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Tata Comms launches cloud platform in S'pore

Telecoms player expands its infrastructure-as-a-service platform to Singapore and Southeast Asia, and targets to churn US$250 million in overall cloud services revenue over three years.
Written by Liau Yun Qing, Contributor

SINGAPORE--Tata Communications has launched its infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud offering in Singapore, and is targeting to derive US$250 million in revenue from cloud services over the next three years.

Singapore is the second country after India, the telecoms player's home market, to offer InstaCompute, David Wirt, Tata Communications' global head of managed services and senior vice president, said at a briefing here Tuesday. Driven out of its local data center Tata Communications Exchange (TCX), the cloud service will also cater to neighboring markets such as Malaysia, Hong Kong, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines.

According to Wirt, Tata Communications has identified a market opportunity in cloud offerings and expects such services to bring in US$250 million in revenue over the next three years.

"We're betting Tata Communications on the cloud," he said. "We really believe that telecommunications service providers have an advantage in this market."

Carriers, noted Wirt, have the advantage over non-carrier cloud providers as network latency is not an issue. He added that even traditional cloud providers are buying wholesale connectivity from Tata Communications as they understand that the network is the enabler for cloud.

Wirt said a competitive differentiator of InstaCompute is its Web management portal which allows companies to easily govern their cloud initiatives. Administrators are able to establish different projects and set a threshold for each user based on the budget allocated to the project, he said. The system can automatically send out alerts that a user is reaching an assigned threshold or even turn off the account to prevent overspending.

The executive did not name Amazon Web Services as a competitor in the region, but admitted Tata Communications uses AWS as a benchmark.

According to Wirt, after InstaCompute was launched in India, 55 to 60 percent of InstaCompute customers are from India, while the majority of clientele outside of India hail from the United States and Singapore.

Vinod Kumar, managing director and CEO of Tata Communications, noted that InstaCompute is targeted at companies of all sizes. Kumar said small and midsize businesses will likely run all applications on the platform while large enterprises will use it for non-mission critical apps or as a sandbox for testing applications.

During the briefing, Aroon Tan, managing director of Magma Studios, shared his experience hosting the company's latest massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORG) on the InstaCompute platform. He said the move to cloud computing eliminated the need to guess the rate of business growth in order to purchase physical servers, as now virtual machines can be turned on when needed.

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