The cloud infrastructure market in Singapore and the Asia Pacific region is heating up.

Savvis, a primarily US-based IT-services company that is looking to aggressively expand in Asia Pacific, is set to launch their virtual private data centre solution (VPDC) next month here in Singapore.

In a regional Asia Pacific market crowded with cloud infrastructure players — like new player Tata, commodity cloud incumbent Amazon, and IT behemoth IBM out of several others — what makes Savvis’ new Symphony VPDC play stand out?

Bryan Doerr, CTO of Savvis, pointed out two key points at the Asia Pacific Savvis Symphony VPDC media press luncheon this week: Security, and performance.

Savvis’ target audience is the enterprise customer, which Bryan defines as corporations who make “revenues of 200 million and upwards”. In other words, players like Amazon and Tata are not really full-on competitors, as their solutions attract the SMB and mid-sized crowd.

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With the cloud computing paradigm showing no signs of stopping, big IT vendors like HP, IBM and Oracle are clamoring to provide lucrative end-to-end cloud computing solutions for enterprise customers.

The one who wins these big solutions are often the ones with the best customer relationships and partner ecosystems. For HP in Singapore, they are setting their sights on three industries: digital media, government and finance.

So said Kelly Tan, vice president and managing director at HP Singapore, at last Friday’s HP cloud strategy sharing session with the Singapore media.

Piggybacking on their strong channels in these verticals, HP is going to target these industries with AP4SaaS, a cloud platform that is new to Singapore. AP4SaaS is a cloud platform where enterprise customers can share their ecosystems with other similar enterprises in the same verticals globally.

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Oracle became the latest major IT vendor to tap into the red-hot enterprise cloud computing market today when it unveiled its Exalogic Elastic Cloud today at its annual Oracle Openworld technology confab.

Targeted at large companies who wish to build their own “private clouds“, Exalogic is touted as a “compute cloud-in-a-box” product that includes a combination of servers, storage and networking components melded into a single machine.

“It includes all the hardware you need to run your applications, including 30 servers, infiniband networking that lets servers talk to one another and a high availability storage device,” Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said at the show’s opening keynote today. “It also has all the middleware you need to develop and run all your applications.”

Essentially, what Oracle has done is to make it easier for enterprises to set up virtualised data centres where IT resources can be dynamically deployed based on business needs with the help of virtualization technology. Oracle is employing Java VM in Exalogic, where applications can run on Linux or Solaris virtual machines.

The usual cloud computing characteristics apply to Exalogic: dynamic load balancing, failover using Oracle Coherence and the ability to add, remove or migrate virtual machines on the fly.

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Every good story needs a hero and a villain.

In Salesforce.com’s case, that villain is Microsoft, who is the poster boy for enterprise software.

Or so that is the narrative that Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff wanted to keep forefront and centre during his excellent presentation at the Cloudforce Tour 2 event in Singapore today.

It is a story of how traditional on-premise software behemoths — e.g. Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, IBM — are going to have their lunch eaten by nimbler Internet companies who started from the cloud, i.e. the Salesforce.coms, Amazons and Googles of this world.

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Look into the world’s tech crystal ball and you’ll see only clouds. Even with my limited divination skills, this trend isn’t hard to spot.

For the past year or so, many tech vendors — e.g. IBM, Microsoft, Oracle — are jumping on and touting clouds as the next big thing. Now Cisco is taking up the banner charge and announcing their strategy and intent to attack this space.

At a telepresence media/analyst session held yesterday at Cisco offices in Asia and US, Cisco’s CTO Padmasree Warrior and senior VP of the software group Doug Dennerline fielded questions on Cisco’s push into clouds.

Firstly, definitions. The over-hyped, fuzzy phrase “clouds” can mean wildly different things to different people, and I have gone off on rants before on what exactly do you mean when you talk about clouds. At least Cisco defined what exactly cloud computing means to them, and here’s their verbatim definition:

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The tech industry is full of jargon junkies. We invent acronyms, come up with complex-sounding terms that are little more than airbrushed revamps of existing concepts. Scarcely had the latest “in” buzzword exited the scene gracefully, we then rush to foist the industry with yet another acronym that essentially means the same thing.

Utility computing? Nope, not in vogue any more. On demand software? Not as sexy as the acronym SaaS (service as a software), retired. The current iteration and poster child is cloud computing, in which all your IT problems are automagically solved by pulling “stuff” out of the cloud.

Major rant: if I hear one more “out of the cloud” reference tossed about casually I’m going to flip. If you mean services over the internet, please say so lah!

Now, cloud computing is an ok and even useful term, if you strictly define what it means. To this cantankerous curmudgeon, as I understand it, it is:

• an external platform of some sort, often hosted by a third party provider
• provides some sort of software as a service (SaaS) over the Internet
• purchase of said SaaS is likely by usage or subscription rather than in a licensing model

The problem is, popular jargon tends to be abused out of all context, which neuters the value of coining the buzzword in the first place.

Take for example VMWare, who invited me for their launch of their VSphere4 yesterday.

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Cloud computing and social media are big themes this year.

Every major software vendor – from Microsoft to Google – is talking it up and jumping on the bandwagon. IBM Lotus just unveiled LotusLive Monday 19th Jan at this year’s Lotusphere 2009 in Orlando, Florida.

Basically, it’s a cloud-based social network platform hosted by IBM and sold as SaaS (software as a service). It extends to the extranet Lotus capabilities (which were mostly intranet focused) and is a reaction to the trends that applications are going online and social.

My first impression from an end user perspective is that it is a sort of a Facebook for business use. From a business perspective, it is an enterprise set of extranet tools that ties in with backend Lotus systems.

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