As smartphones and tablets get smarter on their own with more powerful chips and more storage, consumers still crave remote cloud resources. Face it—companies like Facebook (FB), Google (GOOG), and Amazon (AMZN) aren’t focusing on mobile developers just for the fun of it; they want their services to be easily accessible from small devices.
People want to shop online. They want to stream video and audio. And to do that, they require lots of cloud computing infrastructure.
Skeptical? Consider how Vietnam, like other developing countries before it, has bypassed the landline era to take advantage of the world’s growing mobile Internet market. The country’s government expects the domestic e-commerce industry—powered by smartphone-wielding shoppers—to drum up $4 billion in revenue this year, up from $700 million in 2012.
This explosion in usage was made possible by an infrastructure rollout from local service providers. The Wall Street Journal explains:
Telecommunications companies such as Viettel Mobile, Vietnam’s largest operator by subscribers, and Mobiphone, owned by Vietnam Mobile Telecom Services Co., have rolled out third-generation signals to cover much of the country. Data prices are among the lowest in the world, according to a Vietnamese government study, at just over $3 a gigabyte.
Rule of thumb: If you make the Internet services available (and affordable), people will use them. And the projected market numbers included above should make any business ponder entry into this booming market.
But it’s not just the consumer market that’s keen on cloud services. Companies are also intensely interested in serving cloud-based business services to employees and customers on smartphones or tablets. This could be one reason why T-Mobile (DTE) parent Deutsche Telekom has expanded its partnership with Huawei in hopes of delivering more cloud-based services to business accounts around the world.
The German telecommunications giant hopes to double its annual revenue from business cloud services to about $2.24 billion in the next three years, in part, by luring customers from Google and Amazon, according to Light Reading.
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