Google appoints April Srivikorn to lead Google Cloud adoption in Southeast Asia as the new country manager for the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam. The Bangkok-based executive previously led as Google Thailand’s interim country manager and as the Head of Industry for Banking & Financial Services, Tech, Telco, and Conglomerates. Srivikorn brings with her notable experiences in providing strategic direction and solutions in developing sales plans and working to transform how clients view the role of cloud solutions in building their brand, driving sales and connecting both online and offline.

In Southeast Asia, Google Cloud has recently seen significant growth—with help from its expanded partnership with multinational software solutions provider SAP. The strategic partnership between the two was announced in 2017 during the annual Google Cloud Next Conference. The partnership helped extend Google Cloud Platform’s (GCP’s) robust set of existing capabilities through jointly developed solutions, opened the door for SAP flagship products to run on GCP, and integrated SAP applications with G Suite.

The SAP alliance has helped Google’s key GSI (global system integrators) partners, such as Accenture and Deloitte, win Google Cloud deployments in Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore. Srivikorn is set to build upon this success by leading strategic partnerships across a number of key customer-oriented verticals and supporting the delivery of GCP services in the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam.

Google Cloud Platform Services

Google Cloud Platform is Google’s public cloud computing service platform that aims to help businesses leverage cloud technology and increase their competitive advantage through the use of modern, containerized application models on the web. The service is delivered to customers on an as-you-go basis, by way of service components which include:

• Google Compute Engine (GCE) – Google’s scalable virtual machine hosting platform that can be easily integrated into other Google Cloud services
• Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE, formerly Google Container Engine) – a platform for automating deployment, scaling, and operations of application containers across clusters of hosts
• Nearline, Coldline, and Archive – Google’s low-cost, highly-durable, highly available storage solutions for backup, archival and disaster recovery
• Anthos – a system for building, deploying and managing applications that may be centered around Google, and can utilize resources from other multi-cloud services
• App Engine – a fully managed, highly-scalable serverless application platform that provides web developers with popular languages (Java, PHP, Node.js, Python, C#, .Net, Ruby, and Go) and industry-leading tools (Cloud SDK, Cloud Source Repositories, IntelliJ IDEA, Visual Studio, and PowerShell)
• BigQuery – a serverless and cost-effective cloud-based big data analytics solution that can be integrated with a company’s on-premise data center through SAP Data Services
• Cloud BigTable – a fully managed, scalable NoSQL database service for large analytical and operational workloads
• Cloud Storage – GCP’s object storage for developers and enterprises that allows enterprises to configure data with Object Lifecycle Management (OLM) to automatically transition to lower-cost storage classes
• Google Apigee – a four-time Gartner Magic Quadrant awardee for producing and managing APIs

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Tim Synan, Regional Director of Southeast Asia at Google Cloud, has shared with Channel Asia that the increased Google Cloud adoption in Southeast Asia can be attributed to the deepened alliance with SAP, with the global system integrators (GSIs) leading the charge. This is his view with regard to the technology giant’s market credentials across the region.

During the discussion that transpired before the Google Cloud Summit in Singapore, the Google Cloud Regional Director expressed the enterprise’s excitement with SAP partnership in Southeast Asia. He stated:

“Particularly, we’re seeing large GSIs such as Accenture and Deloitte report significant, multi-year wins through SAP and Google Cloud.”

Synan specifically mentioned manufacturers in Thailand and Indonesia, organisations in Malaysia and, recently, Singapore as its remarkable wins.

SAP applications and SAP HANA are certified to run on Google Cloud. HANA, S/4HANA, BW/4HANA, and Business Suite, as well as Hybris, Business Warehouse, BusinessObjects BI and Business One, are some of the software giant’s key products.

Synan said that Accenture and Deloitte, two of the most recognised SAP global system integrators, have boosted the Google Cloud deployments in Southeast Asia. This has led to an expanded partnership between the ERP software company and Google Cloud. He explained:

“To be transparent, this adoption wasn’t really happening to the extent it is now 24 months ago. A lot of the investments we have made in terms of infrastructure, product innovations and our go-to-market strategy – which started under Diane Greene – has been executed well.”

The Google Cloud executive added that Thomas Kurian, Greene’s successor as Google Cloud CEO appointed in November 2018 to increase credibility at the enterprise level, has allowed them to “to make further inroads into the enterprise market”.

Synan commented:

 “We’re starting to see an acceleration of our enterprise business across Southeast Asia, given some of the changes we’ve made in terms of our go-to-market orientation.”

Google Cloud goes to market across six core verticals, spanning finance services and insurance; retail; communications, media, and entertainment (including telecommunications and service providers); manufacturing and logistics; public sector and healthcare.

Synan said that their team has segmented its customers in distinct ways through enterprise and non-enterprise. He expressed:

 “Our entire team is focused on these verticals across Southeast Asia. As a result of our innovation from a product perspective – such as Anthos for example – we’re seeing wins in telecommunications, banking, and e-commerce. They are leveraging Anthos as part of their multi-cloud and hybrid cloud strategies.”

Anthos is a modern application management platform that provides a consistent development and operations experience for cloud, on-prem environments. With Anthos, customers can also run applications with other major public cloud providers such as Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services. Google Cloud has announced its general availability last April 2019.

Cloud’s Economic Impact

Google Cloud has commissioned a study involving more than 1000 IT decision-makers in the Asia Pacific to take a look at the economic impact of the public cloud. The study expects the public cloud to impact around US$450 billion cumulatively from 2019 to 2023 across the six markets.

Massive employment opportunities, about 425,000 direct jobs, alongside impacting another 1.2 million jobs indirectly, are forecasted as a result of business efficiencies and growth generated through increased deployment during the period. 

In Singapore alone, nearly 22,000 jobs and another 21,000 jobs through second-order effects are forecasted through the deployment of the public cloud. The study stated that of the 22,000 direct jobs, 8000 will be in digital and technology-related roles such as data scientists, product managers, engineering, design, user experience, and infrastructure management jobs with cloud service providers, IT service providers and across industry verticals. These figures are close to 3.5 percent of the country’s current ICT workforce.

The study also stated that an additional 14,000 direct roles will be related to core business functions such as marketing, finance, and operations across industry verticals in Singapore.

Roughly $30 billion is forecasted to come out of the public cloud deployment, which can contribute to Singapore’s GDP. The value is equivalent to 1.7 percent of the national GDP annually.

Congruently, the commissioned study reflects Boston Consulting Group’s (BCG) findings on public cloud deployments that are expected to have a “significant economic impact” on the key markets of Australia, India, Indonesia, Japan, Singapore, and South Korea during the next five years.

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