Tencent Cloud grows APAC footprint

Tencent Cloud has expanded its footprint in the Asia-Pacific region with new datacentres and cloud availability zones in Bangkok, Hong Kong and Tokyo.

The tier-three datacentre facilities are situated in prime network hub locations, providing Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) traffic routing capabilities integrated with major local and international network operators.

With the new datacentres, Tencent Cloud now operates in 27 regions and 66 availability zones worldwide, including a second zone in Bangkok and Tokyo, and a third zone in Hong Kong.

“The cloud industry is quickly evolving and growing, making Tencent Cloud look forward to further demonstrating its commitment to provide customers with more diverse cloud products as well as stronger redundancy and backup options,” said Poshu Yeung, senior vice-president of Tencent Cloud International.

Yeung said the launch of the new datacentres was a significant development in Tencent’s strategy to expand its international portfolio. The company expects to grow its global datacentre footprint by over 30% by the end of this year.

According to Frost & Sullivan, 52% of organisations globally are using cloud services as of 2020, with a further 34% expected to add cloud infrastructure within the next two years.

The latest research from Gartner also indicates that worldwide spending on public cloud services is forecast to grow by 23.1% in 2021 to reach $332.3bn, up from $270bn in 2020, signifying more growth in the already burgeoning cloud industry.

In late 2020, Tencent Cloud opened its second availability zone in Korea, followed by the first datacentre in Indonesia and the third availability zone in Singapore in April 2021. The company is set to launch its second Indonesian datacentre by the end of this year.

The company has a growing number of customers in the region, including Singapore’s Asia Digital Bank Corporation (ADBC), which will be using the cloud supplier’s financial cloud platform to provide banking services to small and medium-sized enterprises.

By doing so, ADBC said it would be able to tailor its offerings to customers by identifying their challenges, desires and goals.

“ADBC believes in delivering contextualised personal experiences to its customers,” said Nelson Goh, board director of ADBC. “To achieve this level of digital journey and customer-centricity, we need to automate the thousands of processes that underpin the customer journey.”

Singapore insurer NTUC Income is using Tencent’s facial recognition technology to facilitate know-your-customer (KYC) processes at its kiosks, while Malaysia’s U Mobile is using the same technology to win new customers and service existing customers.

According to Synergy Research, Google, Alibaba and Tencent are substantially outpacing overall market growth. Tencent’s share of the global cloud infrastructure services market, which includes IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service), PaaS (platform-as-a-service) and hosted private cloud services, stood at 2% as of the first quarter of 2021.