The emergence of a value-based economy under the Thailand 4.0 initiative is enhancing the local cloud computing market as it enters another year of expected double-digit growth.
IDC Thailand, the local operating unit of global IT research firm IDC, reports that Thailand's IT infrastructure spending grew by 3.9% to 400 billion baht in 2016 and is forecast to reach 500 billion in 2020.
The local cloud market, meanwhile, grew by 16% last year, with an undisclosed market value.
"This year will see the local cloud market grow stronger than the past several years," said Natasak Rodjanapiches, managing director for Thailand and Myanmar at Oracle Thailand, the local operating unit of the US software giant.
Cloud services will demonstrate robust growth over the next few years, with the biggest acceleration coming from infrastructure as a service (IaaS), he said.
Cloud adoption continues to accelerate in Thailand as organisations move down the path towards digital transformation and increasingly shift away from legacy IT services to cloud-based services, the penetration of cloud adoption in Thailand remains low, standing at 16% last year.
Cloud is widely used in several sectors ranging from retail, finance and banking, food, trading, manufacturing, and telecommunications.
In the second quarter of the fiscal year ending November 2016, Oracle reported global revenue from cloud products and services at $1 billion, an increase of 62%.
Oracle Thailand also saw spectacular growth in cloud service revenues last year, thanks to the digital transformation, Mr Natasak said.
"We expect several consecutive years of robust growth in our cloud revenue," he said.
Mr Natasak said cloud adoption in medium-sized businesses grew at an even stronger rate, as they realised the advantage of the cloud technology in helping them optimise legacy IT, adapt capacity, improve resiliency and reduce costs.
Despite accelerating cloud adoption, Mr Natasak acknowledged that many companies are still concerned over data loss and privacy as their biggest security challenges when considering adopting cloud technology.
Chris Chelliah, Oracle Asia Pacific's group vice-president and chief architect for cloud, said a lack of standard cloud platforms and lack of clear-cut paths or journeys to the cloud are key barriers to cloud adoption.
To resolve these challenges, Oracle provides an integrated cloud computing platform service under a pay-as-you-go model to help organisations drive innovation and business transformation by increasing business agility, lowering costs and reducing IT complexity.