Mobile sophistication and the need to provide a scalable platform for growth and innovation will drive demand for cloud solutions among APAC SMBs, say AMI

SINGAPORE, Feb. 28 — Small and medium businesses (SMBs, companies with less than 1,000 employees) in the Asia-Pacific region (excluding Japan) will invest US$16.5 billion in cloud computing solutions, according to the latest research conducted by AMI-Partners. These companies will continue to leverage cloud technologies as a major enabler for their future growth and innovation strategy.

AMI predicts that the market for cloud solutions will grow more than 1.5 times the rate of traditional ICT technologies in 2012 in the Asia-Pacific markets. As the leader of worldwide growth of the cloud computing markets over the next five years, these markets will provide information and communication technology (ICT) vendors with the strongest growth opportunities.

"Many organizations and CIOs today reap the benefits of the cloud in the form of speed to provisioning, ubiquitous availability to end-users and variable costs," says Singapore-based Stefan Haas, Consulting Director Asia-Pacific at AMI-Partners. "Yet the instant availability of new business and technology capabilities is among the main factors for APAC SMBs to evaluate cloud solutions. In addition, increasing maturity of cloud offerings as well as rising customer demand for mobile business scenarios supported by increasing tablet and smartphone penetration will continue to drive demand and investment levels for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solutions among these SMBs in APAC over 2012."

In 2012, up to two-thirds of the total cloud investment is estimated to come from SMBs in Korea, China, and India, investing up to US$11B in cloud-related technologies. While the strongest growth among Asia-Pacific economies is expected to take place in China, AMI-Partners expect the ASEAN markets to be the next fastest growing sub-region, with an annual growth potential of over 20%.

In bringing cloud solutions to the APAC SMB market, telecommunications service providers will play an essential role. "The cloud adoption dynamics in the APAC region — especially for the more developing and emerging markets — are different from other more mature regions," notes Haas. "While the fixed and mobile infrastructure build-outs are occurring as we speak, service providers can offer their own or partner-led cloud services on top of their fixed and mobile infrastructure services. Therefore, service providers can take advantage of increasing IT and broadband penetration levels to bring a broad portfolio of cloud solutions and managed services to market. This resonates well with the rising IT sophistication of many SMBs and will eventually lead to a faster cloud adoption cycle."

A confluence of factors will continue to drive broad adoption of cloud services among Asia-Pacific SMBs. "These SMBs will continuously extend their focus from basic computing and connectivity to new technologies that will enable them to drive further profitable growth in more digitized and networked business environments," concluded Haas. "Therefore, cloud technologies in combination with mobile technologies will play a key role for SMBs to build a scalable adaptive technology platform for future business growth and innovation."

Related Studies

AMI's 2011-12 Asia Pacific Small and Medium Business Market Opportunity Assessment is a regional rollup that examines the IT and telecommunications landscape and how it is rapidly being transformed as the APAC SMB workforce becomes increasingly more mobile and adoption of cloud/hosted services rises.

The Asia Pacific Overview survey captures a comparison of India, China, Australia, Korea and markets in ASEAN and their current deployment and future plans pertaining to budgets, spending, usage, channels, service and support, hardware devices, software, applications and services—across a range of IT, telecommunications and Internet products and services.

This study tracks firmographics, decision making, business processes and outsourcing, attitudes and strategic planning activities of SMBs. It examines the ICT usage and deployment, economic influences, and the market opportunity assessment among SMBs, as well as an overview of the growing impact of cloud and mobility on the SMB market.

For more information about this research or AMI's strategic consulting services, call 212 944 5100, email ask_ami@ami-partners.com or visit www.ami-partners.com.

About Access Markets International (AMI) Partners, Inc.

AMI-Partners specializes in IT, Internet, telecommunications and business services strategy, venture capital, and actionable market intelligence - with a strong focus on global small and medium businesses (SMBs), and extending into large enterprises and home-based businesses. The AMI-Partners mission is to empower clients for success with the highest quality data, business strategy perspectives and "go-to-market" solutions. AMI was founded in 1996. Since its inception, the firm has built a world-class management team, each with ten to fifteen years' experience in IT, telecom, online communications or multimedia.

AMI has helped shape the go-to-market SMB strategies of more than 150 leading IT, internet, telecommunications and business services companies. The firm is well known for its IT and internet adoption-based segmentation of the SMB markets; its annual retainership services based on global SMB tracking surveys in more than 25 countries; and its proprietary database of SMBs, Cloud services studies and SMB channel partners in the Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific. The firm invests significantly in collecting survey-based information from several thousand SMBs annually, and is considered the premier source for global SMB trends and analysis.

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Source: AMI-Partners