International Data Corporation (IDC) forecasts in its latest research Entitled State of Cloud in Southeast Asia countries that 70% of enterprises in the Southeast Asia region will commit to a Hybrid Cloud strategy. While the transition may be fraught with challenges in calculating the return of investment (ROI) and getting management buy-in, enterprises realize that adopting Hybrid Cloud is important to reduce cost and achieve business transformation, agility and scalability.

The research further reveals that enterprises in Southeast Asia still prefer to manage their infrastructure and applications using internal resources rather than outsourcing services. However, such traditional in-house deployment of services will gradually decrease as enterprises begin to realize the value derived from moving to the Cloud.

In this regard, it is crucial for IT enterprises to clearly define their business objectives and also understand how the adoption of Hybrid Cloud strategy can help them achieve those objectives. Similarly, traditional outsourcers will have to reinvent themselves. IDC predicts that enterprises will increasingly engage with vendors who can provide end-to-end outsourcing services including Cloud services. This will put greater pressure on traditional outsourcers to transform their traditional business in alignment to customer needs.

Further recognizing the Southeast Asia market as a dynamic and diverse service, providers then need to equip themselves with a distinctive go-to-market strategy to win the competition. Moreover, large enterprises in Southeast Asia are more comfortable partnering with local vendors than have global partnership. Therefore, the adoption of Hybrid Cloud will give local vendors the capability to support the end user's global expansions.

"There is a clear necessity for local vendors to partner with global vendors in order to become more competitive in the market and be able to provide end-to-end solutions," states Sreenath Kandarpah, IT Services Research Manager, IDC Asia/Pacific.