New | Microsoft to speed up 'cloud' adoption in Hong Kong
Cloud computing is enjoying strong growth in Hong Kong, with Microsoft seeing widespread adoption of its online version of Office
Microsoft, the world’s largest software company, expects the momentum for cloud-computing adoption in Hong Kong to stay strong over the next 12 months after its own operation achieved red-hot growth this year.
“We’re hopeful that [adoption] will accelerate next year,” Horace Chow Chok-kee, the general manager at Microsoft Hong Kong, told the South China Morning Post. “We have a strong pipeline to support that.”
Chow cited as an example Office 365, the cloud-computing version of Microsoft’s popular Office productivity software, which has sold more than 700,000 user “seats” in Hong Kong since the subscription-based online service was launched in June 2011.
“Most of that number – about 60 to 70 per cent – was generated over the past 11 months,” he said. “We’ve experienced triple-digit growth quarter after quarter from this application on the cloud, as more firms experience the cost savings on technology infrastructure.”
Cloud computing enables consumers and companies to buy, lease, sell or distribute a range of software, business systems, data and other digital resources as an on-demand service online, just like electricity from a power grid. These resources are kept and managed inside data centres. “Cloud” refers to the internet.
Office 365, Dynamics CRM, the Bing search engine and Xbox Live are examples of Microsoft-built applications which run on the “public cloud”.