Vendor sees huge opportunity in the cloud for SMEs

Asia Cloud Forum editors
24 Oct 2012
00:00

Cloud computing has been empowering SMBs in the West with feature-rich applications and other resources previously only available to large enterprises. While SMBs in Asia Pacific have been slower to catch onto this trend, cloud adoption rates in the region is expected to grow significantly in the coming years.Parallels, a hosting and cloud services enablement leader, estimates the APAC cloud services market to grow to US$19.8 billion in 2015, presentinga huge opportunity for the SMB cloud and hosting services sectors in the region.

Leveraging opportunity through an evolving partner ecosystem was a key theme at the opening sessions at Parallels Summit 2012 APAC. IDC's Asia Pacific Group Vice President Sandra Ng kicked off the event by presenting how not all users and businesses are adopting cloud services in the same fashion or pace. This presents rich opportunities for service providers, hosters and IT channels, to capitalise on the upcoming differentiation trends imminent in the marketplace.

To this end, Parallels CEO Birger Steen outlined his vision of how the hosting and cloud industry here can tap into the Parallels partner ecosystem to meet the growing demand for cloud services. Steen provided an update of how Parallels' strategy, together with its preview of next-generation solutions such as the Parallels Cloud Server, can help partners tap the trillion-dollar blue ocean market andreach the 148 million plugged-in SMBs worldwide. Parallels Chief Architect and Executive Chairman Serguei Beloussov shared how hosting, cloud and IT would be the norm a decade ahead, emphasising the need for businesses to be innovative, resilient and flexible if they are to thrive in the next 10 years.

Developed or developing world?

In line with the event's central theme of "Profit from the Cloud," a very fundamental growth impediment involving creativity and innovation was addressed via keynote speaker Fredrik Härén, a Singapore-based creativity expert and lauded author.

Härén pointed out that the polarization of the world into "developed" and "developing" nations has unwittingly imposed limits and biases on innovation and creativity. This has wrought spectacular effects in the midst of the Internet era, where giant corporate household names have gone bust or lost their gloss; and the fates of entire blocs of "developed" nations hang in the balance. Fredrik propounds a mindset change as simple as wiping the idea of being "developed" off our vocabulary.

This will break down cultural isolation and complacence and propel us from being mere consumers of knowledge to being idea foundries. We will then be well placed to serve as global catalysts of out-of-the-box mindsets that will radically reinvent the world.

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