Google Cloud Platform customers in Southeast Asia should see a dramatic improvement in latency speed
Diane Greene, Chief of Google Cloud speaking at the Singapore launch event.
Called ‘asia-southeast1’, Google launched its Cloud Platform region in Singapore today, the company’s first such initiative in Southeast Asia.
Developers in Southeast Asia should expect to see significantly improved latency speeds. According to Google testing, opening the Southeast Asia region reduced round-trip time (RTT) latency by 51 to 98 per cent in the cities of Singapore, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok.
Previously, the closest Google cloud centre was in Taiwan, so the launch of asia-southeast1 should improve issuance speed across the region.
Google is launching new regions rapidly and the company expects to open a host of new regions in the coming months (for example, it will be opening a Mumbai centre soon).
While the cloud competition amongst the tech giants is fierce, Google representatives said they are grabbing market share, and the ability to leverage G Suite — Drive, Docs, Gmail etc. — is a helpful advantage.
“Google is dead serious about the cloud,” said Diane Greene, the Chief of Google Cloud, at the launch event.
GCP also boasts large clients such as HSBC, Deloitte, Netflix, Avaya, Adidas, Verizon and the New York Times, among others.
At the launch event, Google brought representatives from Carousell, Go-jek and Blackberry to offer testimonials as to why they use the platform.
The reinvention of Blackberry and BBM
What was interesting about the testimonials is that the three companies use GCP for different purposes. If they can be broadly defined in one sentence, it is as follows:
Blackberry: Using the platform as the key infrastructure in a major strategical shift. Carousell: The ability to “control the nobs” and get ‘Feature A’ and ‘Feature B’ without up-selling. Go-Jek: The support system as the company continues its scaling.
While the testimonials of Carousell and Go-jek were enlightening, the commentary from BBM CEO Matthew Talbot was especially interesting.
As media and industry players spent the last few years announcing the death of Blackberry, the company has been busy reinventing itself and its turnaround has been a remarkable case study in corporate innovation.
No, we may not re-enter a world in which every corporate employee has a Blackberry in their suitcase, but BBM is an example of re-invention that appears to be working.
BBM is no longer a messaging platform. Rather, it is a social media service. It boasts 250 million users and it wants to be the “WeChat of Indonesia“. According to BBM CEO Matthew Talbot, the platform beats Facebook as the largest social media platform in Indonesia.
To facilitate this transition, Blackberry is “making a bet on Google” and chose the platform in part because of its flexibility. Talbot said BBM is re-architecting the entire product and, in doing so, is moving a 10-year-old infrastructure to GCP.