Below are a few slides that capture some of the interesting tidbits discussed at Cloud Asia 2011.

• Asia Pacific (excluding Japan) will grow at 40% CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) over the next 3 years in Cloud services to $5B by 2014.
• Most Operator’s role in cloud remains unclear
  • Focused on the importance of end-to-end SLAs (Service Level Agreements) as differentiating their cloud proposition, while most enterprises today take 2 SLAs from the cloud provider and their VPN provide
  • The Cloud broker role remains unclear for telcos, as they lack store front expertise nor IT expertise (except large global telcos, e.g. NTTdata)
• The Cloud Revolution was claimed by many.  But always worry when a marketing person claims a revolution!
  • Core message on cloud appears to be: Cost, Reliability, Agility
  • Cost remains the primary driver: sweating the existing data center asset, or taking advantage of the 5-7 times lower cost of operations of a public data center.
  • However, the other 2 steps: reliability given the many recent cloud failures and agility (term used for why an enterprise should implement SOA and business transformation projects in the past) are proving harder for most enterprises to swallow.
• Many national cloud initiatives are popping up, with unclear objectives and success measures
  • Given scale is the core driver, will only global providers be successful.  In telco does that mean only the global operators like Verizon Business, AT&T Global, Orange Business Services and BT Global Services?
• IT competence matters, in delivering cloud technology an industry specific solution is the key to success as demonstrated by most IT companies, e.g. IBM, Accenture, Oracle, etc.
• Lock-in remains the focus of both public cloud service providers and cloud technology providers
  • Keep an eye on Openstack as a way to break this lock-in
• Korea Telecom gave an excellent presentation showing a different way for telco success in cloud services
  • Built it themselves using  Openstack
  • Used commodity off the shelf hardware
  • Ate their own dog food, in using the data center for their own needs to drive national scale
  • Achieved a price point 70% of AWS – quite unique for a telco
  • However, the issue of IT credibility remains, perhaps a channel strategy through local SIs can address that gap