Alfie Amir is a senior analyst in Current Analysis Group. He is responsible for research, consulting and analysis focusing on market and technology trends, competitive analysis and account-based intelligence for ICT spending and modeling future investments. He also works across several trackers (e.g., fixed, mobile and IT) providing market sizing, forecasts and insights across the region. Alfie is quoted regularly in trade press and is a regular speaker at conferences, workshops and other industry events.
1. Maxis Launched Right Cloud: Maxis stepped up its cloud play with the launch of Right Cloud. Moving from the basic cloud service (IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS) player, Maxis Right Cloud offers multicloud solutions that manage workload across multiple environments. Further, it also offers Right Network, integrating its cloud with network services, and Right Expertise, for cloud professional services.
• Sustainability is becoming increasingly important and should be part of enterprise ICT solution propositions.
• The TPM innovation hub will drive the enterprise 5G ecosystem and development in the country.
The Malaysian government announced the country budget for 2022 last week, allocating MYR332 billion ($80 billion) on operating and development expenditure as well as the COVID-19 Fund. The theme of the budget is mainly around economic recovery from the pandemic and there are also various initiatives in the overall ICT industry such as connectivity expansion in underserved areas, more funds for startups, and additional digital adoption grants for enterprises. However, sustainability and 5G ecosystem are rather new and would have higher impacts on the domestic enterprise ICT market.
Sustainability and Environmental
Initiatives: The government announced several initiatives such as the Voluntary Carbon Market to facilitate carbon credit trading and the Low Carbon Transition Facility to drive enterprises to adopt sustainability practices.
• A sustainable smart city should consider the deployment goals, but also the underlying infrastructure.
• PLDT checks most boxes in the infrastructure and technology layers as well as in the other ICT domains but it could consider further expanding its capabilities in the professional services and partner ecosystem.
PLDT’s Sustainable Smart City Initiatives
In the Philippine Digital Convention (Digicon) 2021, PLDT shared its initiatives and capabilities in driving sustainable smart city adoption and helping industries to achieve goals in the sustainability three pillars: economic, environmental, and social. On the application layer, PLDT offers a range of smart city solutions across verticals in line with the sustainable smart city goals. This includes remote learning in education, COVID response in healthcare, and emergency response in public safety. As an ICT provider, PLDT also continues to build the underlying infrastructure to enhance existing applications and enable new sustainable smart city solutions. It has 15 subsea cables including Jupiter, Asia Direct, and Apricot, and 12 point-of-presence (PoPs) across the world to offer reliable global interconnections. Domestically, it has over 540,000km of fiber providing high-speed connectivity nationwide as well as more than 4,000 5G base stations covering major Philippines cities. Besides connectivity, PLDT has 10 interconnected data centers that deliver 9,000 racks and 27 MW of power to host enterprises applications and workloads. Further, in line with its sustainability agenda, it is working to achieve 1.4 power usage effectiveness (PUE) for its facilities, source at least 20% of its data centers’ power consumption from renewable energy, and obtain Leadership in Energy and Environment Design (LEED) and ISO 50001 certifications.
The domestic competitions across ASEAN are heating up as providers are moving from network deployment to the solution development stage.
Leading providers are starting to commercialize their edge computing services and gain a first-mover advantage.
The enterprise 5G market in ASEAN is moving from network deployment to the solution development stage, led by early adopters such as the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand. Most telcos in these countries such as Globe, PLDT, M1, Singtel, Starhub, and AIS have enabled 5G standalone (SA) networks to support a wider range of enterprises applications through edge integration, lower latency, and network slicing. The competition at the country level is also heating up, as providers are beginning to commercialize the solutions they have been developing through industry collaborations. This includes Singtel’s edge computing and AIS’ 5G smart manufacturing solutions. Service providers are also expanding their collaboration initiatives with enterprises from across verticals and are expected to launch more applications in the market in the near term. AIS and Globe are Singtel’s associates; hence, the three providers could also gain an advantage in 5G solution development in their respective markets through knowledge and partner sharing. Continue reading “ASEAN 5G Q3 2021 Roundup: Competition Heats Up”→
Service providers are picking up their pace again in developing 5G capabilities.
Solution co-creation is key not just in building solution capabilities but also in driving brand share.
