Japanese, Chinese, and Indian firms look to leverage increasingly sophisticated cloud offerings

Melbourne, 28th April 2010. According to a new report from Ovum, the global analyst and consulting company, adoption of cloud computing is set to grow within the life sciences industries of Japan, China, and India. Based on 50 interviews across the three countries, the report titled “Cloud Computing Adoption In The Asia-Pacific (APAC) Life Sciences Industry” presents a break down of the key characteristics of those companies planning to invest in cloud computing.

The report provides a propensity analysis that identifies and discusses the key attributes such as company size, IT budget size, and IT strategy priorities, that influence the decision to invest in cloud computing.

One of the interesting results from this piece of analysis was that life sciences companies within Japan, China, and India had on average more intent to invest in cloud computing than those companies spoken to in the rest of the world. “66% of the companies surveyed had plans to invest, 8% said that they were already leveraging cloud computing, while 26% had no current plans. This surpasses the result from speaking to 100 companies outside of APAC who responded with 63%, 4%, and 33% respectively”, said Adam Jura, Senior Analyst based in Sydney . “Ovum sees Asia-Pacific as a hot spot for cloud computing.”

Clearly, the financial aspects of cloud computing are a great driver for adoption. Those organisations which had final IT project sign-off in the hands of the CEO or CFO were more likely to adopt cloud computing, while those who had the CIO with greater responsibility were less so.

“The financial focus of the CEO and CFO is an obvious driver for investing in cloud computing which can often provide considerable benefits for organisations, but we’re also seeing some reticence amongst CIOs that are perhaps concerned about a loss of control within their IT departments,” Jura continued.

Those life science companies with more positive IT budget situations were also more receptive to the idea of cloud computing. The report surmises that having some additional ‘room to move’ allowed life sciences companies to explore alternative delivery models such as cloud computing. Conversely, those businesses focused on ‘keeping the lights on’ were less likely to have plans to adopt cloud computing. Similarly, smaller life sciences companies (biotechs and the like) are keen to leverage cloud computing as a way to effectively manage IT costs and gain access to functionality such as industry collaboration.

As we start to see IT budgetary pressure easing within life sciences companies across the region, Ovum expects the issue of cloud computing to come up more frequently as companies look to investigate non-traditional delivery models.

“Providing industry specific functionality is one aspect that we expect to be a key differentiator for those vendors offering cloud computing solutions, particularly in the Software-as-a-Service space. Oracle’s recent acquisition of Phase Forward is a clear sign that there will be significant activity in this market in the near future,” concludes Jura.