21st February 2012
Savvis has announced the launch of its first public and private cloud services in Japan. The CenturyLink-owned company will offer its enterprise-class Symphony Open and Symphony Dedicated cloud services through the company’s Tokyo data centre.
The Japanese cloud computing market has been predicted to grow exponentially in the next three years, with Gartner projecting cloud adoption in Japan to represent 12% of the global cloud services revenue.
Despite this expected growth, many Japanese companies still have a number of issues related to the elasticity of cloud in the wake of the devastating earthquake that hit the country last year, something highlighted by Martin Casado, via a Mashable article yesterday:
“[In the wake of the disaster] many of Japan’s manufacturers shifted production outside of the Tokyo area to deal with the energy shortages. Its data centres, however, could not, and many relied on diesel generators to stay in business.
““You have these huge warehouses of computers doing all of these important workloads…If the cloud was really as elastic as we say it is, we should be able to take all those workloads and move them to another data centre. But why can’t we? The short answer is that workloads are still attached to the network of computers they’re being processed on.”
However, such issues have not held companies such as Savvis expanding their presence into the Japanese public cloud market, and the company is confident their data centres will hold up:
"The Savvis Symphony suite of cloud services meets the rapidly increasing demand for enterprise cloud in the high-growth Japan market," said Mark Smith, managing director, Asia, for Savvis.
"Savvis' proven, global cloud services enable organisations to become more agile and competitive in a number of ways, including decreased time to market, the ability to rapidly respond to market opportunities and allowing for a flexible transition from legacy IT deployment to cloud."
Savvis Symphony cloud services can be employed individually via a hybrid solution that leverages the cloud, managed hosting, colocation and network services available through Savvis data centres in Asia, North America and EMEA.
One client already using Symphony Open as a beta in Tokyo is Anicom Holdings Inc., the largest pet insurance services company in Japan. Anicom continues to use the cloud service to host its website, which includes a customer portal for online purchases.
"We selected Savvis to host our website to meet market demand. We needed an IT partner that could deliver the highest levels of flexibility, scalability and security," said Meiji Maruo, director of IT at Anicom.
"Savvis offers true enterprise-class cloud, with great customer support."
The Tokyo launch of Symphony Open and Symphony Dedicated follows the recent announcement by Savvis that industry analyst firm Gartner, Inc. positioned Savvis as a leader in the Magic Quadrant for Public Cloud Infrastructure as a Service.
The company has expanded its global reach since the company was acquired by CenturyLink, the USA’s third largest telecoms provider, back in July 2011.
In total, the merger, said to be worth around $2.5bn, has given both Savvis and CenturyLink a reach of over 50 global data centres across North America, Europe and Asia, giving the company a solid footprint on the overall colocation and hosting markets.
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