Early Pace of 5G in Malaysia
Malaysia had an early start with 5G. The race between service providers began in mid-2019 when Celcom launched the country’s first live 5G cluster trial that enabled various use cases across multiple verticals (for more, please see “Celcom Leads the 5G Race in Malaysia with 5G Live Cluster Field Trial,” July 29, 2019). This was only a few months after the launch of the very first commercial 5G network in the world. Not long after that, Maxis announced a partnership with Huawei to deploy 5G and develop use cases, Digi partnered with Cyberview on the 5G OpenLab to co-create 5G smart city applications, and TM shared its plan to be the first provider to offer 5G standalone (SA) network. The government, MCMC, also played key roles in driving the technology development in the country. It established a 5G task force in December 2018, hosted a 5G event in April 2019, collaborated with telcos and other industry players to launch 55 use cases across 32 locations (5GDP), and planned for commercial availability of the technology in the first half of 2020 (for more, please see “5G Enterprise in Malaysia: Strong Push by the Government Despite Low Market Maturity,” October 17, 2019). It was ahead of many other countries in the region. Continue reading “5G War Begins Again in Malaysia as Launch Nears”→
Awareness and adoption of enterprise analytics are still low in ASEAN.
There is a strong outlook in the near to midterm driven by digital transformation.
Low Awareness and Adoption
A GlobalData study with 158 ICT decision-makers in ASEAN shows very low awareness and adoption around analytics in the region. The study reveals that only 23% of enterprises see analytics as very important criteria when considering new IoT solutions, 22% in cloud, 18% in unified communications, and 17% in cybersecurity. Analytics was also among the least important criteria for respective solutions. This shows that while most enterprises understand the general benefits of analytics (e.g., turning data into insights), many are still unable to relate analytics to their business objectives. Continue reading “Analytics in ASEAN: Low Awareness and Adoption, but Bright Outlook”→
Major ASEAN telcos are considering selling their data center business.
As the demand is shifting, telcos should consider reassessing their data center business strategy.
In the last few days, three major ASEAN telcos – PLDT, Globe, and Indosat – were reported to be mulling over their data center businesses, worth around $500 million (USD), $200 million, and $200 million, respectively.
Not a New Trend, but Has Been Happening for Years
Having telcos exit the data center market is not new: Verizon sold its 29 data centers in the America region to Equinix in 2016; Tata Communications sold 17 facilities in 2016 and its data center arm sold a 26% stake in its Singapore business in 2019; Lumen completed the sale of its data center and colocation business in 2017; AT&T sold 31 of its data centers to Brookfield in 2018; Telefonica sold off 11 data centers in 2019 and confirmed the sale of additional four facilities in 2021; PCCW sold its data center business in 2021; and Singtel has announced that it is considering selling off its infrastructure, including data centers. However, the trend is only recently coming to the emerging ASEAN region. Continue reading “Should ASEAN Telcos Reassess Data Center Business?”→
• Digi expanded its enterprise portfolio and strengthen its SME position with the launch Oracle NetSuite.
• Maxis is moving in the right direction with its Right Cloud to address the increasing multi-cloud demand in the market.
The last three months saw Celcom’s partnership with Google to offer Google Workspace to SMEs; Maxis’ acquisition of Peering One, a private and hybrid cloud provider; and TM ONE’s partnership with SAP to offer a range of the latter solutions from its infrastructure (Cloud alpha). Now, in the first half of September, there were already two significant moves by Digi and Maxis to enhance their cloud offerings:
1. Digi Business brings cloud-based ERP solutions to SMEs
• The accelerated cloud adoption in ASEAN is driving the market awareness and maturity in the region. Enterprises are starting to look for more advanced features such as integrated cloud solutions with other ICT domains.
• New requirements are also driving competition and attracting global cloud players to expand their footprints to capture the high growth opportunity.
About a year and a half since the pandemic first hit the region, ASEAN enterprises had gone through various ICT transformations including accelerated cloud deployments to enable remote working. The awareness and maturity of cloud have significantly increased in the last 18 months. Based on our recent engagements with leading cloud providers and enterprises in ASEAN, some of the current key trends in the cloud market are the convergence with other ICT domains, hyperscalers’ momentum, and the beginning of edge computing.
While AWS is expanding its ASEAN footprint, in-country regions can be important to capture high-growth domestic opportunities.
Its custom and modular approach offers higher performance and reliability, but also enables cost savings through better resource management.
AWS has shared with analysts its capabilities and some details of its infrastructure design, including the data centers, networking, and server equipment that make up each of its regions.
Globally, AWS has 81 availability zones across 25 regions in 19 countries, comparable with other major cloud providers like Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud and ahead of niche players and market challenges such as Alibaba Cloud, Tencent, Oracle, and IBM. Each of its regions has two or more availability zones, with newer ones consisting of at least three. Each availability zone has multiple data centers to offer high availability and performance. This is not new and has been a common approach by some leading global hyperscalers. AWS has also been using a modular approach for its data center (a.k.a. Amazon Perdix) for over a decade. All the availability zones are interconnected through its own metro fiber network. It also uses cutting-edge 6912-fiber-count cables in its network. Continue reading “AWS Showcases Its Infrastructure Design to Offer Higher Performance and Cost Savings in ASEAN”→
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