As the political crisis raged on in Thailand and the overall economy suffered sharp decline throughout 2013, Frost & Sullivan's research shows that data center service providers in Thailand experienced unforeseen business growth over the year.
Teera Kanokkanjanarat, senior ICT industry analyst, Frost & Sullivan says, “The result from our research shows that Thailand's data center industry had a strong year of growth in 2013. The overall industry growth rate was approximately 21% compared to the year earlier with total revenue over 1,700 million baht ($51.8 million). Despite recent political turmoil and ongoing economic downturn, Thai enterprises, both from the public and private sector, turned their attention to strengthening their data centers. Many began to include data center investment in their business continuity planning agenda.”
Frost & Sullivan's forecast shows that Thailand's data center industry will still enjoy strong overall growth of more than 15% in 2014. The key driving factors for growth are the following: cloud computing adoption, rising demand in Disaster Recovery (DR) Solution, and increasing demand of connectivity within ASEAN region.
“Cloud computing technology has been a widely known trend in Thailand for many years, but prior to 2013, most enterprises were still in the learning and trial period for cloud computing adoption,” Teera said. “As cloud computing in Thailand has gained maturity and trust, the rate of adoption has also risen rapidly thereafter. Many data center service providers began offering cloud computing solutions either as Infrastructure-as-a-Service or Managed Cloud Hosting. The rising popularity ranged from public cloud to private cloud for enterprises.”
“Disaster recovery (DR) site has also been another area of interest since the event of the big flood in Bangkok. Last year we also had a few major shutdowns of data center sites from political movement. So enterprises in both public and private sectors have begun looking for disaster recovery solutions in these unforeseeable events. DR-Site and Solution have then become opportunities for data center providers. Major data center providers have begun offering DR-Site as a complementary service for their customers or as a bundled package for new prospects.” Teera adds.
Lastly, Teera suggests that despite political instability in Thailand, we should not overlook the growing importance of ASEAN and its impact to the country.
“From an investor point of view, Thailand still remains the key strategic market for ASEAN. As data center providers continue to improve their facilities and level of their services to meet international standards, more international providers also express their interests in entering the Thai market either as investors or forming joint ventures with local providers.”