Asia is better placed to leverage the current business environment and drive the value of data, as the region accelerates its 5G rollout. Businesses also realise they need data to facilitate planning and maintenance, whether it is to in human resources, inventory, or financial.
Asia had put in far greater investment in 5G and had been more aggressive in rolling out these next-generation networks. This meant it was better positioned to take advantage of the current circumstances brought about by the global pandemic, said Irfan Khan, SAP's president of platform and technologies.
Businesses here also could access a broad and robust ecosystem of developers, including citizen developers, who tapped new tools to rapidly create workloads, Khan said, in an interview with ZDNet.
According to GSMA, Asia-Pacific was projected to be the world's largest 5G region[1] by 2025, hitting 675 million connections or more than half of the global volume. The region's growth would be led by markets such as China, Japan, and South Korea, with mobile operators investing $370 billion[2] between 2018 and 2025 building out their 5G networks[3].
GSMA further estimated that 24 markets across Asia-Pacific would have launched 5G by 2025, including China[4] where 28% of mobile connections would run on 5G networks and account for a third of the world's 5G connections.
Apart from 5G, enterprises in the region also were pivoting faster to the cloud, noted Aneesha Shenoy, SAP's Asia-Pacific Japan senior vice president and head of platform and technologies. He said the software vendor was seeing "good traction" in the adoption of HANA Cloud[5] and Data Warehouse Cloud they were released in Asia-Pacific in late-second quarter.
Shenoy noted that businesses were starting to realise they needed to drive the value of data, whether it