According to data from CNCData and the Synergy Research Group, Asia-Pacific enterprises last year spent almost $10 billion on cloud and data center infrastructure services - a 21% year-on-year jump.
While most of this spend was on the more traditional means of outsourcing data centers, either colocation or managed hosting, there is a relatively small but rapidly growing demand for pure cloud-based computing. In this model organizations pay for computing on a per-usage basis, deployed over the internet - in the form of either Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) or Platform as a Service (PaaS).
Worldwide revenues from cloud infrastructure services reached $12.5 billion in Q4 2012, and $47.2 billion for the full year.
Synergy data showed regional spending on IaaS and PaaS passed the $1 billion mark in 2012, having grown by 55% from 2011.
In the Asia Pacific SMB space, research showed a strong trend away from building and managing your own data center, towards leasing compute and storage resources delivered over the public cloud.
Large enterprises with access to larger internal IT resources tend to move more towards virtualizing their in-house data centers, creating Private Clouds.
The current Asia-Pacific regional leaders in IaaS and PaaS offerings by revenue are Fujitsu, NTT, China Telecom, Amazon/AWS, Salesforce.com and Microsoft.
In terms of worldwide revenue, the top four cloud infrastructure services market share leaders in Q4 2012 were Amazon, Equinix, Akamai and Verizon.