By Cat Yong
According to Microsoft APAC Vice President, Alvaro Celis, the IT environment in Asia Pacific region is changing super quick. “We are not foreign to APAC, having been here for 30 years. But the pace of change has accelerated greatly.”
Celis also said, “We had received a lot of feedback from customers and our partners, about how quickly we were changing as a company, how positive and impactful it is being received, and that they wanted to know more and see more from us.”
This brought about Microsoft’s first Asia Pacific Executive Leadership Forum (AELF), in Singapore, where Microsoft, a few of their key selected partners, and over 200 key IT leaders among Microsoft’s enterprise customers in APAC, got together for a few days to exchange practices and ideas.
This had also prompted an online survey of 291 enterprise customers in CIO and IT director positions across ten countries, to pick their brains about the pace of change and the direction of IT change. Findings of this survey were then shared during the AELF event.
The first thing that Celis pointed out about the survey findings was how CIOs have gone from becoming enablers to actually drivers of business transformation.
Cloud has also moved from being a disruptor to being part of every IT manager’s plans.
“Seventy-one percent of IT managers already have plans that include cloud. It is now part of the expected outcome of IT,” Celis shared.
No doubt cloud services would be among the new technologies that respondents see increased spend on for 2015, and this is reflected in Microsoft’s San Francisco event just a week before AELF, where they announced enhancements to their hyper-scale, enterprise-grade, hybrid cloud platform, Microsoft Azure.
At the San Francisco event, CEO Satya Nadella dubbed this cloud, as now being the industry’s most complete cloud, for every business, every industry and every geography.
In Asia Pacific
According to Celis, Microsoft’s cloud business is growing triple digits in APAC. “That’s four times faster than cloud market growth in Asia,” he pointed out.
What is opening up receptivity of businesses hungry for cloud, towards a traditional provider of software like Microsoft?
Celis names partners as making Microsoft cloud’s pervasiveness possible in APAC – over 100, 000 partners and 14,000 cloud partners in Asia Pacific.
“We are working with the vastest ecosystem in the APAC – developers, system integrators, consultants, trainers, and so on, to really bring the cloud transformation and these new technologies, to life in the market,” Celis said.
Currently, they are also about the only cloud provider around that is able to deliver hyperscale, hybrid cloud and at enterprise-grade SLAs.
“Only Amazon, Google and Microsoft can build out hyperscale cloud – all others can’t match the scale and size!” In summary, Celis opined that not many companies can build hyperscale, almost nobody does hybrid, and much less deliver enterprise-grade SLAs.
Interestingly, it is Microsoft’s huge install base in enterprise IT premises, that gives them a huge leg up in extending these environments to the cloud, for their customers.
Celis said, “We provide the best capabilities to move, manage and secure those hybrid environments. This gives us a great deal of flexibility for business scenarios like risk management, change management and all the things that are very important for businesses.
“We have a very unique ability to bring the value of hybrid cloud to reality.”
Strategy
Microsoft has every intention of delivering cloud to their existing customers.
Celis said, “We can help them with their install base of investments – Windows Server, SQL Server, MS Sharepoint, MS Exchange – if you have any of these in premise, there is a roadmap to take it to the cloud that will leverage your technical people’s knowledge, that will leverage your investments, and gives you all the benefits of cloud.
“As a technology principal we have to help customers protect investments and make the most out of it, by using the cloud.”
To strengthen their hybrid cloud proposition, Microsoft Azure also has its ExpressRoute offering, which creates private connections between Azure locations and on-premise locations. This type of dedicated connections are touted to not go over the public Internet and offer reliability, lower latencies and security.
The Redmond company also recognises the opportunity that the new digital economy brings. The APAC VP said, “We want to leverage the new ecosystem that is being built around the cloud, for us to also bring innovation faster to market.
“Working with partners and helping customers with new projects, is a big part of our strategy, too.”
In October, Microsoft had also launched two new data centres in Australia, keeping true to their strategy of having their services, as close to users, as they can.
Celis described, “I need to make a very important set of investments to secure the services being available in as many countries as possible. And keep aggressively adding more services and more customers, every quarter.”
To date, Microsoft Azure has 19 regions worldwide, which Celis said is more than twice what their nearest competitor has.
He further added, “We have scale of presence and we are the only MNC to have cloud (services) in Mainland China.”
