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“These might sound like small changes, but they clearly illustrate SingTel’s intention to roll out a uniform regional cloud offer, observes Claudio Castelli, Ovum senior analyst, enterprise telecoms.
“SingTel has a leader position in cloud computing in Singapore. It entered the market early and on multiple fronts, and has a significant number of customers and partnerships with many independent software vendors for developing applications. The challenge has always been to build on its momentum in the domestic market and turn it into pan-Asian success, and taking Optus on board will certainly help SingTel to build a regional proposition,” Castelli says.
Castelli says that SingTel can use Optus’s “valuable knowledge and experience in cloud computing and deeper relationships with vendors such as VMware” to help build its own proposition in the Australian market. “Joining forces can also contribute to Optus’s cost-efficiency program. Working together across the group is a more efficient way to roll out new services, but investments, especially in delivery capacity, will still be necessary to match competitors’ offerings. Telstra, for example, committed an A$800m investment over five years just to strengthen its cloud capabilities.”
Castelli also makes the point that SingTel is not alone in its ambitions, and expects the company to face strong competition from other regional competitors with similar aims, as well as “global service providers with aggressive cloud services plans and established relationships with multinational corporations.”
Ovum also observes that enterprises in the Asia-Pacific region are asking for combined technology solutions that can take advantage of fixed wireless networks and innovations in applications management, and, as Castelli says, “they also need end-to-end SLAs for these.”
“The trick for SingTel and Optus, and indeed any managed service provider in region, will be to combine telemetry solutions (M2M) and wireless broadband transmission with data collection and hosting and fixed international backhaul, and to provide end-user network monitoring across all of these services,” Castelli concludes.
