This article is based on reporting originally published by Nation Multimedia (October 2018).
Google Brings Cloud Summit to Thai Businesses
Google held a Cloud Summit in Thailand aimed at helping businesses of all sizes understand and adopt cloud technologies. Tim Synan, then head of Google Cloud for Southeast Asia, outlined the company’s ambitions for the region and the role cloud computing plays in modern enterprise technology strategy.
“Cloud computing technology is about speed, agility, collaboration, awareness and transparency, with machine learning underpinning everything,” Synan said. “We have big plans for the future in the region.”
Synan emphasized that Google Cloud’s goal is not simply to migrate businesses to the cloud, but to meet them wherever they are on their cloud journey — blending existing technology investments with Google’s own infrastructure and expertise.
What Enterprise Cloud Adoption Requires
According to Synan, a mature enterprise cloud strategy must address several interconnected disciplines:
- Networking: Reliable, high-throughput global connectivity
- Mobility: Support for diverse devices and platforms
- Security: End-to-end protection across infrastructure and data
- Data management: Scalable storage, processing, and governance
- Reliability: Low-cost, high-performance systems at global scale
Google positions itself as having pioneered or made significant contributions across all of these areas, bringing them together under the Google Cloud umbrella.
Thai Enterprise Case Studies
Three Thai organizations shared concrete outcomes from their Google Cloud adoption at the summit.
Ananda Development PLC: Property Transfer App Powered by Vision and Speech APIs
Yong Chern Chet, chief innovation officer of Ananda Development PLC, described how the property developer used Google Cloud APIs to build a house property transfer application. The app leverages Google’s Vision API and Speech-to-Text API to streamline property inspection and documentation processes.
“It enables us to simplify our business processes and let us focus on what really matters for our customers,” Yong said. According to the company, within three months the application saved 130 hours of inspection time, representing a cost saving of more than 4 million Thai Baht. Ananda also noted that the platform enabled them to capture operational insights and convert them into actionable data to improve customer experience.
Omise: Scaling a Payment API to 100 Million Transactions Per Day
Ezra Don Harinsut, COO and co-founder of Thai payments company Omise, reported that Google Cloud enabled the company to scale its Payment API platform to handle 100 million transactions per day. Key reported outcomes included:
- 99.99% transaction acceptance rate from financial institutions
- Compliance with PCI DSS 3.2.1 security standards
- Approximately 30% cost reduction compared to previously used cloud providers
These figures were stated by Omise at the time of the event and have not been independently verified.
SCB Abacus: Agile Analytics for Human-Centred AI
Anyarat Boonnithivorakul, COO of SCB Abacus — a dedicated advanced analytics spin-off from Siam Commercial Bank — explained that Google Cloud has been central to the company’s mission of building human-centred AI technology.
“The Google Cloud platform has crucially enabled us to strengthen our core competency by facilitating agile ways of work, and providing accessible data analytics tools,” Anyarat said. The company focuses on making AI and analytics tools available across the organization rather than concentrating them within a single technical team.
Key Takeaways for DevOps and Cloud Engineers
The case studies from this summit illustrate several patterns relevant to enterprise cloud adoption:
- Managed AI APIs accelerate product development. Ananda used off-the-shelf Vision and Speech-to-Text APIs rather than building ML models from scratch, enabling a working product within three months.
- Cloud scalability is non-linear. Omise’s ability to reach 100 million daily transactions depends on elastic infrastructure that would be difficult and expensive to replicate on-premises.
- Compliance and cost are not mutually exclusive. Omise reported achieving PCI DSS compliance while also reducing costs — a combination that often challenges teams managing their own data centers.
- AI democratization within organizations requires accessible tooling. SCB Abacus’s approach of embedding analytics capability across teams reflects a broader trend toward self-service data platforms.
While these outcomes were reported at a vendor-hosted event and should be evaluated accordingly, they reflect real-world patterns seen across cloud adoption in the financial services, real estate, and fintech sectors across Southeast Asia.