Hybrid IT is fast becoming the new normal across organisations in Asia-Pacific.
With the increasing utilisation of data centres and cloud services across the Asia Pacific region, companies have gradually updated or upgraded their existing IT systems, giving rise to the Hybrid IT environment.
Besides helping enterprises to drive digital disruption, the latest Hybrid IT environment is also enhancing the customer experience and encouraging business model innovation.
As a result, there is greater acceleration in the adoption of a multi-vendor multi-cloud environment or Hybrid IT.
More than half of enterprises surveyed last year are planning to move to a Hybrid environment over the next 12 to 18 months.
This is putting the onus on vendors and services providers as the traditional IT procurement model is being disrupted by new business models. The service providers are responding to this by accelerating their pace of service innovation.
Frost & Sullivan’s latest report on Hybrid IT and Cloud Enabled Technologies, ‘Asia-Pacific Data Center and Cloud Computing Market Update 2015’ discusses the current developments in the lucrative data centre market and its potential impact on enterprises.
According to Mayank Kapoor, Industry Principal, ICT - Data Center and Cloud Computing, Frost & Sullivan, Asia Pacific, although Hybrid IT is defining the new normal, the Cloud is enabling the accelerated adoption of new technologies such as Big Data, the Internet of Things and Connected Industries.
“These new technologies are also driving industry transformation,” Kapoor notes.
“From our research, we have identified the three industry verticals at the forefront of such transformations, namely Manufacturing, Automotive and Healthcare.”
Kapoor says 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.
Frost & Sullivan research estimates the market in Asia-Pacific to have been worth US$25.7 billion in 2014.
Kapoor says it is expected to grow at a CAGR in excess of 20 percent over the 2014 to 2019 period to reach US$65.2 billion.
As a result, Frost & Sullivan expects the cloud services to be the dominant segment of the market with a CAGR of 33.1 percent for the forecast period.
“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,” Kapoor adds.
This widespread adoption is also driving significant new investments across the region.
Other key trends 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, such as in Indonesia and the rise of vertical cloud computing applications.
In the long term, Frost & Sullivan recommends enterprises focus on three key pillars - Service Portfolio Augmentation, Geographic Expansion and Business Model / Deliver Capability Enhancement.