The latest from the Asia Cloud Forum

The Asia Cloud Forum, an online media portal, has been created to represent the interests of enterprise users, governments, telcos, vendors, policy makers and others with a stake in the development of cloud computing in Asia.

Singapore Budget 2013 targets quality growth

Building on its productivity gains to a level of about 70% of global productivity leaders the US, Japan, Switzerland and Sweden, Singapore has unveiled a S$5.9 billion (US$4.8 billion) Quality Growth Programme in its fiscal year 2013 Budget to fuel growth by sustained productivity improvement rather than manpower growth.

“We must ... upgrade technologies, skills and expertise across our economy in this decade, so that we can be a truly advanced economy,” says Singapore’s Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam in his Budget Statement. “The 2% to 3% per annum target for productivity growth that we had set after the weak decade until 2009 is ambitious but we must make every effort to achieve it. That will bring us, at the end of this decade, much closer to where the most advanced economies are today.”

That means helping businesses to upgrade, create better jobs and raise wages. That also means restructuring sectors such as the construction, marine and process industries as well as some service industries, which account for the lag in productivity in Singapore’s overall economy.

One of the key pillars of the Quality Growth Programme is a 3-year Transition Support Package to help companies during this period of restructuring. The package consists of three key components - a S$3.6 billion Wage Credit Scheme (WCS); S$450 million in Productivity and Innovation Credit (PIC) Bonus; and S$1.3 billion in corporate income tax rebates.

Read full article by Khoo Boo Leong at www.asiacloudforum.com/content/singapore-budget-2013-targets-quality-growth

INSEAD-AT&T, Gartner on wise IT investment decisions

High investors in new technologies such as cloud services, mobility and online collaboration can double their likelihood of being highly competitive - from 35% to 74% - and outperform their peers, according to research from the INSEAD business school and AT&T.

The INSEAD-AT&T research findings, based on responses from senior executives in 225 multinational companies across Europe, Asia-Pacific and North America, show that in Asia-Pacific, firms are investing a much greater percentage of their total ICT budgets in new technology and expect to grow those investments more quickly than other regions.

Investment in mobility will grow from 17% three years ago to 31% two years from now (82% growth); cloud will more than double from 12% to 30% (150% growth); and collaboration tools will increase from 18% to 26% (44% growth).

However, investing in new technologies alone isn’t enough to guarantee improved competitiveness, the report added. Some high investors in technology are seeing no improvement in their competitiveness at all and perform the same as companies with low or no investment.

The most critical factor in making technology investments succeed is to have other strong business resources in place, said Theodoros Evgeniou, associate professor of Decision Sciences and Technology Management at INSEAD and academic director of INSEAD eLab.

Read full article by Khoo Boo Leong at www.asiacloudforum.com/content/insead-att-gartner-wise-it-investment-decisions

Can old IT security skills be reskilled for cloud management?

Global info-security professional body (ISC)2 on Monday released the results of its sixth Global Information Security Workforce Study (GISWS) and revealed a global shortage of info-security professionals, with 56% of the respondents feeling their security shops being short-staffed.

Concerning cloud computing-related skills, John Ellis, enterprise security director of Akamai Technologies, said that there is a cloud-aspect to most of the IT skills, and the core skills required yesterday do not differ much from the skills required for a cloud professional today.

He said: “I think there is a cloud-aspect to most of the skills you are looking for. People who have an understanding, code developers understanding how to develop codes, co-hosted multitenanted environment, a code that can be run on a virtualised environment, scale out, scale horizontally, scale upward - that in itself requires a level of awareness. All the way down to understanding how to architect an environment that is actually multitenant where you can have logical separation of policies.

“A lot of us have bought into the hype a bit too much. I think it’s more of an understanding about some of the aspects around virtualisation and multitenancy. But there is nothing really revolutionary about the skills.

Read full article by Carol Ko at www.asiacloudforum.com/content/can-old-it-security-skills-be-reskilled-cloud-management

O4BO: Why we switched from AWS to IBM?

Open 4 Business Online (O4BO), a Hong Kong-based solutions provider, said recently it has partnered with the “right infrastructure provider” to deliver its open source cloud-based applications in the region.

At a media briefing held in Hong Kong, O4BO’s founder Mike Oliver explained how the company leveraged cloud computing in its cloud services delivery, and the key reasons why it switched from the initial cloud service provider Amazon Web Services to IBM, by using IBM’s infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud platform SmartCloud Enterprise.

Through partnering with Corent Technology, O4BO primarily provides cloud-based open source applications (SaaS). The six key SaaS it provides are web content management, ERP, CRM, business intelligence and analytics, online storage, and enterprise service bus. A distinctive approach of O4BO is its integration of all six SaaS into a single subscription service to enable data sharing across the applications.

On the same occasion, IBM also announced SCE’s upgraded version IBM SmartCloud Enterprise+ (SCE+) to Hong Kong businesses. SCE+ is aimed at helping business users host core applications like ERP, CRM, analytics, social business and mobile computing on the cloud.

Read full article by Carol Ko at www.asiacloudforum.com/content/o4bo-why-we-switched-aws-ibm