Malaysia a good market for cloud service providers: EMC

• Cloud service providers mushrooming in Malaysia; companies from Japan, China and Middle East tackling niche markets
• New EMC Pivotal centre to be based in Singapore; will service region’s enterprises on big data and cloud needs

THE deployment of cloud computing in Malaysia in these past few years has been largely confined to enterprises implementing private cloud configurations. But unbeknownst to many, service providers offering virtual private clouds – or hybrid clouds – are expected to grow “amazingly fast” in Malaysia, says the local head of EMC Corporation.
 
Speaking to the media in a briefing on July 31, Cheam Tatt Inn, managing director of EMC Computer Systems (Malaysia), said a lot of cloud computing deployments in Malaysia – outside large enterprises deploying private clouds – are conventionally implemented by telcos or by specialised cloud service providers.
 
These players usually provide cloud services using a hosted, multi-tenanted virtual private cloud model, noted Cheam (pic).
 
“I’ve said it in the past before, and say it again -- we are going to see a lot of cloud service providers setting up in Malaysia and they are not going to comprise traditional telcos,” he pointed out at the briefing.
 
“These companies are unheard of, and you and I may not know them,” Cheam said. “But they are going to provide cloud service to a very targeted group of customers, and they are mushrooming at a rate that is amazingly fast.”
 
Private cloud deployments are defined as enterprises deploying cloud infrastructure that is either self-managed or run by third parties but have their own equipment on premise. They are usually dedicated machines that are configured using a single tenant/ dedicated delivery model.
 
By comparison, virtual private clouds are usually hosted in a service provider’s premise and are managed by these players with standardised services tightly governed by service level agreements (SLAs) and configured using a multi-tenant/ shared delivery model.
 
When asked who these service providers were, Cheam declined to say, noting only that they were EMC’s customers and that they have set up shop here to serve clients from their home markets in the Middle East, China and Japan.
 
He also said these cloud service providers serve non-highly regulated industries such as “e-commerce, oil and gas and trading companies,” as industries such as banking may have cross-border regulations that are against setting up data centres abroad.
 
“They serve clients who have a very niche customer base rather than mass market customers,” he said.
 
Cheam noted that cloud service providers are usually associated with telcos such as Telekom Malaysia or Maxis Communications. Apart from these companies, the market may not know that there are other players setting up to serve niche verticals, he added.
 
“We [Malaysia] are becoming, in one way or another, a cloud service provider [nation],” he argued. “But because these companies are not the traditional telcos, we think things are not happening. But [the truth is that] they are moving very fast and without us knowing, these pieces of business are springing up in Malaysia.”
 
On what were the reasons that these cloud players are setting up in Malaysia, Cheam said they are doing so “because they see Malaysia as a stable country, politically and physically speaking, compared with their own countries.”
 
“The Middle East has political challenges at the moment and Japan is frequently stricken with earthquake. Companies from China set up here because they want to grow in the South-East Asia market, providing their cloud services to customers in the region.”

Next: EMC's pivotal move in South-East Asia