Regular readers of my post know about my strong belief that the future of Cloud Computing is an ecosystem of open federated clouds. The world is very diverse and “decentralized” and the most important invention after wheel, the internet, is also decentralized and open. So, in my opinion, the technology that is developed on top of the internet catering to the diverse world should be federated and open. Such an open federated system implies that we will see infrastructure built on many different countries by many different vendors with their services talking to one another. Slowly, we are hearing news about infrastructure that are planned or built by Cloud vendors in many different countries.
Recently, I wrote a post on the plans of Singapore’s largest telecom provider, Sigtel, to offer services on the cloud. They are offering their Cloud services under a brand called Alatum. They plan to offer infrastructure and application services from datacenters inside Singapore. Today Data Center Knowledge writes about Salesforce.com’s plans for a datacenter in Singapore.
Salesforce.com (CRM) has brought its new Singapore data center online ahead of schedule, a move to accommodate strong adoption of Salesforce CRM applications and the Force.com platform across the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region.
Slowly, but steadily, we are seeing SaaS adoptions in countries like India, Singapore, Hongkong, S. Korea, Japan, etc.. To cater to the users in these regions and, also, to follow any regulatory requirements in some of these countries, all the major SaaS players will have to build their infrastructure in this area. Salesforce.com has taken the first step and it is a logical step since we are seeing a reasonable growth of Salesforce in countries like India.
In the same article, Rich Miller has mentioned about Singapore datacenter for Equinix. They already have one 156,000 sq. ft. datacenter and another one is opening pretty soon. Knowing Singapore government’s open handed welcome to big companies to set up shop in Singapore, I wouldn’t be surprised if more players jump in and build their infrastructure there. Since Singapore is closer to equator and on the Indian Ocean, there is a strong opportunity for generating electricity from sun and ocean.
Seeing these trends, I still cannot understand why people believe in the theory of handful of monopoly players on the infrastructure side. I am still waiting for a strong argument in support of this theory other than the weak business argument put forward by these evangelists.
