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The Nanyang Polytechnic-Singapore infocomm Technology Federation Cloud Enablement Centre (pictured) was opened last month at the Nanyang Polytechnic to raise awareness, develop cloud computing solutions and foster cloud adoption by small and medium businesses in Singapore.

The NYP-SiTF Cloud Enablement Centre (CEC) is one of the 13 plus technology innovation centers within the Centre for IT Innovation (CITI) in the School of Information Technology (SIT) of Nanyang Polytechnic (NYP). Earlier in April, the CITI opened the NYP-Microsoft Cloud Innovation Centre, which was meant to train students in Microsoft's cloud computing technology and software.

In an interview with Asia Cloud Forum, Lai Poh Hing, Nanyang Polytechnic’s IT School director and Albert Tay, chairman SiTF’s Cloud Computing Chapter explains how the NYP-SiTF Cloud Enablement Centre will help develop cloud computing expertise to address the rising demand for cloud computing professionals in Singapore.

Lai Poh Hing: The cloud computing paradigm shift brings about disruptive changes to how businesses leverage on IT traditionally. The inherent benefits of the cloud delivery model to business agility, including its low start-up costs, low fixed costs, and faster time to market will become increasingly valuable to companies even as customer needs change even more rapidly.

A study conducted by Wanted Analytics, a US-based talent marketplace intelligence provider, found that 3,000 advertisements for jobs related directly to cloud computing were placed in July 2011 by recruiters in US specializing in IT. According to the study, the figure represents a 68% growth from the same time period in 2010.

Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) has increased its focus on seeding cloud computing efforts. Its cloud vision is to sharpen the overall economic competiveness of Singapore through the adoption of cloud computing and to enhance the vibrancy and growth of the Singapore IT sector through the development of a cloud ecosystem.

Albert Tay: Telecommunication industry is definitely one of the verticals as telco operators are the early adopter of cloud in Singapore primarily with the readily infrastructure for elastic cloud set up. In mid-2009, local telco launched Singapore’s first integrated cloud computing marketplace for businesses and innovation exchange. The marketplace was aimed to accelerate the development of cloud computing services to attract developers and promote their services in Asia Pacific, and to help lower operational costs and shorten the time-to-market.

We can also see the growth in sectors like banks and government agencies as these sectors are starting to leverage on cloud computing, through the creation of private clouds and by brokering cloud services, cloud computing is turning IT into a service delivery role.

Likewise in the public cloud services, a strong demand and interest coming from the small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) space. Referred to Ovum’s report featured on Asia Cloud Forum on 4 October 2011, in fact public cloud services in the Asia Pacific region are set to generate US$12 billion by 2016, growing five-fold over the next five years -- the fastest among all regions amid rapid adoption in small and midsize business (SMB) segment.

Albert Tay: For companies who are interested to showcase their product/ solutions at CEC they need to be a member of SiTF Cloud Computing Chapter. The areas of showcase are Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS).

Albert Tay: There is no restriction. CEC is aimed at supporting the industry in adopting cloud computing solutions.