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Taiwan building cloud computing centre with Microsoft

Tony Chan | August 18, 2009 | 0 Comments

Taiwan’s government funded NCP (Networked Communications Program) has joined up with Microsoft to build what the parties say is the country’s first cloud computing centre at the National Chiao Tung University.

According to online reports, the partnership will set up a showcase for cloud computing in Hsinchu County in northern Taiwan. The centre will be based on Microsoft’s Azure cloud operating platform and aims to develop cloud computing applications, user interfaces and architectures. However, Microsoft says it will not put any claim to any intellectual property developed by the 10-year project.

The centre will be jointly developed by the NCP, under Taiwan’s National Science Council and Microsoft Research Asia – a unit of Microsoft based in Beijing, and is expected to be launched in 6-12 months, online reports said.

While various reports suggest that the NCP-Microsoft centre will be the first in Asia, the statement is not exactly true. Already, SingTel, NTT, Fujitsu, IBM and others have deployed or are building out cloud infrastructures in various Asian cities, including China. Meanwhile, cloud services provider, salesforce.com, has also expanded into the region with its own facility in Singapore.

The announcement represents the latest move by national governments into the cloud computing space. With Taiwan however, the motivation behind the move seems to be different than those of Japan, the US, the UK and so on, whose governments have taken to cloud computing as a way to optimise e-government efficiency. Instead, Taiwan seems to be after the promotion of cloud computing to the domestic IT industry.

Despite producing much of the world’s mobile phones and PC components, the Taiwanese electronic industry has so far made no moves towards cloud computing and the hardware and software components that make up a cloud environment, or data centre technologies that enable cloud deployments.

The other market where the government is heavily promoting cloud computing as a potential economic growth strategy is Singapore, where the Infocomm Development Authority is trying to attract foreign investment in cloud and related services.

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