Cloud Services for SMB in Asia

Q: Types of cloud services that Asia’s SMBs find acceptable?

SMBs’ cloud adoption patterns vary greatly in terms of types of applications and services reflecting their varying levels of comfort with the new paradigm and while a majority of SMBs are using cloud services in conjunction with their existing applications and services, a small but growing number are using them to replace their on-premise infrastructure. This is especially true for cloud services like CRM, hosted email, hosted SharePoint and others.

The extent of Cloud Services for SMB from local providers in Asia today remains largely limited in our experience, with many of the service providers not possessing a definitive strategy for their Cloud offerings let alone an SMB focused Services portfolio’s aimed at addressing the unique needs of this market segment.

For example, SMB’s in Asia are challenged by internet reliability and bandwidth, and concerned with taking of advantage of the transformative, one-off technology event enabled through Cloud to change the expenditure and sophistication paradigm, than they are about security, information asset management and privacy.

The major drivers to Cloud for SMB’s over the next 4- 8 quarters are work force mobility – on demand, access anytime data and tools, the opportunity to leverage dynamic, low cost productivity applications and taking advantage of advanced, high performance, resilient technology infrastructure that has historically been out of reach due to budgetary constraints.

Q: What mission-critical applications are portable to the Internet via cloud service?

Cloud computing presents a significant opportunity because it allow companies to reduce the capital costs of information technology. It allows companies to convert the cost of computing from capital expenditures to primarily an operating expense. What does this mean? It means customers don’t have to pay for expensive mission critical software or hardware that they don’t use all the time, making cloud computing a very cost-efficient alternative to on-site solutions.

Second, it allows companies to easily scale resources. Companies can simply pay for more storage or application users licenses when the requirement arises. As the resources in the cloud are shared among multiple tenants, there are added benefits such as lower costs from the greater economies of scale enabled by this sharing. In addition, since all users may not utilize resources at the same pace and time, a company can more efficiently manage their peak load capacity. Cloud computing also has potential reliability benefits for mission critical applications in that virtual infrastructure and resources are more cost-effective than provisioning backups and security on a single company basis.

Another major advantage of heading for the clouds for mission critical applications will be the speed of deployment. Cloud computing reduces the time between identifying an information technology need and acquiring the means to fulfill it. It replaces the need to purchase and install new software and hardware and it provides faster, more direct access to resources. By moving to the cloud, the old paradigm of mission critical software and its associated costs become even more unattractive. Instead of paying for the purchase of a software installation, the Cloud model allows customers to purchase mission critical software use based on what they need.

The availability of cloud infrastructures has the potential to be disruptive to traditional mission critical software companies as well as the way in which organizations run their IT systems. Essentially, a company can now outsource critical IT tasks to cloud computing service providers who are better equipped to execute them, which frees up the internal IT organization to focus on business critical processes. Key applications being run in the Cloud today include Email, CRM, ERP, Database applications and Business Intelligence systems. We believe this movement will gain speed over the next 4-8 quarters.

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