Malcolm Rogers, Senior Technology Analyst at GlobalData, comments: “In the cloud marketplace, SaaS has been widely adopted by enterprises looking to take advantage of the simplicity of service delivery and flexible pay-as-you go pricing that cloud delivered software offers.
“Increasingly enterprises are also looking to build in agility to their IT infrastructure by moving proprietary software workloads and data storage off of on-site data centers to cloud providers, which will drive the growth in IaaS and PaaS space.”
China and Japan are the dominant cloud markets within APAC with China accounting for 34% of the total APAC cloud market, followed by Japan with 25.5% in 2019.
China is home to cloud hyper-scale provider Alibaba Cloud while Japan has a mature ecosystem of cloud providers with a strong focus on the Japanese market.
Rogers continues: “In order to grow their revenue from the cloud marketplace, telecom operators in APAC are increasingly beginning to offer cloud management platforms and integration services. Rather than competing with hyper-scale providers such as AWS, Microsoft Azure and Alicloud, telcos are bundling cloud services from multiple providers with connectivity and offering management tools through a single platform.
“For operators, the managed services component and cloud optimized networks are increasingly important. Enterprise cloud environments are growing in complexity with most businesses using multiple public clouds as well as private cloud environments.
“The ability to manage various cloud environments with a single view while providing a high performance and dynamic network is the differentiator for operators in a competitive APAC cloud market.”
Emerging APAC markets in South East Asia are also increasingly targeted by the world’s largest cloud providers such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and Alibaba. Governments and enterprises around the region are increasing scrutiny around data sovereignty requirements, which has prompted the hyper-scale players to begin building out data centers in the region. Telecom providers in the region are responding to the changing dynamic in the region accordingly.
Rogers concludes: “Given the increasing competitiveness and market dominance from pure-cloud players such as AWS and service providers such as IBM and Microsoft in the IaaS market, telcos are expanding their reach in the enterprise cloud computing space by acting as integrators of multi-cloud platforms and providing consulting, implementation and management services.
“The cloud market is quite saturated with a number of providers, including webscale players, IT vendors and system integrators. Carriers can position their network advantage such as integrated cloud and network services or software-defined capabilities to differentiate in the market.”