SINGAPORE--Companies in Asia-Pacific are reluctant to adopt cloud computing as they perceive implementations as complex and costly, so Hewlett-Packard (HP) is looking to encourage businesses by providing them with pre-bundled kits to get them started.
Speaking at a media briefing here Tuesday, Jason Tan, director and general manager of cloud and presales for Southeast Asia at HP's enterprise group, said companies in the region fear implementing cloud computing because it has been presented as a complex, long-drawn process.
As such, Tan believes for greater cloud uptake, the way to go is via incremental steps that "encourage" companies to use these services and not hold out hope for a full-scale, "big bang" approach.
Brad Parks, worldwide converged infrastructure strategist at HP Storage, added during the same briefing that it wasn't that companies worry about "doing it wrong" once they embark on cloud services. Rather, they are already intimidated by the complexity of such implementations before they even start.
This is because the consequences of cloud deployments are similar to what happened to the early adopters of server virtualization--companies took longer than was originally planned to deploy, which cost a lot more money that was budgeted for, Parks pointed out. For example, if the company had legacy storage, as much as 70 percent of its capacity would go to waste since it is not optimized for cloud computing in the first place, he said.
For application development, in particular, cloud computing is meant to accelerate the time-to-market, he noted. "[So] if your cloud project is slow and expensive, it becomes the opposite of why you [adopted cloud] in the first place," he said.
Prepackaged for easy deployment
These fears, both real and perceived, among Asian businesses are what the IT vendor wants to tackle with its pre-configured product bundles. These starter kits target specific IT needs and enable faster and easier cloud deployments, after which companies can then decide to scale their implementations accordingly, Parks noted.
For instance, the HP CloudSystem Quick Start Kit is a pre-configured cloud infrastructure pack that customers can just "plug in and turn on", instead of buying individual components from either HP or other vendors and spending time and resources to set everything up, the strategist said.
Another offering, HP Cloud Maps, provides templates of underlying cloud architecture which are optimized for various types of applications such as CRM (customer relationship management) or ERP (enterprise resource planning). This is to cut down the back-and-forth meetings between customers and software vendors during the consulting, design and implementation stages, he explained.
By packaging all the necessary components for cloud deployment in a way that businesses can consume easily takes both the guesswork and barriers out of the adoption equation, and appeals to customers regardless of where they stand in the cloud maturity curve, Parks said.
Tan added that such offerings are appealing to companies that are interested in the "buy, fix, and run" model with minimal fuss.