Governments to benefit most from cloud services

By Eden Estopace | Nov 28, 2011

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Governments stand to benefit most from the cloud because of the recent strides in e-government across the region and the pressure to cut down corruption.

"Everything in the cloud is transparent. You don't need middlemen to access government services. The only problem is if the population is not IT literate enough, and most don't have access to the Internet," said Raju Chellam, Dell's Head of Cloud Practice, South Asia and Korea, in a recent visit to the Philippines.

In Singapore, he said, if you want to get a government deal, you cannot buy a tender document. You have to go to a portal called Gebiz and download the documents, whether you are a citizen or a foreigner. So, there is 100 percent transparency. It is a level playing field.

Interestingly, Chellam disclosed that the first hybrid cloud implementation in the region for cloud services is in education. "In 2009, the Ministry of Education (MOE) in Singapore put 30,000 teachers on a Google public cloud. But it put only strategic items on the public cloud. It means all the course curriculum, all the emails, all the archives and the rest of the strategic parts were put on the private cloud," he said.

Currently, three of the country's universities - the National University of Singapore, the Nanyang Technological University and the Republic Polytechnic -- have adopted the cloud infrastructure. "So much data is generated by students. You cannot keep buying servers," Chellam said.

The interest of governments and CIOs in the cloud, he added, has changed. In the Gartner's CIO survey last year, the three top priorities named by executives were: virtualization, mobile technology and cloud computing. This year, the top priority is cloud computing, which Chellam said reflects companies' interest in cloud implementation and CIO's serious interest in the platform as IT spending increase.

Worldwide uptake for Software-as-a-Service (Saas), however, remains small at only 3 percent worldwide. However, this is expected to dramatically increase to 43 percent by 2014.

In Southeast Asia, he said the Philippines and Vietnam have the highest growth on IT and telco spending. According to research firm IDC, Philippines ICT spending is projected to reach US$3.63 billion by the end of this year, while telco spending is pegged at US$4.49 billion. However, the number of virtualized servers in the country is only 3 percent.

"It is a good idea for the Philippines to look at the cloud very seriously, just to be competitive in the future," Chellam said, citing the robust business process outsourcing industry in the country, an open economy and a competitive footing in the regional economy because of the availability of local talent and English speaking ability of its 98 million citizens.

Ricky Lopez, country manager for commercial business at Dell Philippines, noted though that the cloud is not a solution for everything. "Not all applications can be put in the cloud, so adoption rate is different for every government or every company. At Dell, we try to determine the need and it depends on the existing infrastructure. Going to the cloud is a journey," he said.