Microsoft Vietnam on March 2, announced on its Journey to the Cloud Summit in Hanoi that the company is cooperating with local FPT partner to provide cloud computing services this year-end in Vietnam.

“Vietnam government has identified ICT as a key driver of its economy, and we believe the cloud can accelerate this. We look forward to enabling Vietnam’s businesses, government and consumers to adopt the cloud in line with their business needs,” said Andrew Pickup, chief marketing officer, Microsoft Asia Pacific.

“Some Vietnamese businesses will want on-premise solutions, others to be completely in the cloud whilst others would prefer a combination of the two,” Pickup added.

Under the partnership agreement signed between the two sides in May last year on developing cloud computing services in Vietnam, FPT and Microsoft will deepen this collaboration.

The FPT datacentre will offer a cost effective solution for independent software vendor to host their vertical applications. Especially, with the recent launch of Windows Phone 7 and more generally the increased penetration of smartphones in Vietnam, there are a lot of opportunities for innovative developers in Vietnam to develop mobile applications.

“We see many benefits in our collaboration with Microsoft to build a datacentre using Microsoft Cloud Computing Technologies. Both sides share a vision of the future of computing where by 2015 Cloud Computing Services will be largely available and used in Vietnam,” said Duong Dung Trieu, managing director of FPT’s arm FIS Company.

Vietnamese government has identified a target to have a strong advanced IT industry by 2020. The industry is expected to account for 20 per cent of its gross domestic products by that time. Cloud computing topics and issues are now the centre of attention of many local enterprises as they seek to improve productivity.