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New survey findings suggested that in Japan and Australia, small and medium business (SMB) adoption of cloud services lags behind the rest of the developed world in nearly every service category. In contrast, developing countries such as China and India are poised for explosive cloud services growth as they continue to build out their Internet infrastructure.

Conducted by US-based hosting and cloud services provider Parallels on 1,600 SMBs in China, Japan, India and Australia, the survey “Parallels Asia-Pacific SMB cloud Insights” identifies the opportunities to provide cloud-based operational services such as hosted infrastructure/hosted communications, online backup and storage and hosted email and archiving. 

Compared to their Western counterparts, the slower adoption of cloud services in Japan and Australia is primarily due to the lack of education on the business and technical aspects of cloud services. But on the whole, Parallels finds there is vibrant market opportunity to serve SMBs in these developed Asia Pacific markets. Given the strong IT infrastructure in Japan and Australia, both SMB markets for cloud services are expected to grow by 75% or more in the next several years, eventually matching the cloud adoption levels in Europe and the US.

Parallels Asia-Pacific SMB cloud Insights addresses the types of cloud services that hold the most appeal for SMBs and details the best opportunities for service providers to drive growth and revenue across APAC hosting markets. In addition to basic hosting and Web presence for developing markets, service providers should focus on value-added hosted applications and services such as social media presence, content management and online customer relationship management (CRM) tools. 

“SMBs in Asia-Pacific, like much of the world, are rapidly realizing value of embracing cloud and other hosted services,” said John Zanni, vice president of service provider marketing and alliances of Parallels.

“We are already seeing Australian SMBs understand and leverage the benefits of cloud services via our Parallels platform,” said Michael McGoogan, CEO of UberGlobal, Australia-based Web hosting service provider. “The SMB cloud Insights research further highlights that there is a great opportunity for our reseller partners. These resellers can now really take advantage of the cloud, profit from it and at the same time, differentiate themselves by adding their own unique value and service to their customers.”

China and India both have millions of SMBs who could potentially benefit from cloud services, with only a small fraction of these businesses are currently using them, as only 36% of the Chinese population and eight percent of the Indian population are online (Source: World Bank).

As Internet infrastructure proliferates in these markets in the next few years, Parallels predicts that many of the SMBs will forego the stage of buying and maintaining in-house IT infrastructure such as servers, and instead embrace cloud services and applications, presenting a massive growth opportunity for service providers to leverage.

“As the Internet infrastructure continues to expand at a rapid rate, more and more Chinese SMBs are looking towards the cloud to increase their efficiency and productivity,” said Dennis Ng, CEO, PacHosting. “Parallels SMB cloud Insights for Asia Pacific will give service providers a new level of confidence for tailoring on-demand cloud solutions that can resonate to the specific needs and demands of growing SMBs.”