Head in the cloud is way forward for IT

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Microsoft Asia-Pacific chief marketing officer Andrew Pickup said the market size of computing in Asia-Pacific today was estimated at around $666 million including software as service, infrastructure as service and layer as service.

Vietnam posted the highest growth in the region.

“Overall the Asia-Pacific  market is growing 33 per cent per year, but in Vietnam it grows 50 per cent, per year and Vietnam has a small base and is expected to grow faster,” said Pickup.

Tran Viet Huan, chief technology officer of IBM Vietnam, quoted an International Data Company (IDC) research as saying Vietnam’s cloud computing service market size this year was only $1 million and would probably reach $15 million by 2014.

Huan said local small- and medium-sized enterprises’ demand for cloud computing services such as e-mail, web conference and data back-up was on a quick rise.

“We have run a small-scale survey and the two most wanted services are e-mail and web conferencing. We have now six large-scale customers, including telcos, which have demand to set up private clouds,” he said.

IBM will provide services such as data back-up and tailored cloud computing services from its branch in Vietnam by the year’s end. IBM Vietnam has three years boosting cloud adoption experience in Vietnam through two local partners of VNTT and Quang Trung Software City Company.

Of these, around 80 firms in Quang Trung Software City have used cloud computing.

Microsoft, through local partner of FPT, is to provide cloud computing services such as exchange, sharepoint and unificomunication online by the end of this year.

The Office 365, which accomodates contents specialised for Vietnamese customers, will be on offer by the end of this year.

 Under the partnership agreement signed between the two sides in May last year on developing cloud computing services in Vietnam, FPT and Microsoft would deepen this collaboration.

 The FPT datacentre will offer a cost effective solution for independent software vendors to host their vertical applications.