Philippine firms seen warming up to ‘cloud’ computing

Listed technology firm IP-Converge Data Center Corp. expects more local companies to adopt cloud computing into their operations, following the global trend of tapping Internet-based services instead of in-house applications.

In a statement, the country’s only public cloud computing company said corporations were starting to discover the benefits of “leasing” or “renting” software and hardware services, instead of buying expensive computer equipment that go obsolete every year.

“Our company’s experience shows that the Philippines is set to follow the encouraging global trend in cloud computing,” IP-Converge president Rene Huergas said.

In a recent study, market research firm IDC projected a compounded growth rate of 27.14 percent in public information technology (IT) cloud services by the year 2014. This is more than five times faster than the projected 5-percent growth for other “traditional” IT products.

Locally, the IT industry has seen several cloud services being introduced by companies like Salesforce.com, Google and Microsoft.

Recently, Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. (PLDT) also announced its partnership with Microsoft Philippines for the development of the PLDT AppFarm Private Cloud Services.

The new AppFarm will work like the “App Store” for Apple products and the “Android Market” for devices working on Google’s Android operating system.

The AppFarm will list down enterprise-grade applications that corporations can avail themselves of. These include the latest versions of Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, Microsoft Sharepoint Server 2010, Microsoft Lync Server 2010 and Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V.