Sandeep Bhargava (Rackspace)
Rackspace has unveiled plans to achieve double digit growth within Asia Pacific during 2020, underpinned by an increase in cloud migration projects.
The specialist provider - serving both customer and partner markets - is prioritising the delivery of legacy IT infrastructure support in a move designed to trigger customer adoption of cloud through professional and managed services.
Such a go-to-market strategy has been shaped by 12 months of hybrid cloud enhancements, including up-skilling on VMware Cloud on AWS, Kubernetes and container-enabled services. This is in addition to added expertise in cloud-native support leveraging reliability engineering, managed security services and application and data integration.
“With these hybrid cloud advancements, we plan to improve how we support customers with legacy IT infrastructure,” said Sandeep Bhargava, managing director of Asia Pacific Japan (APJ) at Rackspace. “These capabilities provide customers access to a broad set of advanced services to facilitate consistent deployment and management of applications on hybrid architectures."
Rackspace also plans to leverage the recent acquisition of Onica in late 2019 - an AWS approved Partner Network (APN) Premier Consulting Partner and Managed Service Provider - to strengthen professional and managed services offerings.
“Organisations need the confidence to know they are getting the maximum value from their cloud investments, and minimising risk, while accelerating their transformations,” added Bhargava, when speaking to Channel Asia. “No matter where businesses are on their digital transformation journey, Rackspace promises to accelerate the value of the cloud for them.
“We have the necessary tools to help companies implement and integrate leading applications, deploy these applications on the optimal cloud platform and ensure its security and compliance.”
Asian ambitions
Despite the disruption of Covid-19, Bhargava said plans are underway to double the size of Singapore operations amid wider regional growth plans.
“Businesses in Asia Pacific, especially in Singapore, are adopting digital transformation in earnest,” he said. “It's rapidly evolving and impacts every part of a business, requiring organisations to embrace modern mindsets and adopt new business models. Organisations must also manage increasingly complex IT environments with tight IT budgets, talent shortages, and fast-changing market demands."
Citing Singapore as an example, Bhargava said the development of a low-latency, high bandwidth 5G network in the city-state will enable distant sensors to share updates about connected devices instantly, enabling real-time processing and data insights.
“This is also driving demand for edge computing, as data can be immediately processed near where the data is generated, rather than a centralised data processing warehouse, and can help to reduce operational costs,” he said.
According to IDC, over 65 per cent of enterprises in Asia Pacific will use multiple cloud providers by 2021. The transition to multi-cloud will also prompt an increase in investments to manage resources across platforms, with cloud market revenue is estimated to reach US$40.32 billion by 2025 in Southeast Asia alone.
“As businesses innovate to stay ahead, digital disruption will require all organisations to be more agile with multi-cloud becoming the preferred IT foundation for more organisations,” Bhargava added. “Companies in Asia Pacific are also looking at cost optimisation as a driving force towards cloud adoption.
“The cloud enables companies to leverage the power and performance of enterprise-grade IT infrastructure without having to incur the capital expenditure of managing and maintaining their own hardware. The pay-as-you-go model also enables organisations to manage costs.”
In contrast however, Bhargava acknowledged that key challenges still remain which continue to hinder transformation progress for organisations across the region.
“These challenges are around integrating complex legacy applications and infrastructure with the latest technologies when migrating to the cloud, managing hybrid and multi-cloud environments and assembling the right resources to fulfil digitalisation and transformation commitments,” he outlined.
In response, Rackspace recently worked with consumer electronics retailer Challenger in Singapore to automate and scale IT infrastructure, cutting lead times for automating and scaling infrastructure from 6-8 weeks down to 1-2 days.
“Rapidly evolving market expectations, and the need to transform operations into a true online-to-offline model were key issues the company needed to solve,” Bhargava explained. “This meant moving core operational systems, including point-of-sale, ERP and online marketplace onto the cloud. This has also allowed the company to enhance data security and compliance."
In looking ahead, Bhargava said leading providers can no longer rely on a strong value proposition, with such a proposition now expected to be endorsed by customised and quality support.
“Many hosting companies are focused on the technology side so Rackspace has created Fanatical Support to combine the power of proactive, always-on service and expertise with best-in-class tools and automation to ensure that customers can use technology the way they need it,” he added.
Channel Asia Advance is a centralised editorial resource designed to help partners access forward-looking content as the ASEAN and Indian markets attempt to reposition for growth.
