 | Issue: | Asia-Pacific II 2010 |
| Article no.: | 2 | |
| Topic: | Business opportunities in the ‘Cloud’ | |
| Author: | Geoff Thomas | |
| Title: | General Manager, Asia, Communications Sector | |
| Organisation: | Microsoft Corporation | |
| PDF size: | 354KB |
About author
Geoff Thomas is the General Manager for Asia Pacific, Greater China, India and Japan within the Communications Sector at Microsoft. Mr Thomas is responsible for sales and marketing, business development, consulting and support services in Asia. He began his career at Microsoft almost seventeen years ago in Sydney as an account manager, and has held various positions in Asia Pacific and the US, spanning the enterprise, SMB and channel segments. Prior to his current position, Mr Thomas was based in New York and held various regional and national sales leadership roles in the financial services, distribution and services sectors, rising through the ranks, first as Regional Sales Director for the Northeast and Central regions, and later as General Manager, where he oversaw sales, marketing, channels and technology strategy for the division. Mr Thomas has also served with IBM and Unisys during his career. Geoff Thomas holds a Bachelor of Business degree from Kuring-gai College of Advanced Education in Sydney, Australia, majoring in accounting and finance.
Article abstract
To reduce both their operational and capital expenditures telcos, indeed most businesses, are compelled to transform their business and embrace new types of partnerships to deliver new revenue-generating services. The need to affordably access increasingly sophisticated services online is creating a demand for a new breed of online capability – Software-plus-Services. Telcos can create important revenue-generating services by partnering with software providers and offering both businesses and individuals pay-for-what-you-use access via the ‘cloud’ to sophisticated services.
Full Article
The global economy suffered a major slump in 2009, but reports indicate a growing optimism about recovery this year and we could not agree more. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) most recently said global economies are experiencing “a multispeed recovery”, led by Asian emerging markets.1 Nevertheless, enterprises remain cautious about both capital and operational expenditure as they ride out of the recession. Proponents of new investments need to justify how that investment can help companies drive efficiencies in the short term and position them for long-term growth. Technology can play a key role in promoting workforce productivity, market efficiency, and more effective business practices. Widespread deployment of productivity software, smartphones, and mobile broadband netbooks can help increase efficiency and reduce transaction costs across all segments of the economy. With the ‘consumerization of IT’ people expect the same tools at work as they get in their social life; for example, sales professionals now use instant messaging to communicate with clients. There is a blurring of digital lifestyles and work styles and this, in turn, will drive demand for new cloud services. Economists and policymakers agree that investments in technology are crucial to economic growth and development. Improved technology helps increase productivity, hence bringing higher returns and ultimately prosperity in the economy. Technology, in all its forms, has tremendous potential to connect communities, address crucial pieces of the global economic development puzzle and facilitate healthy, sustainable growth. The key to realizing this potential is to apply technology strategically and in a way that suits a country’s unique needs. Despite hefty costs, governments are making necessary investments and putting legislation in place: • In Asia, the upgrade of domestic telecoms networks to Next Generation Networks (NGNs) in Singapore, Korea and Japan is underway. • Giant developing markets like China and India are expected to add a ‘big buzz’ to wireless broadband growth.2 Whether at work or socializing with friends, people want to be constantly connected. Since there is no way to avoid investments and still provide the necessary connectivity, we should consider how we can reduce costs in other ways, such as through business transformation. Enterprise efficiency and productivity It is increasingly difficult for enterprises to reduce costs, manage transformation and generate profitability in a rapidly changing world. Today’s enterprises are still cautious of expenditure, and CIOs are under immense pressure to reduce costs and operate more efficiently. For telcos, building and maintaining infrastructure networks requires significant ongoing investment. According to Gartner, telcos have invested two trillion US dollars (25 per cent of their revenue) over the last decade to build out their networks. In a bid to reduce OPEX, telcos are compelled to transform their business and embrace new types of partnerships to deliver new revenue-generating services. The most urgent need is for CIOs to drive IT efficiencies in the short term and ensure that their IT investments today will help to generate profitability for shareholders in the long term. To do so, CIOs should re-examine how, and transform the way in which, IT is being used in their organisations especially in the areas of customer care, client retention and wallet-share growth-enabling technologies. Perhaps CIOs could start by asking whether existing IT tools are sufficient to make workers more efficient, whether current IT investments are being optimized in workflow processes or whether there are alternative technologies that can boost productivity. Transformation requires moving from information technology to business technology. While information is important, it has to become knowledge that can be used to make good business decisions and take appropriate and timely action. Enterprises need