More than half of all Australian companies spend more than 10% of IT budgets on cloud - 70% intend to increase budgets significantly, finds Frost & Sullivan
- Security, reliability of services and hosting capabilities in Australia are top criterion for selecting cloud providers; providers with a local data centre presence have competitive advantage
SYDNEY, Aug. 8, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Business agility, increased standardization of IT infrastructure and the ability to lower overall IT costs are driving the adoption of cloud computing amongst enterprises in Australia. An intrinsic part of this is the ability of cloud computing to lower upfront IT capital expenditure and grow the business without the expenses of installing new systems.
53% of Australian companies using cloud computing services spend more than 10% of their total IT budget on cloud solutions or services, while 31% spend more than 20%. 70% of them will increase their cloud-based solutions budget significantly over the next 12 months. Larger organisations are generally spending much more on cloud computing than smaller ones.
"Cloud-based solutions enable organisations to focus on other aspects of operations by freeing up key resources previously dedicated to other IT services. Providing the flexibility to meet business demand via real-time /on-demand computing also rates highly" says Mayank Kapoor, Industry Analyst, Datacenter and Cloud Computing, APAC ICT Practice, Frost & Sullivan.
Most Australian organisations are now fully cloud deployed rather than in pilot phase. HRM and Unified Communications are the two slowest applications to move out of pilot phase. Storage & computing solutions has the highest rate of full deployment. With the exception of HRM, private cloud deployments are more widespread than both public and hybrid cloud deployments.
"Software as a Service (SaaS) is the most commonly used delivery model in the cloud. Apart from SaaS benefits over on-premise software such as lower upfront costs, ease of upgrade, seamless integration with in-house infrastructure, falling broadband prices, rising data cap limits and increasing enterprise mobility are all stimulating SaaS adoption" Kapoor elaborates.
Meanwhile, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), has seen a huge spurt in adoption in the last 12 to 24 months due to an increasing number of local market participants such as Melbourne IT, Cloud Central, Ninefold, BitCloud and Ultra Serve. Growth in local data centres also assists in alleviating customer concerns surrounding latency and data sovereignty.
Telecommunications service providers Telstra and Optus have also been aggressively positioning themselves in the cloud space by offering IaaS, SaaS and private cloud offerings. Managed service providers with local data centres in Australia such as Fujitsu have also secured large contracts particularly in the Financial Services and Public Sector verticals.
"E-mail and storage & computing resources are the two types of solutions that are currently most commonly accessed via the cloud amongst organisations" says Phil Harpur, Senior Research Manager, ANZ ICT Practice, Frost & Sullivan. "59% of Australian organisations that currently use cloud-based services and solutions, access them via the cloud. Others commonly accesses via the cloud are Office Productivity Applications, Web Security and Email Security" Harpur explained.
Companies such as Netsuite, Salesforce.com, SAP, Microsoft, and Google are some of the SaaS vendors with good growth in the Australian market. Telstra and Optus Alphawest are also starting to build SaaS offerings for its customers.
When selecting a cloud vendor, security is the most important criteria for companies. Reliability of services/support, hosting capabilities in Australia, company reputation and value added services are very important, as are price and ROI.
"NetSuite and Ninefold are the 2 highest rated cloud services vendors for local organisations and MNC's respectively" mentioned Harpur.
If you are interested in more information on this study, please send an e-mail with your contact details to Donna Jeremiah, Corporate Communications, at djeremiah@frost.com.
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