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The multicloud management market is expected to grow from US$939.3 million last year to US$3.4 billion by 2021. Photo: Bloomberg

Australian cloud service provider eyes China potential with expanded presence in Hong Kong

  • Public cloud services market worldwide estimated to grow from US$176 billion this year to US$278 billion in 2021
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Megaport, an Australian-based “one-stop shop” for cloud services, has expanded its operations in Hong Kong through a new partnership with a local cloud company, eyeing the fast growing mainland Chinese market across the border.

Through Hong Kong cloud service provider OneAsia, the Brisbane-based company will connect its users to the cloud from the local firm’s data centre in Kowloon Bay, adding to Megaport’s list of 300 service providers and over 240 data centres worldwide.

“We’re not in China but basing in Hong Kong allows our partners in China, who have international licenses for inbound and outbound traffic, to work and connect with us here, and they’ll look after our customers directly in China. Hong Kong is a key and strategic market for us,” Vincent English, chief executive of Megaport, said on Wednesday in Hong Kong.

Counting the new OneAsia site, Megaport now has eight locations in Hong Kong now with plans to add at least four more in 2019, according to English.

Recognising China’s huge demand for cloud connectivity, Megaport’s manoeuvre into China could take a couple of years as “it takes times to establish relationships” in China, English said, as the five-year-old company focuses on the US and European markets it entered two years ago.

The Australia-listed company works as an on-demand platform for enterprises looking for cloud connectivity, operating like a “one-stop shop” for companies that can choose services from the seven cloud providers that Megaport partners with. They include Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing unit of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group. Alibaba owns South China Morning Post.

Cloud computing enables companies to buy, sell, lease or distribute over the internet a range of software and other digital resources as an on-demand service, just like electricity from a power grid, and companies are increasingly moving to the cloud or expanding their cloud usage to handle the explosive amount of data they need to process.

The overall public cloud services market worldwide is estimated to grow from US$176 billion this year to US$278 billion in 2021, according to research firm Gartner.

Enterprises are not confined to one cloud provider for their needs. English highlighted a trend in multicloud usage where enterprises pick and choose the services they need from different cloud providers through Megaport, with the number of customers using more than one cloud provider increasing more than 200 per cent in the year ended June.

“Customers and enterprises are now a little more sophisticated, wanting to cherry-pick the services they want from the individual cloud service providers for their applications, storage, computing or database capabilities … rather than relying on any one cloud provider to do everything for them,” he said.

According to global market research and consulting company Markets and Markets, the size of the multicloud management market is expected to grow from US$939.3 million last year to US$3.4 billion by 2021, representing a compound annual growth rate of 29.6 per cent.

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