Strategic cloud thinking needed for Asia Pacific

cloud-based office productivity tools tussle, vendors such as Microsoft and Google will need to capture the majority of Asia Pacific's growing small and midsize business (SME) base as well as have a robust channel partner ecosystem to support their customers' deployment of the products, ZDNet Asia reports.

According to Daniel-Zoe Jimenez, programme manager of enterprise applications and business analytics at IDC Asia Pacific, the cloud computing market in Asia Pacific continues to develop rapidly, but cloud services are still "relatively new" to the region and are emerging as a component of one's enterprise IT portfolio.

Jimenez notes that the region comprises a “mosaic of cultures” and varying levels of software and cloud maturity, which can affect purchase decisions, Tech Wire Asia notes.

Given these, Microsoft and Google are taking different approaches in attracting their potential market. Google focuses on providing a 100% Web-based experience with its enterprise Google Apps offering, which is a “clean-slate approach based on entirely modern technologies designed for today's world”. Google Apps is the enterprise-grade online application suite offered by the search giant, which includes Gmail, Documents, Calendar, and likewise offers third-party application support.

On the other hand, Microsoft offers a mix of software as a service and on-premise offerings with Office 365, which enables the company to support existing IT infrastructure, which might include on-premise hardware, services and applications. This enables companies to go for staged and tiered adoption of cloud services, which can work hand-in-hand with existing implementations of enterprise Microsoft products like Exchange and Active Directory.

But it's not only the consumers that Google and Microsoft will need to worry about. With other strong competitors like Cisco, IBM, Zoho.com and even other local offerings, Google and Microsoft will have to beef up their channel partnerships. As such, both Google and Microsoft are making strategic partnerships with telecoms providers in the Asia Pacific region in order to improve their potential market for enterprise customers.