 | Issue: | Latin America 2009 |
| Article no.: | 10 | |
| Topic: | Mobilising services | |
| Author: | Célio Bozola | |
| Title: | Vice President | |
| Organisation: | EDS, an HP company in Brazil | |
| PDF size: | 268KB |
About author
Célio Fernando Bozola is the Vice-President of EDS, an HP Company in HP Brazil; he joined EDS as President of the Brazilian operation. When HP acquired EDS, he became a Vice-President of HP in Brazil and the CEO of EDS. Mr Bozola has more than 25 years’ experience in IT and Telecom in Brazil, England and the United States. He previously served as director of Diebold Procomp Services, CEO of Impsat Brazil and as Chairman of the Advisory Board of Telcomp – Brazilian Association of Providers of Competitive Telecommunication Services. He also held various management positions at NCR, including as President of its Brazilian subsidiary. Mr Bozola also served in leadership positions in several national computer companies. Célio Fernando Bozola graduated as an electronic engineer from The University of São Paulo’s Polytechnic School and earned an MBA from Fundação Dom Cabral.
Article abstract
New hardware, software and communications technologies are now mobilising services, to make them widely and affordably – and most important, simply – available both to corporate users and individuals. Some of these services are available for users of today’s increasingly versatile mobile devices, while others are professionally managed highly complex services suitable to deal with the requirements of the most demanding corporate applications. Mobile payments systems bring consumers savings and convenience; big corporate systems offer big savings, convenience and environmental advantages.
Full Article
We are seeing growing use of mobile and wireless communications. The mobile phone is gaining more space in people’s lives as well as in the business environment. Brazil, for example, already has 150 million active lines and the trend is that this number will grow even more, evenutally matching the total number of inhabitants, which is close to 190 million. The device itself is becoming more intelligent. Through it, you can access an extremely broad range of information. In a single device, one has all the technological resources they need to access pictures, music, business email, personal email, and corporate applications as well as tools to prepare, amend and send documents, even when out of the office. There is no limit for more features; currently, technological creativity and innovation is continuous. You can go much further. Telecom companies continue to create innovative ways to use mobility to do business. Mobile phones are already used as payment vehicles. In Brazil there is a service provider that offers customers the possibility of using their mobile devices to make credit card payments electronically without using the card itself. This is part of a growing tendency to use mobile technology for an ever-widening range of services. There is also a need to facilitate consumer access to optical fibre broadband to handle the growth of data-intensive transmission. Using this technology, Brazilian suppliers of telephone and cable TV offerings have created triple play bundles, bringing access to fixed telephony, Internet and closed channels in one package at affordable prices. Brazil has four million users of 3G broadband, 1.8 billion of them access the Internet through modems in computers. Still other 3G connections are via cell phone. The subscription TV industry in Brazil reached 6.4 million homes and grossed US$2.5 billion, up 27 per cent compared to last year. Cable TV has proved to be a great medium for spreading broadband in the country, and is responsible for much of the 43 per cent increase, comparing the first quarter of this year with the same period last year, in Brazil’s Internet subscriber base. Even in Brazil, the electric grid may soon be used for broadband Internet access and, as well, for streaming video and voice and enabling subscriber TV. The technology for this, known as Power Line Communications (PLC), was regulated in August of this year by Brazil’s National Electrical Energy Agency. The agency established the rules that allow the commercial exploitation of the power lines as part of the regulations that electrical energy distribution is subject to. Equivalent rules have also been established by Anatel, the regulatory agency that regulates Brazil’s telecommunications sector. In practice, PLC technology will allow power transmission cables to carry multimedia data. The new technology will stimulate competition and increase the availability of broadband Internet, since the electrical network has far better existing capillarity and coverage than any other available technology. PLC should reduce service costs by eliminating the need for large investments in infrastructure. The connection speed will also be greater than that available from other services. Today, the Internet already allows us to be online, in real time, 24 hours a day, seven days a week with almost anywhere in the world. You can talk and see anyone regardless of the distance, with perfect picture and sound, free of charge. These technologies are already well established and widely used; the task is to expand their use and their possibilities. To do this, to support growing businesses and individual use, will take greatly increased storage and data processing capacity. The work technology providers do behind scene makes it possible for telephone operators, Internet and cable TV providers to focus on creating and marketing new services without having to deal with the complex technology that makes these services possible. Thus, mobile payments service providers have only to focus on making more credit card holders use their cell phones to make payments. The technology providers have already made all the necessary infrastructure available – the hardware, software, personnel and intelligence – to ensure that transactions are conducted with safety and reliability. Users need only pay a small fee per transaction. The software as a service (SaaS) model helps speed the expansion of mobility in people’s lives and in businesses. It can give companies and individuals access to a wide and growing range of services and applications, on the spot, if and when they need them. Companies no longer need to manage every technology, every application, they use. They can immediately, without complications, access common applications that someone might need once a year without having to administer them. Companies need only monitor their business – their operations and marketing and such – to manage the whole. This is not utopia; it is the future. A recent survey by Ovum Research found – based on interviews at 1.3 thousand companies in 14 countries – that managed IT services and communications business, now growing 18 per cent each year, will move US$66 billion worldwide by 2012. The benefits are already reflected in the numbers of companies adopting managed services, software as a service, virtualised computing and the like. There are instances where server virtualization reduced processing time by more than 60 per cent. In one company, it was possible using such methods and tools to reduce electricity consumption by 530,000 KVA per year. This corresponds to reducing CO2 emissions by more than 100k tons per year. Total cost of ownership, TCO, was also reduced by some 30 per cent during the same period. During 2009, the potential for managed services should be greater in America than in countries of Europe and Latin America, given its more mature and economically more advanced usage of ICT resources. Brazil follows Latin America’s rhythm, in some fields, but is more advanced in the availability and use of managed services. In terms of managed services, Brazil is in many ways an example for other Latin American countries.
