If (er, I mean when) you attend Cloud Expo in New York in a couple of weeks, where does your thinking lead you beyond the United States?
If you’re solely focused on a local challenge – whether building and deploying a cloud project or initiative, or selling technology – then perhaps you don’t think much beyond our shores. But given the globalized nature of much of business today, perhaps you have to.
We’re far from the era of ubiquitous, global cloud-computing structures. Hardware bottlenecks, pesky national governments, and sheer distance forestall the day when your real-time global cloud empire may be virtualizing in Johannesburg, mirroring in Doha, and processing data in Sofia and Jakarta to zap to users in Chicago and San Francisco. Nevertheless, a map of the world can be useful in determining your best sources, office locations, investments, and potential new customers.
I’ve endeavored through my research these past 18 months to locate the most dynamic IT (or ICT) nations on the planet.
My initial research focused on raw dynamism – which countries seemed to be accelerating most quickly, even if they were accelerating from a previously very low speed? Using raw economic data, I found places like Bangladesh, Morocco, Senegal, and Ukraine were on a course to emerge from the pack. These were countries that seemed to be doing the most with what they had, even if they don’t have very much.
Since my initial look, I’ve layered in several other economic, technological, and social parameters to locate the countries that not only were doing the most with what they had – which were not only accelerating – but were also making great strides in establishing themselves as ICT powers.
Now, as I prepare for New York, I’ve been looking at bandwidth. I looked at average Internet speeds and access to high-speed connections, then integrated this data into measures of local cost-of-living and income disparity.
Looking at things this way shows South Korea once again leading the world. The remaining Top 10 are Lithuania, Hong Kong, Bulgaria, Romania, Latvia, Ukraine, Singapore, Estonia, and Hungary. As we can see, the nations of Central and Eastern Europe are doing a spectacular job of deploying high-speed connnections – and making them accessible to their people.
Regional leaders include Canada, Chile, the Netherlands, Lithuania, Israel, Singapore, South Korea, and South Africa, although there is some disparity amongst the regions themselves.
Look me up in New York if you want to learn more about what I’m doing!
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