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Infotech Lead Asia: Business agility, increased standardization of IT infrastructure and the ability to lower overall IT costs are driving cloud computing adoption among Australian enterprises.
53 percent of Australian companies using cloud computing services spend more than 10 percent of their total IT budget on cloud solutions or services, while 31 percent spend more than 20 percent.
70 percent of them will increase their cloud-based solutions budget significantly over the next 12 months. Larger organizations are generally spending much more on cloud computing than smaller ones.
“Cloud-based solutions enable organizations to focus on other aspects of operations by freeing up key resources previously dedicated to other IT services. Providing the flexibility to meet business demand via real-time /on-demand computing also rates highly” said Mayank Kapoor, industry analyst, Datacenter and Cloud Computing, APAC ICT Practice, Frost & Sullivan.
Most Australian organizations are now fully cloud deployed rather than in pilot phase.
HRM and Unified Communications are the two slowest applications to move out of pilot phase.
Storage & computing solutions has the highest rate of full deployment.
With the exception of HRM, private cloud deployments are more widespread than both public and hybrid cloud deployments.
Software as a Service (SaaS) is the most commonly used delivery model in the cloud. Apart from SaaS benefits over on-premise software such as lower upfront costs, ease of upgrade, seamless integration with in-house infrastructure, falling broadband prices, rising data cap limits and increasing enterprise mobility are all stimulating SaaS adoption.
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) has seen a huge spurt in adoption in the last 12 to 24 months due to an increasing number of local market participants such as Melbourne IT, Cloud Central, Ninefold, BitCloud and Ultra Serve.
Growth in local data centers also assists in alleviating customer concerns surrounding latency and data sovereignty.
Telecommunications service providers Telstra and Optus have also been aggressively positioning themselves in the cloud space by offering IaaS, SaaS and private cloud offerings.
Managed service providers with local data centers in Australia such as Fujitsu have also secured large contracts particularly in the Financial Services and Public Sector verticals.
Companies such as Netsuite, Salesforce.com, SAP, Microsoft, and Google are some of the SaaS vendors with good growth in the Australian market. Telstra and Optus Alphawest are also starting to build SaaS offerings for its customers.
NetSuite and Ninefold are the 2 highest rated cloud services vendors for local organisations and MNC’s respectively.
