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NTT Communications is posed to retain its lead in the Asian telecom cloud market, according to data and analytics firm GlobalData.
This finding forms part of GlobalData’s ‘competitive landscape assessment - telco cloud services (Asia)’ report, which found that the technology integrator scored the highest overall score on four main categories, namely, cloud portfolio, data centre footprints, software-defined infrastructure and supplemental services.
“Cloud products offered by telcos are comparable in terms of technical capabilities and ecosystem partners,” said Alfie Amir, technology analyst at GlobalData.
“What differentiates NTT Communications from the rest is its wide footprint and presence in the region to address data residency and latency requirements, as well as its software-defined capabilities which offer better workload management and service orchestration.
“These advantages enable the provider to address the diverse needs of Asian enterprises. The integration with its sister companies also enables NTT Communications to enhance its system integration and service delivery capabilities, and therefore retain its lead in the market."
The report also cites Telstra and Orange Business Services as following closely behind NTT Communications, offering similar services but falling behind with their respective regional footprints.
The other three leading providers in the region mentioned in the report (BT, CenturyLink and Singtel) still have some gaps in their regional presence and supplemental services compared to the top three.
“The APAC cloud market is still growing fast as the market emerges, while the competition is getting more intense driven by the web-scale players,” said Amir.
“Telcos need to continue to leverage their network strengths and at the same time, include latest technologies such as self-service tools, analytics and AI in their offerings to gain competitive advantage.”
However, while the cloud is a mature technology the market itself is still evolving across APAC.
Furthermore, while major web-scale players such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Alibaba are continuously expanding their portfolio and presence in the region, carriers are playing to their strengths by offering integrated network and cloud services to grab the growing market opportunity.
On the flipside, other regional providers are catching up fast to close the gap.
For example, Telstra partnered with Equinix for direct access to other facilities globally, while Orange Business Services (OBS) partnered with Huawei for expansion in the region, especially in China.
The initiatives by telco cloud providers to add software defined capabilities, expand their footprints and enhance service capabilities are in-line with enterprises’ digital transformation directions.
Enterprises today are looking for cloud providers with extensive cloud portfolios, not just the traditional IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS, but also cloud-based IT services such as IoT platform, UCaaS, security and marketplace that offer various horizontal and vertical applications.
