"Today, Hong Kong SMBs are running a very competitive business environment that requires more advanced technologies and more effective technology usage to assist them to maintain and expand their competitiveness in the marketplace," said Chua from Atos Origin. "Considerations include the role of technology in achieving better time-to-market, improving customer satisfaction, the intention to grow the business outside of Hong Kong and especially into the mainland, cost savings that may be generated and the ability, flexibility as well as the scalability offered by the service provider as the enterprise grows and expands its field of operations and market share."

"The decisive factor for having a datacenter is simply the need to value business information and processes," said Leung. "As long as there are means to reduce costs from centrally managing hardware (infrastructure) and software (applications) that will impact the business from a revenue and survival standpoint, a datacenter is justified."

"In Hong Kong, SMBs are running their business in a very tough environment without much sponsorship or assistance from the government," said Mak. "Most SMBs have no more than 10 employees and have dominance in the Hong Kong market [but] may not have appropriate skill-sets to run their IT systems." Mak suggested that a one-stop solution at a reasonable TCO is their main evaluation criterion for a service provider.

Virtualizing the datacenter

"Datacenter virtualization is something of a holy grail for the IT industry," said Leung. "As business applications get more complex and supported by a hybrid of infrastructure, the 'virtual datacenter' builds on and encompasses a few key concepts: a) Reduced dependency on hardware or software, b) Reusability of infrastructure, c) Transparency."