MANILA, Philippines — It’s official: cloud computing has finally graduated from “buzzword” status and is quickly making its way to mainstream adoption both in the consumer and enterprise markets, according to cloud software provider NetSuite.
Citing immense growth for the company in Asia last year, NetSuite product manager Jan Pabellon said the initial fears of companies regarding the cloud have now been allayed, and more and more companies are looking to the cloud to future-proof their businesses.
In particuar, Pabellon cited the cases of businesses in Hong Kong and Singapore — both regional hubs for global businesses — that are pressured to grow despite the general lack of manpower to fulfill business tasks.
“Solutions like NetSuite allow them to do more with less, even if they are constrained by manpower,” Pabellon told a group of reporters during the NetEvents Press and Analyst Summit here.
Emerging countries such as the Philippines and Indonesia, meanwhile, have a lot of small- and medium-sized businesses (SMB) that do not have a lot of investment in legacy systems, making the jump to the cloud easier if not an obvious next step.
“There is a lot of room for growth in these growing economies, and businesses want to leapfrog competition, so cloud solutions allow them to do that,” Pabellon stressed.
“If there is any market that’s most enthusiastic about the cloud, it has got to be the Southeast Asian countries,” he added.
Unlike two to three years ago, the NetSuite executive said, firms today are no longer apprehensive of the cloud due to issues of security and privacy, since a lot of them now have a “good understanding of the risks” and know how to manage them.
Issues of data sovereignity are no longer present as well, Pabellon added, as only specific industries such as the government and financial services sector have issues about where their data reside.
The issues that hound enterprises today are now centered on integration of cloud services to legacy systems, a problem that’s mostly pervasive in developed nations and in multinational companies.
“When we started out, security and privacy are the main issues with the cloud,” Pabellon told the summit audience during a panel interview. “Now there has been a shift, as some of the concerns now revolve around integration and customization.”
Because of this shift, more and more companies are choosing to offload some of their mission-critical applications — such as Enterprise Resource Management (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems — to the cloud.
Pabellon said NetSuite has been a beneficiary of such a shift, since its main strategy is offering a tier-two ERP system wherein customers wouldn’t have to replace their existing on-site ERP investments when they want to expand, or automate their subsidiaries and branch networks.
The executive added that this strategy has allowed them to penetrate more of the large companies in their upmarket transition from simply providing systems to SMBs.
