Red Hat Inc, the world's largest pure-play open-source software company, is ramping up its cloud-based subscription service in Asean to capitalise on the rapid adoption of cloud computing in the region.
Its new cloud service is aimed at competing directly with Microsoft's cloud platform and provide another alternative for enterprises, said Damien Wong, senior director and general manager of Red Hat Asean.
He said businesses were increasingly switching to cloud-based IT services as they saw the benefits of moving to the cloud such as greater flexibility, improved service delivery and lower upfront investment cost in an IT network.
Red Hat is focusing on open hybrid cloud technologies that enable businesses becoming more agile, competitive and effective, Mr Wong said.
The traditional infrastructure set-up process takes around 72 hours for deployment, but cloud requires only a minute for installation, increasing application time to market with faster integration of new services.
To chase the rapid growth of the cloud, Mr Wong said Red Hat had appointed Rhipe Technology as its first cloud service distributor in Asean covering Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand. Target customers are financial institutions, telecommunications firms, airlines and the public sector.
Red Hat released global earnings for the third quarter of fiscal year 2014 ending in November, and application and emerging technology businesses including cloud grew 45% from last year. The group's server operating system service rose by 11%.
Kasem Pornanarat, country manager of Rhipe Technology (Thailand), an Australian-based cloud distributor, said the company expected to obtain two to three of Red Hat's certified cloud providers in Thailand this year, including True IDC.
Thai companies have mostly adopted the private cloud — a cloud infrastructure operated for a single organisation and managed internally or by a third-party.
Other developed countries like Australia use the hybrid cloud for up to 70-80% of operations. Hybrid cloud is a composition of two or more clouds (private, community or public) that remain distinct entities but are bound together, offering the benefits of multiple deployment mode.
Mr Kasem said Thailand has only 40,000 square metres of data centre space operated by seven to eight companies, compared with over 140,000 square metres in Malaysia.