Video: 10 Minute IT Jams - An update from Leaseweb with Pieter Kraan
Leaseweb, a prominent player in the infrastructure-as-a-service sector, says business is booming as companies across the Asia-Pacific region race to upgrade and streamline their digital operations.
Peter CR, Leaseweb's Managing Director for Asia Pacific, shared insights into the company's momentum and ambitious expansion across the region. Speaking on TJS, he described Leaseweb as a provider with a worldwide portfolio of 20,000 customers, spanning from small- and medium-sized businesses to large enterprises.
"It's quite a long list of services that we offer worldwide," Peter remarked. "We tune a bit on the local market and what we can support locally."
Leaseweb's core offerings include cloud solutions, private and public cloud via VMware, elastic compute, virtual private servers, object storage and dedicated service for clients needing customisable, high-performance and high-bandwidth solutions. On top of these, the company provides cyber security, content delivery networks (CDN), private networking, and collocation services. However, Peter noted, "In APAC, that's not always easy because of local regulations, importing network equipment, and so on." The company also supports clients with hosting, sub-domain web hosting, backup and disaster recovery, as well as migration between on-premises and cloud environments.
Reflecting on Leaseweb's recent improvements, Peter highlighted a strategic pivot that took place in 2023. "At the beginning of 2023, we changed course from a hosting portfolio to a cloud portfolio, and we are making major investments in development in our cloud and private network portfolio," he said, adding that mergers and acquisitions are also on their agenda to further strengthen their capabilities.
According to Peter, Leaseweb's typical customers are internet and IT professionals: "Our customers are, for the most part, the internet and IT professionals: SMBs, enterprises born in the cloud and those transformed by the cloud." He went on to list key industries including marketing technology, SaaS, gaming, iGaming, media, entertainment, e-commerce, big data, AI, and fintech. Leaseweb also works "together with service providers and system integrators."
The motivation for customers to choose Leaseweb, Peter explained, often boils down to cost efficiency and profitability. "Very important is to save cost and make more profit in the end."
On the company's go-to-market approach, Peter was clear that a combination of direct sales and partnerships is key. "We are selling direct – local and global customers – although we are a global company, I strongly believe that we have to act as a local company, especially in the APAC region. We work with local staff who understand the market and also speak the language." He gave examples of Leaseweb's entities in Hong Kong and Japan, where local language skills are essential for business. "If you don't speak the local language it becomes pretty hard to do business," he said.
Leaseweb also serves clients via global and local resellers, leveraging APIs for quick and easy deployment of its services. Peter explained, "We help them, of course, to secure small and big projects with our local and global sales teams, depending on the location." He pointed to Leaseweb's participation in local events such as Cloud Expo as part of maintaining local market insight.
The region is on a strong growth trajectory for Leaseweb. "If you look at APAC, we are growing very, very fast, so our team is expanding to serve our growing customer base and to be able to deliver at the speed customers expect from us."
Peter was candid about the savings potential in migrating from larger, global hyperscalers to Leaseweb's services. "The power of our solution is that if you migrate from a hyperscaler to our solutions with dedicated services or in combination with a cloud solution, customers can easily save up to 40%." However, he urged businesses to consider operational realities. "If you go to more dedicated solutions, then you also need to have a dedicated support team yourself in the organisation to implement those solutions. It's an important thing to keep in mind – it's not very straightforward."
When asked about product development trends, Peter underlined Leaseweb's focus on automation and containerisation, alongside building customised cloud infrastructures. "Important to streamline the business is automation, next to, of course, containerisation and cloud solutions in combination with our private networking. We build customised platforms – that's a big, big difference."
Artificial intelligence is another area on Leaseweb's radar. "We have quite some customers in the region in that area who are growing very fast, which gives us some challenges in capacity – data centre capacity – in some of the regions, for example, especially Singapore where data centre capacity is pretty limited, but also in Sydney, for example." He pointed to the rapid pace at which new data centres are built as indicative of surging demand.
In terms of infrastructure, Leaseweb's strategy is to blanket key Asia-Pacific markets. "We serve customers from four locations – Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan," he said. The company's Australian operation, based in Sydney, operates three data centres. Singapore, which Peter described as a hub due to its "very important connectivity," hosts Leaseweb's largest regional team and four data centres. Hong Kong and Japan (the most recent addition) further extend Leaseweb's network, each with two data centres.
For enterprises interested in connecting with Leaseweb, Peter said, "If we don't have a relationship yet, you can visit our website, we have a chat there which is linked to our global teams – when we go to sleep in the APAC region, Europe takes over, and after that, the US. We support the US and Europe when they are asleep." He also suggested reaching out via sales channels directly for the Australia market.
Wrapping up the discussion, Peter sounded a note of anticipation for what's ahead: "Thank you very much for having me, Tom."
