Leanne Buer talks about her trip to Singapore to attend this Asia Pacific Cloud Seminar and see how Gen-i's development of cloud technology is faring in our region. Read the full story below.
It's full steam ahead on the path to cloud.
There is nothing more interesting to Leanne Buer, Head of Cloud Infrastructure Services at Gen-i, than being able to compare notes with her counterparts across the Asia Pacific region. Along with the other APAC service providers at the Cloud Asia 2011 Conference it was great to hear that the approach Gen-i is taking to the cloud being endorsed.
Gen-i had previously researched and leveraged their international technology partners to ensure the investments were aligned with global service providers thinking and the two-day event in Singapore in June left Leanne satisfied that they are matching or ahead of other regional ICT providers in developing cloud services.
"I knew we were on the right track during the information sharing session" Buer says. The session at the end of the conference had representatives from a number of Asian telcos quizzing her on how the company was bringing together its network and data centre assets into a compelling cloud sales pitch.
"While your core platform assets, like the network and data centres, are a huge part of the delivery mechanism, for cloud to work for our clients we need to have a deep understanding of their applications and IT."
This means for wannabe cloud providers without IT expertise, such as many of the telcos at the event, partnering is essential.
"My message was that you have to partner if you don't have the IT expertise in the development of the service and/or the selling," Buer says.
Gen-i's experience meant other telcos were all ears when it came to swapping notes.
"We have been investing in a service delivery platform within Gen-i for a few years now, and a lot of these telcos didn't even have that," says Buer.
"We have been providing some of our security services for quite some time, so I was able to share some of our experience, and they were all very interested in learning from our experience."
But it wasn't entirely a case of Buer's brain being picked. One of the other telcos in attendance, a leading telco from Singapore, shared learnings from its launch of a backup service using the same EMC Avamar platform as Gen-i's ReadyCloud Backup solution.
"It is good that they are seeing some of the same challenges and opportunities that we are. They had four big customers that were already consuming a service they had only had in the market for a month," Buer says.
There was also endorsement for Gen-i's approach to the cloud from Analysys Mason, who said the company was following a direction in line with the analyst company's recommendations.
Overall, Buer was encouraged by comparisons between Gen-i's cloud service maturity and that of other Asia-Pacific telcos.
"Within the Asia Pacific region where we operate it was reassuring that there are other people asking similar questions and a couple of the regions leading telcos at a similar stage as us. I now know with certainty that our clients are getting access to the best in cloud technology and expertise by choosing Gen-i."
