Singapore's ZONE Telecom (ZONE) has partnered with AliCloud and Microsoft to expand its suite of cloud solutions to cater to SMEs in Singapore, as well as to reach out to larger international markets.
ZONE focuses largely on the SME business sector and aims to be the go-to service provider for SMEs planning to adopt cloud-based services. ZONE currently serves over 80,000 business customers across its suite of service offerings, including SMEs, large corporations and government offices.
ZONE will offer direct access to the suite of cloud services provided by AliCloud for compute resources and Microsoft for a range of business productivity applications like Microsoft Office. Together with its state-of-the-art cloud infrastructure, ZONE is able to meet the varied needs of the SMEs at very flexible terms.
"The partnership with AliCloud and Microsoft complements our existing cloud capabilities and allows us to better service our SME clients. We can now offer them a full spectrum of cloud services from compute resources to essentially business productivity application," ZONE Telecom managing director Peter Ong said.
"Our partnership with AliCloud allows us to expand our footprint regionally and internationally to serve our customers in their IT needs when they expand into the region. This is most timely as our government had announced in the Budget generous support to help our SMEs venture overseas and adopt technologies."
This partnership will further expand ZONE's reach beyond the Singapore market. ZONE's clients will have secure and dedicated access to AliCloud's services and ZONE'S Cloud Biz and Cloud Mail will be available to 1 million Alibaba.com members.
With Microsoft, ZONE's customers can now access popular Microsoft productivity applications like Microsoft 365 or the CRM solutions in the cloud on top of ZONE's own suite of service offerings like ZONE Spectrum, a hosted sales pipeline management tool, or a hosted PABX for voice communication and even a data backup or disaster recovery service.
According to research firm IDC, the cloud computing market in Singapore is forecast to grow to about $1 billion (S$1.4 billion) by 2017. Singapore is one of the largest users of cloud technology in Asia Pacific, and SMEs are among the fastest adopters of cloud services, both in usage and sophistication. Cloud service offerings allow SMEs to deploy and reap benefits of enterprise-grade IT capabilities at affordable costs.
Besides Singapore, ZONE has operations in Hong Kong and Shen Zhen, China. With the new Cloud service partnership, it now serves customers in the Asian region such as Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Australia, New Zealand as well as further regions like the Middle East and Africa.