Sandeep Bhargava
Managing Director, Asia Pacific and Japan,
Rackspace Technology
Asia’s strong post-pandemic recovery has largely been driven by an acceleration in digital transformation. Forrester expects the Asia Pacific technology market to grow by 6.2 percent this year, reaching US$675 billion. The research firm predicts software sales to lead the way in the region, expanding 9.2 percent.
Meanwhile, IDC forecasts that 30 percent of revenues for a third of companies in the region will generate from digital products and services, compared to one in five in 2020. It also projects that over half of organisations in the Asia Pacific will prioritise network resilience by year-end. These forecasts come on the back of continued investment from hyperscale computing operators amid accelerated cloud adoption in the Asia Pacific.
With organisations in the region trending towards a multicloud strategy, simplifying operations and processes are crucial to improving digital engagement with customers, employees and partners. For Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), this is an opportunity for aggressive growth. The market is expected to be competitive, and to participate in this growth, ISVs need to be agile, resilient and accelerate their time to market in delivering solutions to customers.
In this hypercompetitive growth market, ISVs looking to accelerate their innovations and speed up their time to market will do well to look at transforming from traditional on-premises vendors to cloud-native development and production environment. This approach not only accelerates time to value but helps overcome critical bottlenecks in the journey, moving software vendor businesses towards higher business efficiency, advanced innovation and cost-effectiveness.
In addition, software firms in the region can scale much faster than legacy on-premises enterprises to engage global customers with minimal uptime and resources. The benefits extend beyond just being time-effective, as it offers greater flexibility and delivers a significantly higher quality of service at the lowest possible costs.
The business benefits of migrating to the cloud
The right cloud strategy derives more value from technology ecosystems, data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI), enabling ISVs to benefit from increased functional flexibility and shortening the time to market. By running essential applications on the cloud, ISVs benefit from diverse capacities, including lean cost management of underlying compute, network and storage to maximise returns on investment by increasing savings for customers.
Navigating operational challenges and an efficient IT environment with the power of cloud adoption facilitates integration, delivering the scalability and flexibility to enhance user experience. Elastic, scalable models such as ‘pay as you grow’ and an increased global data centre presence with comprehensive ground support equip ISV businesses with the much-needed confidence to make the shift to the cloud.
Leveraging the value of a multicloud infrastructure is critical for efficient digital operations and businesses must identify the most effective and secure method of migrating to the cloud as they look to lay the foundations for increased agility and resilience.
Simplifying the cloud-migration journey for ISVs
While managing the software vendor’s cloud migration transition effectively can seem daunting and complex at first, the critical steps include scaling with ease, mitigating common risks and accelerating investment returns. By rethinking traditional support models and broadening horizons, software companies can break barriers and explore new possibilities and partnerships in a competitive landscape.
Modern cloud architectures enable the successful shift of complete end-to-end processes for an ISV by categorising and prioritising existing applications and workloads. An in-depth assessment of the current infrastructure and network systems helps determine the right cloud platforms to align with core business objectives and superior security requirements. By assessing and predicting future cloud consumption well in advance, businesses can reduce IT costs, plan capacity and budget management, while consistently generating revenue.
Driving agility and differentiation
A reliable cloud platform that enhances operational intelligence with the power of real-time data insights offers ISVs more agility to plan schedules strategically, thereby making it an empowering business edge that was once limited to third-party software and on-premises solutions. By moving into the cloud, independent software businesses can unlock capabilities needed to perform complex permutations, enable effective knowledge sharing at various levels and work across multiple parallel workloads within dynamic timelines.
Expert cloud solutions not only equip ISVs to achieve more for their customers with serverless application capabilities but also assist in onboarding new customers comprehensively with lower entry barriers and expansion into markets with easy deployment.
As the global economy recovers, the greater adoption of digital operational models will generate further growth through investments in the region. Digital deployments and infrastructure will grow significantly, including Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).
A robust, flexible and elastic cloud infrastructure will not only enable software vendors to stay competitive, accelerate innovation and optimise capital costs and investments but also ensure faster deployment times and reduced friction with partners. Therefore, ISVs in Asia have an incredible opportunity to realise significant cost and operational efficiencies while addressing core infrastructural and growth challenges to build a more secure and mutually beneficial customer-centric ecosystem.