Asia Pacific, SINGAPORE, October 29, 2013 – Microsoft Asia Pacific today announced a wave of new enterprise products and services to enable companies to seize the opportunities of cloud computing and overcome today’s top IT challenges. Complementing Office 365 and other services, these new offerings deliver on Microsoft’s enterprise cloud strategy.
In his blog “The Enterprise Cloud takes center stage”, Satya Nadella, Cloud and Enterprise executive vice president, Microsoft said, “As enterprises move to the cloud they are going to bet on vendors that have best-in-class software as a service (SaaS) applications, operate a global public cloud that supports a broad ecosystem of third party services, and deliver multi-cloud mobility through true hybrid solutions. If you look across the vendor landscape, you can see that only Microsoft is truly delivering in all of those areas.”
Microsoft’s cloud momentum in Asia Pacific
IDCi predicts that spending on Public Cloud Services in Asia Pacific (excl. Japan) will grow from US$5.3bn in 2013 to US$14.9bn in 2017. In addition, in Asia Pacific (excl. Japan), IaaS (Infrastructure as a service) and PaaS (Platform as a service) are predicted to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 25% from 2013 to 2017, according to IDC.
In Asia Pacific, Microsoft Azure has grown at least three times faster than the market growth rate for IaaS and PaaS cloud services while demand for Microsoft’s virtualization solutions, which support private and public cloud infrastructures, has grown 30% year-on-year in Q2 of 2013, outpacing overall market growth of 1%ii. This strong momentum was bolstered by a rich partner ecosystem, datacenter-class solutions with industry-leading cost of ownership.
Microsoft has continuously invested in the Asia Pacific region to strengthen its ability to deliver cloud services to organizations of all sizes. Microsoft recently announced that it is investing several hundred million dollars to expand Windows Azure in the region over the next two years with additional datacenters in Australia, China and Japan. Some of Microsoft’s key customers in Asia Pacific include: Coca-Cola Amatil (Australia), Karya Harmoni (Indonesia), Navcore Nextology (Indonesia) and Cycle & Carriage Industries (Singapore).
“In the Asia Pacific excluding Japan markets, the appetite for cloud computing within enterprise organizations is mainly for private cloud, due to concerns around security, performance and legislation; however, many organizations are realizing that the hybrid cloud model is rapidly becoming a model that many would like to leverage. With their Windows Azure platform, Microsoft is well placed to be one of the leaders in this space due to the prevalence of the Microsoft platform and the ease of adoption of their cloud service offerings,” said Simon Piff, Associate Vice President, Enterprise Infrastructure Research, IDC Asia Pacific.
Arun Ulag, General Manager, Cloud & Enterprise Division, Microsoft Asia Pacific said: “The launch of these new cloud products and services in Asia Pacific gives our customers clear options which will better meet their fast changing and varied business demands. This means infrastructure and services which are scalable, secure and which can be better managed than ever before.”
Hybrid infrastructure and modern applications
To help customers build IT infrastructure that delivers continuous services and applications across clouds, Microsoft has released Windows Server 2012 R2 and System Center 2012 R2. Together, these new products empower companies to create datacenters without boundaries using Hyper-V for high-scale virtualization; high-performance storage at dramatically lower costs; built-in, software-defined networking; and hybrid business continuity. The new Windows Azure Pack runs on top of Windows Server and System Center, enabling enterprises and service providers to deliver self-service infrastructure and platforms from their datacenters.
Building on these hybrid cloud platforms, customers can use the new Visual Studio 2013 and .NET 4.5.1 to create modern applications for devices and services. As software development becomes pervasive within every company, the new preview Studio 2013 Modern Lifecycle Management solution helps enable development teams, businesspeople and IT managers to build and deliver better applications, faster.
Enabling enterprise cloud adoption
Recognizing that most enterprises will take a hybrid approach to cloud, Microsoft wants to help customers utilize their investments in on-premises software solutions toward the adoption of cloud computing. On Nov. 1, Microsoft will offer Enterprise Agreement (EA) customers access to discounted Windows Azure prices, regardless of upfront commitment, without overuse penalties and with the flexibility of annual payments.
Data platform and insights
As part of its vision to help more people unlock actionable insights from big data, Microsoft has released a second preview of SQL Server 2014. The new version offers industry-leading in-memory technologies at no additional cost, giving customers 10 times to 30 times performance improvements without application rewrites or new hardware. SQL Server 2014 also works with Windows Azure to give customers built-in cloud backup and disaster recovery.
For big data analytics, Microsoft has released Windows Azure HDInsight Service, an Apache Hadoop-based service that works with SQL Server and widely used business intelligence tools, such as Microsoft Excel and Power BI for Office 365. With Power BI, people can combine private and public data in the cloud for rich visualizations and fast insights.
People and devices in the cloud
The proliferation of cloud applications, data and consumer devices is moving many enterprises to a bring-your-own-device model. The new release of Windows Intune combines with System Center Configuration Manager to help IT departments give mobile employees security-enhanced access to the applications and data they need on the Windows, iOS and Android devices of their choice. This unified management environment for PCs and mobile devices complements the new access and information protection capabilities in Windows Server 2012 R2.
Further, with Windows Server 2012 R2 Microsoft is introducing the Microsoft Remote Desktop app to provide easy access to PCs and virtual desktops on variety of devices and platforms, including Windows, Windows RT, iOS, OS X and Android.
Software as a service business solutions
The next major version of the company’s CRM solution, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online Fall ’13 is now available, helping make customer interactions more personal via contextual information for deeper insights than the previous version, delivered on a variety of devicesiii. The on-premises version is expected to be available later in the fall for deployment either in-house or hosted by a partner. More information is available here. In addition, Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013 R2 is available today, offering small and midsize businesses interoperability with Office 365, full multitenant support, and a range of tools designed to support large-scale hosting of the application on Windows Azure.
Additional information:
i. Source: IDC Worldwide Cloud Black Book 2013
ii. Source: IDC Worldwide Virtualization Tracker 2013 Q2 – Published Sept 2013
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