The cloud computing sector generated US$ 257 million in Brazil in 2013, and can reach US$ 798 million in 2015, according to the IDC.
The telecom operators in Brazil have increased their offer of cloud computing services for corporate clients, but despite the efforts, they are still working to gain the confidence of the clients in a market dominated by foreign giant technology companies and companies specialized in data centers.
The use of this technology has increased over the last few years, but it’s still a small market in the country, said the director of survey company IDC, Alexandre Campos Silva.
The market is currently dominated by giant companies such as Microsoft, IBM, SAP and Oracle, and by specialized companies like Alog, Locaweb and Totvs.
“Because Internet links are needed to offer cloud, and these are provided by the operators, they saw the opportunity to enter into a growing market where revenue can be made”, says Silva.
According to IDC, Latin America continues to reflect significant growth in IT spending, with increasingly high demand for cloud-based solutions and a high degree of spending around infrastructure services. Revenues in Brazil Public Cloud will submit a CAGR of 72.8% during the period between 2011-2015, reaching a total value of US$ 798 MM in 2015.
For the corporate clients, the advantage of cloud is the lower cost compared with the physical server, apart from being a flexible service in which the company can increase or reduce the storage and processing capacity according to the needs and seasonality of the business.
Vivo has joined the sector in April 2012 focused on big corporations. The operator has not informed the number of clients, but it has confirmed that it has more than 3 thousand virtual servers, according to the director of this sector at companies Telefonica/Vivo, Maurício Azevedo.
“With cloud, the company can change the configuration faster, paying per use. With the traditional solution, these features are fixed “, says Azevedo, stating that the biggest majority of the clients are retail companies which increase the demand for data processing and storage at the end of the year.
The industry and the financial sector also use cloud technology in different levels, says Azevedo. “The sector that least uses it is the government, due to the traditionalism and the perception that information needs to be secure.”
The main challenge of cloud computing is the idea that this technology is less secure than a traditional physical server, according to the executives from the operators. For Azevedo, this perception is wrong and only time can change it.
Small and medium-sized companies, however, were the first ones to have the confidence to use cloud services, says the executive-director of Added Value Services at Embratel, Ney Acyr. “The big companies that own their own equipment or servers hosted in data centers are slowly starting to exercise the cloud solutions “, he added.
With 2 thousand corporate clients, mainly small and medium sized, the operator is in its final phase to hire a company to build a data center in Rio de Janeiro, which will complement the existing server in São Paulo, opened in October last year.
“Before we used to think only about the traditional voice, data and Internet portfolio. The new strategy is to complement these offers already consolidates with the IT services “, says Acyr.
The proposal to increase the offer of cloud services has been done globally by Embratel’s parent company, Mexican America Movil, and it also being adopted in other Latin American countries such as Argentina and Colombia.
Despite the fact that the operators have entered the market less than two years ago, they still cause IT directors to be suspicious so they still prefer to contract cloud services from specialized companies, explained the IT analyst of consulting company Frost & Sullivan, Bruno Tasco.
A study carried out by the consulting company at the beginning of the year showed that only 30 percent of the IT directors consulted trusted the telecom operators when the topic is cloud. The survey was done with 121 Brazilian companies that already used cloud technology.
For Tasco, the result is positive, considering that the operators have entered the sector not too long ago. “The market takes a while to be ‘convinced”, he said.
Jeff Gordon, president of New-Zealand company OpenCloud, provider of applications for telecom companies has explained that originally the term “cloud” referred to the telecom networks, and that this term was linked to IT services related to the Internet only recently.
via Cloud Computing market in Brazil | ALOG | Colocation, hosting e cloud computing.
