The keynote speaker at a regional HP event says companies in Asia Pacific markets are relatively eager to adopt cloud services."The region is more ready than other regions on the planet," says Wolfgang Wittmer, interim senior VP and general manager, Enterprise Services, Storage & Networking in the Asia Pacific & Japan. According to Wittmer, this advantage is due to a number of factors, including economic, social and technological changes.Wittmer, speaking at the HP APJ ESSN Cloud & Innovation event in Singapore on Tuesday, said that HP is "leading this change". "We're ready and our customers are ready.""APJ region customers are at the forefront of dealing with a highly competitive market," said Steve Dietch, HP's VP of market, Cloud Solutions & Infrastructure. Dietch says that mobility and an evolution in the workforce are two key transformation agents in the IT world today, along with technology meeting emerging markets.According to HP, a survey to CIOs and CTOs found that 58 percent of businesses in China have a plan to move into the cloud. In India, the percentage is also high, sitting at 56 percent. In comparison, only 32 percent of CIOs and CTOs in Europe and 34 percent in the US said they have plans to move into the cloud.The goal, as Dietch points out, is to combine the "fragmented set of islands" that IT has turned into and deliver a secure end-to-end solution. This need for a hybrid IT environment presents a new set of challenges for CIOs and IT leaders in the region. "You have to be a builder of IT services but now also a broker. It is a very different profile as you try to create a seamless experience for all your users," says Dietch.For EJ Bodnar, HP's worldwide marketing director for Technology Consulting Services, this is a "once in a lifetime opportunity" for the APJ region."In APJ, new data centres built annually will double between 2010 and 2014. By 2012, China will be the second-largest data centre market in the world," says Bodnar. "This region is leapfrogging the world."HP hosted its APJ ESSN Cloud & Innovation event in Singapore on Tuesday where it also made a number of cloud announcements, including a cloud financing programme for HP partners.