ranges from the – Cloud Enabled Data Centre, which helps cut IT expense, risk and complexity; Cloud Platform Services to accelerate time-to-market with new workloads; Business Solutions on Cloud to gain immediate access to application; and the Cloud Service Provider to deliver innovative business services.

These cloud adoption patterns can help clients accelerate entry into new market and services and deliver real business model transformation. The Survey result findings also suggest that when considering cloud-based solutions, it is vital to understand the different characteristics of the available cloud deployment patterns, as using the best deployment pattern to address a particular business workload requirement is central to a cloud strategy. It can maximize the return-on-investment (ROI) and mitigate any risks inherent to each approach. Using a standardized and understood deployment pattern also results in faster implementation time.


** All results were from the IDC APEJ Cloud End-user Survey 2012.