Cloud driving the age of ‘everything as a service’

According to research firm Frost & Sullivan, hybrid IT is fast becoming the new normal across organisations in Asia-Pacific. F&S says that, in addition to helping enterprises drive digital disruption, their use of hybrid IT is also helping them deliver a better customer experience and to introduce business innovation.

“More than half of enterprises surveyed [in 2014] are planning to move to a hybrid environment over the next 12 to 18 months,” F&S said. “This is putting the onus on vendors and services providers as the traditional IT procurement model is being disrupted by new business models.” It says that service providers are responding to this by accelerating their pace of service innovation.

The findings come from F&S’s latest report on Hybrid IT and cloud enabled technologies, which discusses the current developments in the data centre market and its potential impact on enterprises.  

According to Mayank Kapoor, industry principal, ICT - data centre and cloud computing, with F&S, Asia Pacific, cloud is enabling the accelerated adoption of new technologies such as big data, the internet of things and connected industries.

“From our research, we have identified the three industry verticals at the forefront of such transformations: manufacturing, automotive and healthcare,” Kapoor said.

“These two trends (hybrid IT and cloud enabling technologies) are also creating a strong demand for data centre and cloud services. This in turn is driving the data centre construction frenzy across Asia-Pacific.”

F&S estimates the market for cloud services in Asia-Pacific to grow at a CAGR of 33.1 percent until 2019.

“In Singapore, for example, we are witnessing investments worth over a billion dollars over the next three years to establish more than one million square feet [93,000 square metres] of raised floor space, and that is a conservative estimate.

We at Frost & Sullivan believe that this is the start of the Everything as a Service (XaaS) era, with managed services at the heart of it.”

Other key trends identified by F&S as having a strong impact on the data centre and cloud computing market include the implementation of a software-defined-everything vision, stricter data sovereignty laws and the rise of vertical cloud computing applications.