Sunny outlook for cloud services

China is shaping up to be the largest spender on public cloud services in the Asia-Pacific region, with the adoption of cloud-computing services seeing triple-digit growth year-on-year in the quarter that ended in March, according to a report by Tencent Holdings Ltd.

Public cloud usage skyrocketed 138.6 percent year-on-year, thanks to the ongoing shift to cloud computing across the public and private sectors, according to figures released by the tech giant on Wednesday.

Drawing on statistics from 351 cities, the research encapsulates the three primary segments of public cloud services－SaaS, PaaS and Iaas－to examine the adoption of servers, databases, and a host of related services in the daily operations of organizations.

Beijing, Guangdong and Shanghai are the top three destinations for cloud services, accounting for 72.8 percent of all cloud adoption in the nation.

Meanwhile, cloud volumes in Hainan, Shaanxi and Hebei provinces all jumped more than four times year-on-year, indicating continued cloud computing penetration in less affluent regions.

"Cloud adoption rate is an important parameter for the digital economy," Pony Ma, chairman of Tencent, told a cloud-computing summit in Guangzhou. "It is parallel to using electricity consumption to gauge economic development in the industrial age."

The internet sector claimed a solid 79.1 percent across all industries when migrating computing into the cloud of massive data centers. Financial institutions, traditional industries such as manufacturing, and public services were at the forefront of embracing cloud technologies.

China's public sector has shown great enthusiasm in promoting cloud-based services, with the volume of information and services it offers on these growing tenfold compared with a year ago.

To better connect clouds with terminals, Ma said the company is on course to develop a "Super Brain" system, an operating system banking on artificial intelligence, to empower enterprises and governments to better obtain and enable services in the cloud.

In addition, Tencent Cloud announced on the same occasion it would slash prices by up to 50 percent on its Cloud Virtual Machine products, which allows for flexible computing and diverse configuration.

It would also trim costs on database and storage offerings, and make dozens of AI-based applications free of charge to its customers.

"A leading factor in China's adoption of cloud technology is that the Chinese government has been actively promoting the development of the high-tech industry, and continues to implement its Internet Plus strategy," said Ashutosh Bisht, IDC Asia-Pacific research manager for customer insights and analysis.