Still,
let's look at how things stand in Japan, Korea, China, Australia,
India & South-East Asia.
Japan is still generally a very conservative IT market, however Cloud & SaaS is being looked at carefully. There are definitely examples of major corporations making significant investments in cloud and especially SaaS technologies (for example Toyota is the largest customer of SalesForce.com). While big enterprise has the resources to move into cloud, and especially private cloud, the chief adopters of public cloud are small-medium enterprise, with adoptions patterns very similar to western countries and for the same reasons of economy.
Korea can be even more conservative than Japan, and generally heavy reliance on older Windows technology (ActiveX, etc) from the early 2000's makes migration to Web 2.x & cloud/SaaS less straightforward in many cases. However, once one large enterprise moves, the rest of the market will follow quickly.
In Australia, cloud technologies are being investigated by large enterprises who have the resources to spare (eg the big banks), and up-coming businesses looking to leapfrog the old fixed-system way of working. Still, the "cloud first" mentality is still a couple of years behind the US.
China shows lots of interest in cloud, with several large service providers offering cloud and SaaS services, and there is a lot of focus on how to develop cloud services with a Chinese flavour rather than straight adoption of western (particular US) systems. In general, government still generally favours traditional application deployment, and security is a significant concern. The adoption trend shows that smaller organisations are most likely to adopt cloud, either by migrating existing process or taking the opportunity to move directly into public cloud. Private cloud are much less common. Larger organisations may see cloud as a way of leapfrogging old deployment methodologies, but the automation and TCO benefits of private cloud can be less attractive where low-cost, high-skilled labour is available. In general it’s still true that there is not a lot of radical new innovation in Chinese IT, but the scale of deployments often pushes the boundaries of technologies.
In South-East Asia, especially outside of Singapore, the scale of IT deployment is generally too small to really gain advantages of on-premise cloud. As with Australia, there are places where small businesses are looking to leapfrog the old way of working & go directly to SaaS, or at least public cloud. Even this is really more prevalent in Singapore than in the truly emergent economies.
For home-grown enterprises in India (as opposed to outposts of US, etc companies), cloud & SaaS is an area of early investigation. Even more than in China, TCO benefits of private cloud deployments are often undercut by generally low labour costs, which in turn hampers adoption of a lot of operations automation technology.
In comparison to the rest of the world, my general perception is that Asia's cloud-adoption maturity lags behind that of the US (where adoption of the new can be much faster than elsewhere, even if it's not necessarily a good idea), and also behind the UK and similar western economies. On the positive side, this means that Asia can take advantage of the mistakes made and lessons learned, and possibly entirely leapfrog legacy IT concepts that western world has to continue to deal with for many years to come.
From an employment point of view, there is opportunity for people from the US, the UK & the rest of the world to bring their cloud expertise to Asia – most importantly it is business-integration-related skills and experience that are needed, rather than purely technical exposure. The biggest headache most organisations face when moving to cloud is how to integrate business needs with access to the right resources. This is a big change from the way we've been working with IT over the past 30 years (or more) and so needs different approaches & ideas. Experience from people successful in this area will be invaluable to organisations in Asia.
No comments:
Post a Comment