Enabling Digital Transformation across Vietnam’s Industry 4.0 with Viettel IDC
Anticipated to total US$295 billion by 2021 with a CAGR of 12.5%, the global cloud market is expanding exponentially despite, and in many ways, because of the ongoing pandemic.
During this time, global cloud providers have experienced robust demand for their offerings, and are now tasked with discovering new ways to effectively capture and support the needs of the enterprise as digital transformation becomes a reality for many organizations.
Mr. Hoang Van Ngoc, CEO of Vietnam-based data center and cloud provider, Viettel IDC, sheds light on the industry landscape as it currently stands in Southeast Asia, and how the company is addressing the challenges and opportunities of supporting a cloud-first market, during Vietnam’s ‘fourth industrial revolution’.
Supporting innovation in Vietnam’s fourth industrial revolution
With Viettel alone having witnessed a growth rate of 100% in cloud computing in the last year, while accounting for 30% of Vietnam’s IaaS cloud market share and 40% of the country’s data center market share, according to Mr. Hoang Van Ngoc, Southeast Asia’s industry growth has clearly escalated in recent times.
This growth has been driven largely by innovation and product adoption as Vietnam’s fourth industrial revolution unfolds. This includes the introduction of more advanced services such as Dedicated Private Cloud, Virtual Private Cloud, Cloud AI, Cloud GPU, CaaS and DaaS.
Mr. Hoang Van Ngoc believes that the provision of these services works to accommodate the requirements of a larger ecosystem of customers, enabling providers to satisfy more people with the latest and most suitable technologies for their consumers’ needs.
“Big tech companies like Google, Intel, IBM, and Apple are also transferring some of their productions to Vietnam,” Mr. Hoang Van Ngoc reveals, which has been another major driver of expansion within the region’s data center and cloud service industries.
Google shifting the production of its Pixel smartphone, Apple shifting that of its AirPods, and Intel shifting that of its chipmaking, all to Vietnam, has forced local providers of cloud and colocation to level up their offerings.
Viettel, specifically, have also engaged in several projects with the Vietnamese Government and the Department of Defense, which have required a critically high level of security to be incorporated into their systems in order to satisfy the privacy needs of these organizational bodies.
“Providing for big customers who operate in multiple business areas, it is important to constantly be expanding and upgrading our offerings in order to provide our customers with international-quality services, and satisfy them at the highest possible level,” Mr. Hoang Van Ngoc says.
The Vietnamese Government has played a major role in revolutionizing their country’s industry, having recently promulgated the Cyber Security law which requires international companies operating in Vietnam to store data in Vietnam.
This requirement for localized storage is an opportunity for cloud and data center providers in Vietnam to improve service diversity, as well as enhance service quality to satisfy the robustly growing need of both domestic and international customers.
Keeping up with an emerging cloud-first market
Jumping from around 20% to over 40%, the proportion of small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs) that are taking advantage of cloud computing today has more than doubled in the last two to three years, according to Mr. Hoang Van Ngoc.
“As a matter of fact, the number of SMEs in Vietnam accounts for approximately 90% of all domestic companies, which plays a huge role in the groundbreaking growth of cloud implementation in Vietnam,” Mr. Hoang Van Ngoc says.
“In this day and age, almost every new start-up implements cloud from the beginning in order to catch up with the ‘cloud-first’ global trend.”
Mr. Hoang Van Ngoc has also found that other, typically larger, enterprise and government segments in Vietnam are also beginning to acknowledge, and ultimately take part in, the mass transition to cloud environments, which has contributed significantly to the demand for cloud computing services.
As a means to keep up with this rapid emergence of cloud computing in various sectors of Vietnamese business, Viettel have placed great importance on investing in various technologies and in further research.
“50% of Viettel’s profit has been re-invested into research and development in order to maintain our market position and, most importantly, to provide our customers with the most diverse service ecosystem,” Mr. Hoang Van Ngoc says.
Tackling the challenges of accelerated digital transformation
“We believe that any business challenge can be turned into an opportunity, with the recent COVID-19 pandemic being the most typical example,” Mr. Hoang Van Ngoc says.
“The pandemic has caused a number of challenges for global industries, but it’s great to see that many organizations have found a way to adapt and power through this tough situation.”
Across the world, digital transformation has been propelled by the recent surge in working and learning from home, which many network and cloud service providers have been able to support. Viettel has seen an uptick in this area.
“The key to success is having the flexibility and capability to respond quickly in times like this,” Mr. Hoang Van Ngoc says.
To ultimately capture the robust demand for data center and cloud services that is emerging from this digital transformation, providers around the world are constantly pursuing new and exciting avenues as a means to provide customers with the best possible services.
“In the future, Viettel IDC will continue to invest in new, and more advanced, technologies in terms of data center and cloud, with the objective of providing our customers in Vietnam and in other markets with excellent-quality services, competitive pricing, and timely support.”
Responding to the positive engagement they are seeing in Vietnam, Viettel is also seeking to drive industry expansion in neighbouring regions through servicing other countries such as Cambodia, and plan to continue driving this growth by entering the market in Myanmar and Laos in the near future.
Vietnam’s IT market is on the rise, facilitating the cloud and network requirements of Industry 4.0 and its subsequent digital transformation demands. Innovation, product adoption, new cybersecurity laws, and transfers of production have all been crucial to Viettel’s recent growth as one of Vietnam’s largest data center and cloud providers, and to the industry expansion that Vietnam is experiencing more broadly.
This growth within Southeast Asia has been tremendous and will pave the way for further development in the cloud and data center industries in the near future.
Contributor – Mr. Hoang Van Ngoc, CEO, Viettel IDC
Mr. Hoang Van Ngoc has held various positions of senior directorship in Viettel Group for more than 12 years. He has deep industry knowledge and global market experience in IT & Telecommunication. Sourcing network services is made easy with Cloudscene Marketplace and Cloud Pathfinder tool. Reach out to the Cloudscene team for any connectivity-related questions or assistance. Visit Viettel IDC on Cloudscene to learn more about their services.
