2017 has started with a buzz of events in South East Asia, including Ashnik hosting its quarterly Big Data Talk – Transformation Series session in Singapore, followed by BIGIT’s 2nd Big Data & CEM World Show event in Jakarta, Indonesia. In and around the events, I was zipping through these regions meeting our customers, partners, various CTOs and Heads of IT departments. The discussions were again an endorsement of the fact that I had mentioned in my last article about Postgres Vision – today companies in diverse industries — from banking and finance to automotive and healthcare are facing the reality that, they are now in the technology business. In this changing paradigm, it is insightful to see how these CTOs, CIOs and IT Heads are planning to shift from Business-Driven-IT to IT-Driven-Businesses, even in South East Asia.
1) Cloud Adoption  –
Accept it or not, cloud computing has become cornerstone of digital economy and South East Asia businesses are no exception to this. Many companies in South East Asia today are adopting Cloud – public, private or somewhere in between to deliver their product and/or services. What I observed is that public cloud adoption was higher in small and medium business whereas hybrid cloud adoption was on the roll in large enterprises with legacy applications and significant on-premise infrastructure investments. Large Banks, Telcos and others are using Cloud for storage and scale-out capabilities and new customer-engaging workloads (like mobile), but are keeping most critical workloads on premise. Countries like Singapore and Philippines are ahead in Cloud adoption as compared to other countries in South East Asia. In Singapore, Monetary Authority has recently been very vocal in support of Cloud and that has given a big push for Cloud adoption in BFSI sector of Singapore. However, countries like Malaysia and Indonesia are still grappling with policy issues related to location of Cloud servers and security and privacy of data.
2) Containers for DevOps –
Today, rapid development and deployment of applications and scalability to meet the evolving business needs has become crucial for success of many businesses in South East Asia too. These businesses are looking at Containers technology to provide the right lightweight deployment model with better resource utilization, automation and quick scale up-down capabilities. Moreover, as there are multiple infrastructure choices, we see Cloud platforms offering variations in infrastructure architectures and Container technology is providing Platform agnostic layer to the applications. South East Asian companies are already adopting to DevOps culture by realizing this need of the time.
3) Microservices  –
As organizations are moving slowly but surely into Cloud infrastructure, they are realizing that lesser the complexity of the application, more likely is it to remain portable across cloud providers and various environments. And thus they are focusing on development practices that seems to be most suited for the breaking abstract monolithic applications into their simplest parts which can run as separate independent processes communicating through lightweight communication mechanism — a microservices architecture. With such an approach, organizations can build each microservice written around business capability it is serving, can code it in different language suitable for nature of the service and can use different data store for it.
These three initiatives are quite strikingly mentioned by almost all CTOs, and Head of IT that I met. As I realized from these discussions, Microservices built, shipped and deployed using Container technology is becoming the new application platform in Cloud environment. It is not just the small change, but there is a complete paradigm shift taking place in culture and processes of modern organizations and that shift is driven by frequently changing business needs, collaboration, continuous development and integration needs. And all that is planned by CTO of modern organisation is address this tectonic shift.

– Kaustubh Patwardhan I Director I Southeast Asia and Hong Kong, Ashnik

Kaustubh (KP) is the Head of Business Development and Strategy at Ashnik. His role comprises of heading Strategic Partnerships, Channels Management and Business Development for ASEAN. With his expansive experience in IT, he plays a pivotal role in strategic initiatives undertaken by Ashnik. Apart from his usual responsibilities at Ashnik, he is passionate about photography, cricket and other sports. He is also an enthusiastic participant in poetic circles and plays.