Taiwan has for many years led some of the transformations that would have global impact, including the growth in e-commerce as a business model.
IDC estimates Taiwan’s public cloud services market size at US$767 million. This includes all IaaS, PaaS and SaaS markets. William Lee, research director for Cloud Services at IDC Asia/Pacific, forecasts the figure to reach US$890 million in 2021.
Microsoft announced plans to set up what it acknowledges as its first datacentre in Taiwan bringing to total 19 (in Asia) existing and announced Azure ‘regions’. Taiwan will eventually become part of Microsoft’s public cloud, providing highly available, scalable and secure cloud services across Taiwan with the option of customer data residency and improved latency in the country.
Plans for supporting infrastructure
Additionally, Microsoft is growing its Taiwan Azure Hardware Systems and Infrastructure engineering group, which will establish Microsoft Taiwan as a hub in Asia for innovation in designing and building advanced cloud software and hardware infrastructure spanning AI, IoT and edge solutions.
The new investment adds to Microsoft’s significant and recent investments in Taiwan, including the IoT Innovation Centre, AI Research and Development Centre, Startup Accelerator and the IoT Centre of Excellence.
“Technology has a critical role to play in supporting economic recovery and opportunity everywhere. Microsoft is committed to fostering local innovation to support digital transformation across the public and private sectors in Taiwan,” said Jean-Phillippe Courtois, executive vice president and president, Microsoft Global Sales, Marketing and Operations.
“Our new investment in Taiwan reflects our faith in its strong heritage of hardware and software integration. With Taiwan’s expertise in hardware manufacturing and the new datacentre region, we look forward to greater transformation, advancing what is possible with 5G, AI and IoT capabilities spanning the intelligent cloud and intelligent edge,” he added.
IDC’s Lww acknowledged that the pandemic does have a slight positive effect on enterprise cloud spending across the region from IDC’s COVID wave research.
“With Microsoft and Google’s plan to buildout/expand their datacentre footprint into Taiwan, this will generate additional cloud-related economy revenue by about 19% over the next 4 years for Taiwan,” he added.
