Tim Synan (Google Cloud)
A deepened alliance with SAP has been cited as a leading factor in increased Google Cloud adoption in Southeast Asia, with global system integrators (GSIs) leading the charge.
That’s the view of Tim Synan - regional director of Southeast Asia at Google Cloud - when assessing the technology giant’s market credentials across the region.
“We’re excited about the work we’re doing with SAP in Southeast Asia,” said Synan, speaking to Channel Asia ahead of Google Cloud Summit in Singapore. “Particularly, we’re seeing large GSIs such as Accenture and Deloitte report significant, multi-year wins through SAP and Google Cloud.
“These wins include manufacturers in Thailand and Indonesia, organisations in Malaysia and a recent win in Singapore.”
Whether shifting SAP applications to the cloud, integrating machine learning into business processes or enhancing enterprise data capabilities, SAP applications and SAP HANA are certified to run on Google Cloud.
Key SAP products include Hana, S/4 Hana, BW/4 Hana and Business Suite, in addition to Hybris, Business Warehouse, BusinessObjects BI and Business One among others.
According to Synan, the expanded partnership with the software vendor has kick-started a wave of Google Cloud deployments in Southeast Asia, driven by specialised partners such as Accenture and Deloitte.
“To be transparent, this adoption wasn’t really happening to the extent it is now 24 months ago,” he acknowledged. “A lot of the investments we have made in terms of infrastructure, product innovations and our go-to-market strategy - which started under Diane Greene - has been executed well.
“With Thomas Kurian, this has now allowed us to make further inroads into the enterprise market.”
Kurian was appointed in November 2018, succeeding Greene as the CEO of Google Cloud, in a bid to increase credibility at enterprise level.
“We’re starting to see an acceleration of our enterprise business across Southeast Asia, given some of the changes we’ve made in terms of our go-to-market orientation,” Synan added.
Google Cloud - which is rumoured to be eyeing up a bid for Nutanix - goes to market across six core verticals, spanning finance services and insurance; retail; communications, media and entertainment (including telecommunications and service providers); manufacturing and logistics; public sector and healthcare.
“We’ve also segmented our customers in different ways, through enterprise and non-enterprise,” Synan explained. “Our entire team is focused on these verticals across Southeast Asia.
“As a result of our innovation from a product perspective - such as Anthos for example - we’re seeing wins in telecommunications, banking and e-commerce. They are leveraging Anthos as part of their multi-cloud and hybrid cloud strategies.”
As reported by Channel Asia, Google Cloud announced the general availability of Anthos in April 2019, a platform that allows customers to run applications on-premise, in the Google Cloud and, crucially, with other major public cloud providers such as Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services.
Speaking at the time during Google Cloud Next in San Francisco, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced that the idea behind Anthos is to "write once and run anywhere”.
“It gives you the flexibility to move on-prem apps to the cloud when you are ready, and it allows you to keep using the technologies you are already using, while improving security," he said.
"Today most of the world's enterprise computing still happens on-premise. It hasn't moved to the cloud yet because the path forward is complex and daunting, full of difficult decisions.”
Impact of cloud
According to Boston Consulting Group (BCG) findings, public cloud deployments are expected to have a “significant economic impact” on the key markets of Australia, India, Indonesia, Japan, Singapore and South Korea during the next five years.
The study - commissioned by Google Cloud and involving more than 1000 IT decision makers in Asia Pacific - expects public cloud to impact around US$450 billion cumulatively between 2019 and 2023 across the six markets.
Within this, business efficiencies and growth generated through increased deployment is forecast to help in the creation of nearly 425,000 direct jobs, alongside impacting another 1.2 million jobs indirectly during the period.
Specific to Singapore, public cloud deployment can contribute roughly $30 billion to the country’s GDP, which is the equivalent of 1.7 per cent of the national GDP annually.
The city-state is also forecast to see the creation of nearly 22,000 jobs - and impact another 21,000 jobs through second order effects - through the deployment of public cloud.
Of the 22,000 direct jobs, the study stated that around 8000 will be in digital and technology-related roles such as data scientists, product managers, engineering, design, user experience and infrastructure management jobs with cloud service providers, IT service providers and across industry verticals. This is close to 3.5 per cent of the country’s current ICT workforce.
According to findings, another 14,000 direct roles will be related to core business functions (marketing, finance, operations etc) across industry verticals in Singapore.
