Latin America has the highest percentage of firms (14 percent) that have already implemented cloud computing or pay-per-use hosting of virtual servers, accordingly to a recently released study by Forrester that highlights the technology spendings across the globe. Forty percent of firms in the region are not interested, and an additional 23 percent of firms are not familiar with the technology or don’t know if they are interested.

Country-wise analysis reveals that current and planned cloud computing implementations in Chile (28 percent) and Mexico (23 percent) are more than those in Brazil (14 percent). However, almost and even more in some cases 50 percent of the respondents from all of these countries cited that they not interested or are not familiar with the technology.

The study also finds that 66 percent of the enterprises in China, India and Vietnam are not interested or are not aware of pay-per-use-hosting of virtual servers or cloud computing. Only nine percent of such enterprises have already implemented the cloud computing while 26 percent have or plan to implement it the next 12 months to come. Strikingly, 52 percent of respondents from APAC showed no interest in this latest technology.

However, "as a service" adoption of cloud in the software layer is quite high in the Asia Pacific. Of firms surveyed, 18 percent in Asia Pacific and 14 percent in Middle East Africa and Russia have implemented or have planned to implementing projects. "An additional one-fifth of respondents in Asia Pacific and MEA/Russia also expressed interest in or are piloting SaaS. However, interest in SaaS — in terms of considering or piloting projects — is higher in Emerging Asia (30 percent) and Latin America (27 percent). Despite this fledgling interest, the percentage of firms not interested in SaaS hovers around the 50 percent mark. SaaS vendors must continue to educate and evangelize globally," cites the study.