In order to extend the possibilities of cloud computing to the Asia Pacific, as well as address its expansion to the region, IBM today announced a $38M budget in construction of a new Cloud Computing Data Centre to be based in Singapore. It will serve as an extension to IBM’s globally-integrated cloud delivery network with centres in Germany, Canada and the United States; and 13 global cloud labs with 7 of them based in Asia Pacific. It is scheduled to roll out on April.

“IBM’s investment in our Asia Pacific Cloud Computing Data Centre in Singapore reflects the increase in demand for cloud solutions and services by our clients in the region. The Centre will provide the highest security standards and capabilities to minimize capital expenditure and reduce operational costs,” said Paul Moung, Vice President, Cloud Computing, IBM Growth Markets.

“The new Centre furthers IBM’s focus on the delivery of cloud services and technology for both public and private clouds, giving clients the best available set of options to achieve their infrastructure ambitions.”

The Centre is designed to enable clients to reap the benefits of business and IT transformation; increase flexibility and agility; accelerate time to market; reduce costs; and increase security and compliance of public cloud environments. It is IBM’s comprehensive cloud services and technology portfolio.

“The APEJ market for cloud computing services will grow by an average 40% per annum rate through 2014 to reach US$4.9 billion,” said Chris Morris Director of Cloud Services & Technologies, IDC Asia/Pacific. A major driver of this growth has been the new regional data centres which are now emerging to provide the necessary infrastructure for growth of the key cloud service areas. While cloud services have been attractive in the past, concerns about the consistency of the service performance due to the potential impact of network latency and the location of the data have inhibited their uptake for anything that was a critical workload. This increased availability of enterprise-class cloud services will underpin the acceleration of cloud services in APEJ as cloud service shifts from the SMB sector to the large enterprise.”

The Centre will have IBM’s infrastructure as a service (IaaS) cloud portfolio as its initial offering. It will provide rapid access to security-rich, enterprise-class virtual server environments and is well suited for dynamic workloads. Moreover, it helps enterprises reduce operational costs; eliminate capital outlays; improve cycle times for faster time-to-market; and improve quality with virtually instant, secure access to a standardized infrastructure as a service environment.

IBM also recently launched City Forward, a website which helps officials make systematic and methodical decisions that involves the city by providing statistics and trends in areas such as education, safety, health, transportation, etc. It has worked closely with universities, cities and NGOs to create this free website. At the IBM Pulse Conference, the company has been advocating smarter buildings and smarter cities.  Despite the big city-stats initiative, Alliance IBM reported that IBM retrenched 600 employees. The exact number and location of these unfortunate employees were not revealed in compliance with the company policy prohibiting any and all official discussion of firings, layoffs, and reallocation of human resources.

And IBM’s not the only cloud service provider headed to the Asia-Pacific region.  Juniper Networks released the new Stratus QFabric aiming at core networking market. What Juniper is targeting in Asia are financial institutions and the government sectors, which are heavy users of cloud services. An ideal network architecture has a few key attributed like low latency, high reliability and scalability, said Lam Chee Keong, enterprise solutions manager for Juniper Asia-Pacific. The company also pirated Microsoft executive Emilio Umeoka to become its president of the Asia-Pacific region.  EMC, on the other hand, is considering the the junction between private and public cloud for the Asian Market, focusing on bringing data centers to private clouds, as well as collaborated closely with service providers and telecom companies on cloud projects.