Orange Business Services (OBS) has joined NTT Ltd as the co-leaders in the Asian telecom cloud market driven by its strong professional service capabilities combined with the continuous enhancements of its cloud portfolio and wide partner ecosystem, says GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company.

According to GlobalData’s recent report, ‘Telco Cloud Services (Asia) Competitive Landscape Assessment’, OBS and NTT were rated as the leaders based on their respective overall points. This is followed closely by BT and Telstra. The study rates six global carriers based on four main categories: (i) cloud portfolio, (ii) data center footprint, (iii) software-defined infrastructure, and (iv) supplemental services in the region.

The cloud market in Asia-Pacific is expected to grow from US$133bn in 2019 to US$288bn in 2024 at a CAGR of 16.8% (source: GlobalData Cloud Computing Market Opportunity Forecast, 2019 – 2024). While basic services such as IaaS, PaaS and SaaS are still the largest market driver, there is a growing demand for multi-cloud management, cloud-interconnect and convergence with network domain. This hits carriers’ sweet spots, driving them to strengthen their cloud portfolio to grab the growing opportunities.

Alfie Amir, Senior Analyst at GlobalData, comments: “While OBS and NTT Ltd have strong cloud portfolios, they have different strengths that set them apart from not only other carriers but also cloud providers including the hyperscalers. OBS differentiates with its professional services to help enterprises with their cloud journey. This is important in solution selling to address the growing consulting-led engagements today. NTT Ltd has an unmatched data center footprints across the region which are crucial assets to support the increasing edge computing demand.

“However, other providers are catching up fast to close the gap. For example, BT’s recent launch new Cloud Security as part of its new Security Advisory Services; Telstra’s partnership with Equinix to offer its customers on-demand multi-cloud connectivity to over 170 cloud providers in 38 markets globally; CenturyLink’s strengthened professional services through partnerships with IBM and Microsoft; and Singtel’s Network Intelligence-as-a-Service that offers deeper visibility across cloud and network domains.”

There is a huge demand in the region especially in the emerging Asian markets such as ASEAN where the adoption is still low. This is also fuelled by the increasing demand to cater for the urgent need for remote working as the results of Covid-19. As the competition increases, some telcos are playing to their strength to differentiate in the market. Besides the basic cloud services (e.g., IaaS, PaaS, SaaS), combined capabilities of software-defined infrastructure, wide exchange partners, professional services, and cloud management platform; offers telcos a competitive edge to address the growing multi-cloud demand.

There is also demand for cloud computing at the edge driven by ultra-low latency applications such as autonomous vehicles. 5G will be one of the key enablers in edge computing through the multi-access edge computing (MEC), network slicing, and private network. The ecosystem is still fragmented but is shaping up driven by the collaboration between carriers and other players such as AWS Wavelength, Azure Edge Zones, and Google Anthos for Telecom. There is also a GSMA-supported initiative by several Europan and Asian telcos to co-develop interoperable edge-computing platform.

Amir concludes: “The Asia Pacific cloud market is growing fast with the trend shifting from basic IaaS, PaaS and SaaS to value-added services. As competition increases, telcos are playing to their strength to differentiate in the market, by leveraging the network advantage to address the current multi-cloud demand and start building out edge computing capabilities.”