OREANDA-NEWS. April 11, 2016. Equinix has more than 4,250 employees working across five continents, which gives us the ability to spot trends as they are happening. People like Global Solutions Architect Daniel Ong provide invaluable insights to help us stay relevant – no matter where business is being done.

Interconnections interviewed Daniel, who works out of Singapore, to talk about trends he and Equinix’s South Asia team are seeing as they bring emerging technologies to market and build customer partnerships and technology roadmaps for success. We also connected with him about Singapore street food and his love of racing Ducati motorcycles.

What are the fast-moving technology trends you see across the APAC region?

I am seeing three main trends. The first is a shift from the traditionally conservative and risk-adverse Asian customers to a staggering rate of cloud adoption. IDC predicts that more than 65% of enterprise IT organizations in Asia-Pacific will commit to hybrid cloud architectures by 2017. And cloud service providers Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure are leading the pack.

The second trend I am seeing is a shift from “just” virtual servers and cloud storage to customers taking greater advantage of the more sophisticated offerings from public cloud service providers.

This trend has spurred the growth of niche system integrators, who are pivoting their offerings to guide customers on their journey to the public cloud. I continue to be amazed at the profiles of customers who are building next-generation IT on the public cloud.

The third trend focuses on Chinese content and cloud providers that are increasingly expanding out of China and are choosing Singapore (must be the street food!) as their first port of call. Alibaba’s AliCloud is one example of this. I’m looking forward to working with our new customers as they land and expand their offerings in South Asia.

What is an example of an Equinix customer getting it right? 

There are so many! But recently, a national transportation provider reached out to Microsoft and Equinix for private access to Microsoft Azure. The company’s equipment was aging, maintenance costs were rising and performance for its mobile application, which required near real-time information, was intermittent. The company made a bold choice to migrate to the cloud, but they couldn’t go all-in at once, as they had legacy architectures and business units to support. Their best path to the cloud was to build a hybrid cloud architecture based on the Equinix Cloud Exchange. Today, the company has stabilized its mobile app and is in the process of deploying its enterprise customer relationship management system completely in the cloud. This also freed up data center space that the business could use for other projects.

How would you summarize the overall sentiment in APAC around cloud migration? 

Optimistic, focused and fast. Customers are realizing you don’t have to be a high-net-worth company to take advantage of more cost-effective, enterprise-grade technologies. It’s exciting to see this shift in thinking and the related benefits for our customers. It’s almost as fun as racing around on a Ducati.