India 3rd in understanding Cloud

According to a VMware study, India ranked third highest for their confidence in cloud computing knowledge.

This was also the first time Singapore came out tops in this category, edging out Australia which held the position over the last two years, he added during a media briefing here Wednesday to unveil the results of the online survey.

According to the VMware Cloud Index 2012 report, 82 percent of Singapore respondents said they believed they had a strong understanding of cloud computing, higher than the regional average of 75 percent, said Michael Barnes, vice president and research director of Forrester Research, which conducted the study.

Commissioned by VMware, the annual study, now in its third run, was done in September this year. A total of 4, 954 senior IT practitioners in 10 economies across Asia-Pacific were surveyed: Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, and Thailand. Japan was surveyed separately by another market research firm, ITR.

Barnes highlighted that as cloud adoption grows across the region, enterprise perception of what constitutes cloud usage has incrementally matured from merely using SaaS (software-as-a-service) applications to datacenter transformation and IT operational optimization.

With that, the position and opportunity of the telco will grow in prominence, considering 69 percent of Singapore respondents expect cloud adoption to increase the critical role of telco or hosting service provider, he added. Across the region, the figure was 59 percent.

Kevin Pratesa, Asean director service providers and public cloud at VMware, also at the briefing, agreed, saying telcos increasingly have to innovate and "sell up the stack" beyond providing merely infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS).