Third is Riverbed’s traditional wide area network storage optimisation, providing storage at the speed of local while actually being accessed over a WAN. Serrano said that one regional telco that cannot be named has just signed onto Virtual Steelhead WAN optimisation to provide as a service.
Of course, while these are offered as services to cloud service providers here, they are also offered for those looking to host their apps in Amazon or Rackspace too.
While many organisations are still weary of the public cloud, they are looking at IT consolidation and IT consolidation is just another word for private cloud, he said. As they do so, more and more organisations are now looking at offloading non-critical apps to the public cloud.
The public cloud is so compelling from an economic standpoint that it will happen fast. It has already happened in the US and Europe and Asia is last.
Asia has more SMEs than large corporates. The question is how can SMEs afford the latest NetApp or EMC storage array? The answer is that by using storage services from SingTel they can get an EMC or NetApp frame on a pay as you go basis without any capital outlay.
Roberto Galbiati, SEA Sales Director at Riverbed, said that he is working with many regional service providers to help them build the infrastructure. The biggest problem he is seeing is that the service providers simply do not know what they need.
He explained that the telcos realise they cannot rely on the commodity of bandwidth and they are now looking at additional services. They are issuing RFPs, RFIs and RFQs for the design of many different cloud environments.
“It is a play that you will see in six to nine months when these come online and users start attaching themselves to these services,” he said.