Cloud adoption in Southeast Asia growing at a mixed pace
“If you look at it from a cloud adoption perspective, organizations in Southeast Asia have all moved their initial workloads into the cloud primarily because it was giving them benefits in terms of cost reduction, elasticity, availability and so on,” says Ramesh Babu, Public Cloud Go-To-Market (GTM) Leader for Southeast Asia at Rackspace Technology.
The 2025 State of the Cloud report by Rackspace Technology highlights the cloud as the core component in every organization’s digital strategy. While most businesses have opted for the public cloud as it’s the cheaper option, the future is seemingly moving towards the hybrid cloud with multi-environment deployment.
In fact, the survey of more than 1,400 IT decision makers, revealed 46% of respondents from the Asia Pacific region stating the hybrid cloud to be critical for their IT operations over the next 12 to 24 months.
In a conversation with CRN Asia, Ramesh Babu, Public Cloud Go-To-Market (GTM) Leader for Southeast Asia at Rackspace Technology pointed that the cloud in the Southeast Asian region is rather mixed. While some countries like Singapore and Malaysia have taken the lead, other nations in the region are playing catch up, having crossed the initial first step in cloud adoption.
“If you look at it from a cloud adoption perspective, organizations in Southeast Asia have all moved their initial workloads into the cloud primarily because it was giving them benefits in terms of cost reduction, elasticity, availability and so on. But they've also learned from it. Let's say they are in the cloud environment for last 12 months or 24 months, the initial workloads where they could take a chance if something goes wrong is all being tested and they know exactly what it is,” explained Babu (pictured below).
At the same time, Babu also pointed out that businesses in Southeast Asia have learned that it's not always cost reduction with the cloud as the costs can go up at times.
“If you have to project it for the next 12 months or so, the next step in the cloud adoption would be modernization where organizations are looking at it slightly more holistically. This is where the critical workloads come into picture, but they also want to make sure cost optimization is there so that they know the benefits of having cloud. It gives you that flexibility of giving the responses. So far, it's always available, but the cost has to be considered. And now, they want to pick both of it, cost consideration, as well as availability and elasticity and the services available,” said Babu.
When it comes to AI, Babu mentioned that customers are already looking at how they can implement AI into their products. Irrespective of the size of the organization, Babu believes AI will become part of it once the core offering is figured out.
“We all know AI can help security, but AI can also aggravate the security situation, right? So how AI is going to protect AI? Because if somebody is going to use AI in a very malicious manner, how is that AI to detect that and prevent it from happening? These are the kinds of things which are going to happen in the next 12 to 18 months in Southeast Asia,” added Babu.
In terms of providing organizations with what’s needed in their cloud and AI journey, Babu added that Rackspace understands the customer requirements and environment which allows them to provide solutions based on the customer’s preference.
“Some customers have preference for a certain hyperscaler. We make sure that a solution is built for them, or a blueprint is built for them, and it gets accepted by them. We then work with the hyperscaler to bring that service. We take the responsibility of not just implementing but also managing the customer in terms of managed services after the implementation phase is over and that is where we have four pillars of our offerings,” said Babu.
“We are talking to many customers and that's where our pedigree and our reputation comes into play. We are able to offer a lot of solutions, and we are able to advise our customers on that front in terms of their journey into cloud and their journey in the digitalization which they are looking for and the digital transformation which they expect as an outcome,” he added.
From managed services to the partner ecosystem
The Foundry for AI by Rackspace is where the tech company continues to shine in helping customers in both their cloud and AI journey. FAIR has completed over 40 successful global AI implementations across several industries in its first year, including financial services, real estate, education, and government services. In addition, FAIR achieved a high level of technical excellence by securing several AI, GenAI applications, data, and infrastructure certifications on Microsoft Azure, AWS and Google Cloud.
In November last year, Rackspace launched the Rackspace Technology Adaptive Cloud Manager, a proprietary solution built by leveraging Microsoft Azure Arc technology with Rackspace services automation to onboard customers to hybrid cloud architectures with Microsoft Azure. The platform improves observability, licensing efficiency, and security monitoring across workloads in both private and public cloud environments while making it easier to onboard customers into hybrid architectures.
For AI, Rackspace also announced the Rackspace Spot with a new geographic location and an on-demand GPU-as-a-Service powered by NVIDIA accelerated computing. The expansion comes as the demand for compute power is expected to continue to grow at a rapid pace.
Interestingly, Babu highlighted that while Rackspace has its own skill set that it brings to our customers in a direct manner, they also have channel where they try to bring in the channel partners to fill in certain gaps that they may not have.
Acknowledging that there will be some gaps, Babu pointed out that Rackspace brings in its partners to augment services so that when they go to the customer, they have the right kind of solution to cater to their expected outcome.
“When it comes to channel partners, we have different kinds of channel partners. This includes partnering with hyperscalers that are at a very high level, and we have specific function-oriented partners who come and fill in certain capabilities and expertise which we might not have as an organization. We bring that in, and the next part would be certain skill sets might not be available in the Asia Pacific region. These are the different kinds of channel partner engagements which we have right now, and it has really helped us to increase the pie,” he concluded.