Asustek Computer Inc (華碩) aims to grow its online data storage customers by more than 60 percent to 50 million users by the end of this year, from 30 million members, in an effort to transform itself into a service provider from a hardware vendor, a company executive said yesterday.
To achieve the goal, Asustek yesterday unveiled an updated version of its Asus WebStorage file hosting platform, ASUS Cloud Platform, allowing users to access documents stored in public clouds from their own personal storage.
While the company’s new data storage platform is designed to attract more individual and enterprises customers, it also aims at providing app developers with useful tools for software coding across different platforms, said Peter Wu (吳漢章), chief executive officer of Asustek’s cloud services unit, Asus Cloud Corp (華碩雲端).
Photo: Tsai I-hsuan, Taipei Times
“Our new platform is open to everyone, and we welcome more businesses and app developers to utilize it for big data management backed by cloud computing technologies,” Wu said during the conference.
Wu said Asustek’s existing ASUS WebStorage platform had been serving more than 500,000 enterprise users and 600,000 academics and students in Taiwan and China since 2006.
The world’s fifth-largest PC vendor expects the number of online data storage customers to grow to 50 million users by the end of the year as it aims to follow the example of Google Inc and Dropbox Inc that host servers for people to save documents as a service provider, Wu said.
With more people using their mobile devices to share files, demand for online data storage is likely to continue to grow, which is why Asustek decided to join the data storage market and to set the user base expansion goal, he added.
Currently, Asustek runs six data centers, three in Taiwan and one each in China, the US and Luxembourg, Wu said.
He said the company plans to set up a new data center in Taipei later this year as it needs more space to install servers for its online data storage platform.
To promote the company’s new services, Asustek yesterday announced a price cut of more than 70 percent for its 100-gigabyte data storage space to US$22.99 a year from the original US$99.98.
The new pricing is considered attractive compared to the US$99 charged by Dropbox and US$23.88 by Google for the same program.
Wu said that only 0.5 percent to 1 percent of Asustek’s online data storage customers pay subscription fees for additional data storage space on a monthly or annual basis.
However, the company hopes to raise the percentage to more than 1 percent this year as it seeks to expand its user base by improving its services, he said.
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