integrated solutions that can help them consolidate and organize data; employees need devices and platforms to work seamlessly between groups and connect with customers and suppliers. Transformation also means realizing the business value of IT, where companies will need: • solutions that can help them be more efficient and productive; • to operate more intelligently and strategically; and • to innovate to create a competitive edge that enables them to grow. Given the extensive suite of solutions available in the market, enterprises can achieve the above by deploying: • Virtualization – This is one of the most effective means for achieving cost efficiencies. It provides powerful, tangible ways to streamline many traditionally time-consuming processes and minimizes the resources needed to deploy and manage IT resources. The consolidation of servers and acceleration of desktop deployment helps organizations gain significant time, space and power savings, as well as environmental benefits. • Cloud computing services – Businesses of all sizes, including telcos, can look to software vendors for relevant services, to avoid heavy investments in IT and incur costs on a utility model. We have seen nearly 40 per cent growth in the usage of hosted services over the last five years, and this figure will rise. Interestingly, the majority of the top 20 global telecom firms are now deploying cloud-based solutions. • Unified communications – Enterprises can reduce both the need to travel and their communications costs through the use of unified communications – a set of products that include e-mail, instant messaging, and video-conferencing. With these technologies, employees can work seamlessly and communicate securely while working from their PC, smart devices or the Internet via a consistent unified user interface and user experience. These technologies will enable enterprises to transform and save costs as they: • Consolidate and reduce Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) – Enterprises often struggle to maintain silo solutions, working with multiple independent software vendors and managing numerous product licences. Mobile employees also often need better information access, and compatibility with new data types is often a concern. To solve this, businesses can turn to vendors offering a set of mission-critical platform technologies and development tools that encompass user experience, business intelligence, data platform, etc, which integrate with existing systems and help achieve a company’s IT goals. • Leverage software that is already owned and maximize current IT spend – On a daily basis, enterprises need to embrace new ways in which they can leverage existing IT investments to save money and improve operations with the technologies they already have. Dematerializing assets and delivering cloud Besides driving transformation and cutting costs within their organizations, telcos can also help their business customers do more with less by providing relevant cloud services that are more cost-efficient than on-premise IT investments. In a report released in December 2009, IDC mentioned the growing concern regarding the under-utilization of on-premise IT that has become more costly to support.3 As a result, companies are ‘dematerializing’ IT and using virtualized services such as cloud computing and cloud services, which can reduce the maintenance and operational overhead is, including hardware expenses. Software-plus-Services combines the best aspects of software with services, giving users more ways of accessing and using their data. Software-plus-Services lets users access the same software and services from any device anywhere. Cost-conscious businesses can access software paying for its use as they use it – as a utility-type service. The cloud is central to this utility service. Software as a service (SAS) providers need strong partnerships with communications service providers to deliver cloud-based services to businesses and consumers. Operators can offer software as a service on the cloud, using them as building blocks to complement and attach to devices and deliver rich, new, integrated experiences that span the PC, TV, mobile phone and beyond to subscribers. This is a tremendous opportunity for telcos to be at the centre of this transformation by providing a rich new set of services and experiences, allowing their customers to be connected 24×7 no matter what device they use. Far from being dumb pipes for over-the-top (OTT) players, telcos are in a unique position to deliver a slew of new cloud-based services. This will help them differentiate from their competition, win new subscribers, reduce churn, and ultimately drive ARPU. The ways in which people interact with devices and software has evolved, and so have the business models supporting these new services. With the right platform and tools, telcos can work with software partners to align business models and thereby draw mutual benefits from distributing cloud services. Leading regional telcos such as Chunghwa Telecom (CHT), Telstra, and Reliance Communications, are now working to launch cloud services. Telcos, like any other enterprise, can leverage software developer expertise to transform their operations and reduce costs. Telcos are at the epicentre of the next wave of transformation; be it delivering cloud services to subscribers, distributing the smartest of smart devices, or connecting people through integrated experiences across many different ‘screens’, there are huge opportunities ahead for service providers. As businesses move along the road to recovery, we believe that selecting the right partner to support transformation is crucial. Business leaders are concerned about increasing productivity and efficiency while reducing costs and delivering profit margins, and their choice of partners will be critical as they move along the road to recovery and accelerate their growth in 2010.
