THE major telecommunications players in Jamaica are now positioned to take on one of the fastest global growers in information technology — cloud computing services.

Last week, David Bates, head of ICT sales at Digicel Business — the latest to be officially launched — placed revenues made globally from cloud services last year at US$41 billion, and projects it will grow to US$214 billion by 2020.

Michael HoShue, principal consultant of Ignition Technology Group, which has partnered with Flow’s parent to provide cloud services under Columbus Business Solutions (CBS), emphasised the shifting emphasis of the industry when he told the Business Observer last week that demand for cloud services grew by 68 per cent over the last 12 months.

What’s more, chief information officers (CIOs), who placed cloud computing as the sixteenth highest priority among technology investment in 2009, last year placed it is the second most important, by Bates’ reckoning.

And even though CBS and Digicel have now positioned itself to fully take on this segment of the telecommunications market, LIME has already earmarked it as a “key growth area”, according to Ian Galt, managing director of LIME’s Managed Services, which started offering services last year.

But while voracious growth in global demand has them eyeing chunks of the ever-growing market, locally the telecoms providers believe Jamaican businesses stand to benefit significantly from embracing the technology.

Cloud services enable local businesses to avoid costly investment in IT infrastructure, such as servers, and software licences by using the resources managed by the telecoms instead of buying expensive computing equipment and software.

Last week Bates estimated the potential saving from using cloud services at 30-50 per cent.

“This new innovation will give Jamaican business the edge — any business, any size can avail [itself] of cost-effective, world class IT services on a pay as you go payment model,” according to Bates.

By HoShue’s measure, the smallest entity can benefit from these services.

“Most SMEs operate like you and me,” he said, “they don’t back up data all the time… except maybe when something finnicky happens and you say whoa! let me back up. With the cloud backup is done automatically.”

CBS VP for regional business solutions, Niall Sheehy, emphasised the importance of backing up data.

“Forty per cent of businesses that lose data in the event of a natural disaster fail to recommence operations,” Sheehy stated.

Apart from reducing upfront capital expenditure and lowering maintenance costs, clouding can also allow businesses to focus more on strategic IT management.

“Companies spend 70 per cent of the time maintaining legacy systems,” said HoShue. “Cloud services could release as much of that time to allow IT managers to focus of strategic direction.”

Digicel Business now offers cloud backup, managed hosting and co-location to its corporate customers and plans to roll out additional services over the coming weeks including Hosted Email, Hosted BlackBerry Server, Virtual Server and Cloud Telephony.

Galt said that LIME already offers a few more services, including managed network services for telephony, hosted email and exchange, disaster recovery, and firewall monitoring and management.

In the case of CBS’s partner, Ignition, its “differentiator is we have the total package from soup to nuts with uni-tasked professionals focusing on this and this only,” according to HoShue. Furthermore, CBS uses a product that allows for software cataloging.

“This product allows you to pick and choose how licences are deployed among users and hence manage the deployment of licences,” HoShue added. “This leads to a reduction in the number of licences deployed as they are issued only to users that need and use them.”

Digicel made Jamaica its hub for cloud services.

Opened in November 2009, Digicel has invested a total of $600 million on the three-storey facility with 8,000 square feet of space available to businesses in Jamaica and across the region, and now Digicel has achieved Tier III Design Certification from The Uptime Institute.

Tier III certification speaks to how systems are backed up with redundancies, and is the highest level of redundancy possible in any market that is served by a single Power Utility provider — with only JPS, the facility is not able to back up its power provider with another.

CBS has its cloud in Curaçao — a country known for not being in the hurricane zone or having any major natural disaster — at a 40,000-square-foot facility, which the company touts as meeting Tier III classification.

“The facility in Curaçao is a Flow facility and is not “officially” certified, but adheres to Tier 3 standards in its design and build,” said HoShue. “Our goal is to focus on business certifications such as SAS 70 and the Curaçao site is focusing on ISO 27001 certification.”

LIME has cloud facilities located within the Caribbean and across the wider hemisphere in several territories including North, South and Central American.

“All of our facilities are Tier 2, 3 and 4,” added Galt.