Bespin Global plans expansion

Bespin Global, a cloud managed service provider, is ramping up efforts to increase revenue growth tenfold in China this year, in a move to gain a toehold in the market amid stiff competition, executives said.

The 3-year-old startup's ambitious expansion plan is the epitome of the booming cloud managed services market.

"Bespin Global aims to help clients migrate, run and manage their workloads effectively in the cloud, and to speed up their digital transformation," CEO John Lee said at a news conference.

To achieve the regional growth target, Bespin plans to tailor-make software for Chinese clients and expand its recruitment network in the market, said Brad Lee, co-founder and president of Bespin Global China.

The company has more than 80 employees so far, and the number is expected to triple this year, spurred by business growth to increase the quality of services, Brad Lee told China Daily in a recent interview.

Last month, the company completed a new round of financing worth 170 million yuan ($27 million), which added to a total of 300 million yuan.

In 2017, the company's revenue in China jumped by 13 times year-on-year, double the global business growth rate, according to CEO John Lee. He did not disclose revenue figures.

As of March, the number of clients in China exceeded 100, accounting for about 38 percent of the global total.

As companies migrate their work to the cloud, the cloud computing market is expanding rapidly.

Worldwide spending on public cloud services and infrastructure is expected to reach $160 billion in 2018, an increase of 23.2 percent from 2017, according to a recent report from the International Data Corporation.

Amazon's Web Services, Microsoft's Azure, Alphabet's Google Cloud platforms and Alibaba are together forecast to make up about 89 percent of the global cloud market share in 2019, Heather Bellini, an analyst at Goldman Sachs, wrote in a research note.

The large-and medium-sized users' cloud application environment has become increasingly complex, which accelerates the market growth.

The cloud managed services market is expected to grow from $27.15 billion in 2017 to $53.78 billion by 2022, at a compound annual growth rate of 14.6 percent, according to Research and Markets.

Competition is becoming fiercer, as established tech companies and startups are expanding their businesses to grab market share.