A subsidiary of Citic Telecom International has launched its first ASEAN SmartCloud center in Singapore.
The newest SmartCloud center is Citic Telecom CPC's sixth in the region after Taiwan, Guangzhou and Shanghai early this year and two in Hong Kong last July.
"The centers are about less than a year old," said Stephen Ho, CEO of Citic Telecom CPC. "We're in the process of educating the market and building a sales pipeline. The sales cycle of [cloud services] is very similar to what we experienced with virtual private networks back in 2002, and that is slow.
We definitely [hope], over the next three years, that the cloud business will [grow to] 20% to 25% of [our total business]."
Friends with benefits
The SmartCloud service is based on technologies from vendors such as Dell (infrastructure), Riverbed (optimization), VMware (hypervisor and virtualization) and Hewlett-Packard (security event management for security operation centers).
"We mobilized a team of cloud and data center experts who were committed [to] end-to-end design, deployment, performance benchmarking, optimization, as well as detailed strategic planning," said Philip Davis, vice president of Enterprise Solutions Group, Commercial Business at Dell Asia Pacific & Japan Region, a key infrastructure partner of Citic Telecom CPC.
Apart from offering its SmartCloud Compute infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), Citic Telecom CPC's cloud portfolio also includes software-as-a-service (SaaS) and value-added service (VAS) offerings from its partners.