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.
“A lot of enterprises want to test what can be done on the cloud,” said Bryan. “So they try, say, Amazon. After a while, they realize that they like it but there are key pieces missing. And there’s where Savvis can come in.”
Bryan believes that one big unique difference is their robust approach to security, which “is something you cannot get from other cloud vendors”.
According to him, security was baked into their cloud architecture from the very beginning: Virtualization security policy management, segmentation of VLANs, physical perimeter firewalls, IPS/IDS appliances, and URL filtering are just some examples.
A second key point is performance. In a series of CPU and I/O benchmarks that Savvis ran on their cloud vs. other competitors, Savvis claims to have come up tops.
Thus, Savvis is fairly certain they have a good solution that makes them stand out amongst their competitors. Together with their strong roots in the finance space and tie-up with Thompson Reuters, and existing contracts with US MNCs, Savvis believes it has a good position in the cloud vendor war.
Remarked Savvis’ Asia managing director Mark Smith on their tie-up with telco Bharti in India, which is whitelabeling their solutions and pushing it to about 2,000 enterprises in the region: “We’re pleasantly surprised by the strength of the sales pipeline.”
Savvis’ VPDC centre in Tai Seng, Singapore, will launch next month and will go fully live by July 2011.
