HONG KONG (April 12, 2018) – NTT Communications Corporation (NTT Com), the information and communications technology (ICT) solutions and international communications business within the NTT Group (TYO: 9432), has announced the results of a new multi-market survey titled "Asia Firms Partner to Capitalize on Innovative Services for Future Growth.” The survey explores why managed services providers (MSPs) are called on to help businesses in Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand to resolve a host of issues in handling IT in-house, as well as key considerations for CIOs to expand outsourcing and their planned technology projects in the next 18 months.

The research was commissioned to better understand trends in the world’s fastest growing managed services market – Asia Pacific, which is expected to grow from USD 28.03 billion to USD 64.01 billionⁱ by 2021. The APAC market is also forecast to see the world’s highest compound annual growth rate (CAGR) at 18%, surpassing North America and Europe at 7.7% and 7.2% respectively.

Security risks, talent scarcity and skills shortage seen as major challenges to managing IT in-house

Surveyed business executives cited three major challenges for managing IT in-house: 59% pointed to security, while finding and retaining the right people was noted by 51%, and lack of IT skills by 50%. Security (58%) and cloud infrastructure (55%) were found to be the most outsourced technologies; outsourcing of both is expected to grow to 66% and 74% respectively over the next 18 months. Over 50% of organizations outsource systems and applications management (ERP, CRM) today and that is expected to grow by an additional 10% over the next 18 months.

At present, the number of companies using hybrid cloud remains low at 18%, but almost half of businesses surveyed expect to deploy it in the next 18 months. Leading the way are Singapore companies with 58% considering moving to hybrid cloud, followed by Hong Kong at 33%. Half of Asian businesses are considering deploying SD-WAN, which is an enabler of hybrid cloud, and Azure Stack over the next 18 months – a sharp increase from the current deployment rate at 18% and 13% respectively.

"While businesses are migrating to public cloud for cost benefits, most are required to retain key user data in the private cloud for compliance reasons. Although hybrid cloud is an irreversible trend, building and managing a hybrid cloud environment in-house has become increasingly complex and challenging,” said Dave Scott, Solutions Director, NTT Com Managed Services.

Managed services: The missing piece for large-scale transformation

"7 out of 10 large-scale transformations failⁱⁱ, which explains why businesses see global managed services partnerships as a strategic move to improve their chance of success - addressing opportunities and obstacles in technology integration, talent scarcity, skills shortage, and operational excellence,” added Scott.

The regional survey found that while over 60% of businesses manage more than six IT vendors, most respondents cited complexity leading to performance issues (56%), the difficulty of making vendors work together (54%), and the high cost of using multiple vendors (53%) as major concerns in a multi-vendor IT environment.

To address fast-evolving IT trends, NTT Communications’ Global Management One (GMOne) Managed Services provides end-to-end managed services that deliver smart, reliable and secure IT solutions to energize business, reduce costs and speed the digital transformation journey. Combined with the company’s global resources and capabilities such as high-speed networks, a global footprint of data centers and cloud services, with only a single contract, one service-level agreement (SLA) and one management portal, GMOne can deliver seamless managed services for a business’ entire global hybrid IT ecosystem.

For a list of the survey’s key findings, please refer to the Appendix. The full whitepaper can be downloaded at www.nttcominsight.com/asiams-survey.

About the Managed Services Survey

On behalf of NTT Communications, IDG Connect surveyed 200 organizations with at least 500 employees to large enterprises, across verticals in Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand in 2018. More than half of respondents were most aligned with the IT department but general management, accounting/finance and other departments were also polled.

About NTT Communications

NTT Communications provides consultancy, architecture, security and cloud services to optimize the information and communications technology (ICT) environments of enterprises. These offerings are backed by the company’s worldwide infrastructure, including the leading global tier-1 IP network, the Arcstar Universal One™ VPN network reaching over 190 countries/regions, and over 140 secure data centers worldwide. NTT Communications’ solutions leverage the global resources of NTT Group companies including Dimension Data, NTT DOCOMO and NTT DATA.
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