According to data released by CNCData and the Synergy Research Group, enterprises in Asia Pacific spent about $10 billion on cloud and data center infrastructure services.
The majority of the investment was accounted by the more traditional means of outsourcing data centers, either co-location or managed hosting. However, enterprises exhibited relatively small but rapidly growing demand for pure cloud-based computing. As part of this model organisations 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).
Further, the worldwide revenues from cloud infrastructure services reached $12.5 billion in the fourth quarter of 2012 and $47.2 billion for the full year. The data shows that the regional spending on IaaS and PaaS passed the $1 billion mark in 2012, registering a growth of 50 per cent over 2011.
In the Asia Pacific small and medium enterprise market, the research firm identified a strong trend where organisations moved 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 virtualising their in-house data centers, creating private clouds. The Asia-Pacific regional market in IaaS and PaaS services in revenue terms is led by players like Fujitsu, NTT, China Telecom, Amazon/AWS, Salesforce.com and Microsoft. For the fourth quarter of 2012, the top four cloud services market share leaders by revenues were Amazon, Equinix, Akamai and Verizon.
