PERFECTING THE CLOUD RECIPE FOR SUCCESS

It is no secret that the cloud has democratized access to technology previously reserved for only the largest of organizations, leveling the playing field. With it, the role of the Chief Information Officer (CIO) has changed.

No longer is the CIO’s core focus that of ‘keeping the lights on’, and ensuring that technical operations function optimally. Today, the CIO is a partner to the business, driving innovation at DevOps speed and scale, and playing a key role in supporting the company’s go-to-market strategy.

Conceptualizing the perfect cloud approach is not an easy task, especially in today’s fast-paced business environment. Too often, business leaders spend a lot of time debating configurations, especially when deploying enterprise applications – only to find that the business has changed by the time they are done.

Thus, in this new cloud-driven world, the imperative is to move at the speed of business. This will ensure that organizations adjust and move beyond failing fast, to embrace “succeeding fast”.

A walk in the clouds

In the pre-cloud days, IT infrastructure deployment was a tedious and complex process. Monolithic applications meant dealing with multiple vendors and lengthy provisioning timeframes. Today, with the evolution of the cloud, ‘outsourcing’ software (Software-as-a-Service) to be delivered and managed by the experts, while you focus on running your business, is becoming the mainstream.

If a business realizes the need for additional computing firepower as a result of dynamic shifts in the industry landscape or a requirement to play less in the datacentre space, that’s where Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) comes into the picture. After the computing resources needed are determined, businesses can easily look at scalable resources, instead of being stuck with constantly underutilized capacities.

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) forms another critical component of cloud infrastructure, including components such as a database, analytics, integration, mobile, security, etc., that can be consumed on-demand.  Not only is the approach time efficient, but these cloud stacks can also help with building the extensible platform needed to support strategic business outcomes by lowering entry barriers and accelerating the go-to-market.

The hybrid cloud platform – a CIO’s key to cloud success

Achieving successful outcomes from the cloud increasingly involves taking a hybrid approach to deployment. Organizations need to be able to utilize different forms of cloud solutions that can best cater to their requirements while simultaneously meeting regulatory benchmarks, including data governance and evolving security regulations in the markets that they operate in.

The financial services industry, for example, has specific rules about how data is collected, used and stored. Oracle Cloud at Customer helps organizations in the sector enjoy the benefits of a public cloud, while allowing them to stay in control of their data and where it is located.

The secret in the “sauce”

Today, several vendors offer cloud stacks and solutions. So, how can CIOs choose the right option for their business, especially in a rapidly changing market that is moving beyond the cloud to incorporate advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and automation?

This is giving rise to a whole new category of services. This new autonomous cloud is underpinned by three core tenets; being self-driving (where it literally runs itself, eliminating considerable human labor by self-tuning, self-patching, and self-scaling), self-securing (including intelligent threat detection, remediation and automatic encryption) and self-repairing (enabling the system to keep running even as patching and maintenance takes place).

This new cloud platform infrastructure has the potential to positively disrupt business models - enabling reduced risk, lower costs, and maximization of a business’ most important asset, their data. In the longer run, the resulting ‘autonomous organization’ has the potential to reach an ideal state where manual processes for running day-to-day operations and maintaining core IT systems can be completed without human interference. Instead, manpower can be redeployed toward value-added roles, enabling companies to redirect revenue and focus on innovating amid changing market dynamics.

The Journey Forward

Already we have moved far in the journey to the cloud. Some years ago, even established companies were wary of the cloud; today, cloud acceptance and adoption continues to grow.

Witnessing shifts within its business and customer demographics, driven by the rising tide of consumer e-commerce, Indonesia’s leading express logistics provider, JNE is introducing the Oracle Management Cloud to manage innovative applications, including a Business Reporting System for e-commerce customers. This enables end users to see where their items are at each stage of their journey and provide JNE with end-to-end visibility of all transactions to ensure performance and response times for deliveries.

Evidently, this new approach truly represents a new era of IT, where things are finally made simple, business leaders have a clear view of all applications and most importantly, glean actionable insights from data. Modern CIOs are now leading the charge in the way forward for their organizations with this new, enterprise-grade cloud that enables them to focus on supporting business strategy and leave the techie ‘how to’ to the cloud service providers.

In this new form, the cloud won’t just be ‘as a service’, but at your service – providing unprecedented access and ease of use to CIOs and their businesses. Cloud and other transformational technologies will be further demonstrated and discussed at Oracle OpenWorld Asia, the industry's most important business and technology conference, happening in Singapore from March 26 – 27. Registration is now open: https://www.oracle.com/sg/openworld/ 

This article is written by Chin Ying Loong, VP, Cloud Platform, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines 

New Wi-Fi Services from Converge ICT, Introducing Linksys Whole Home Wi-Fi System to Fiber Consumers

Converge ICT recently unveiled a suite of new products that's set to give a seamless connectivity experience for its subscribers.

Partnering with home router pioneer hardware manufacturer Linksys®, the first to sell 100 million routers globally, the telco company introduced Converge Seamless, a Whole Home Mesh Wi-Fi System called Velop. Linksys Whole Home Mesh WiFi will help simplify the way Converge’s subscribers experience pure, end-to-end fiber internet. Linksys’ Velop Intelligent Mesh Wi-Fi system is the world’s first true Whole Home Wi-Fi with an intuitive design and functionalities that simplifies everything from setup to daily use. The Velop nodes have gained multiple industry awards for design excellence, as well as positive reviews from tech critics for both performance and reliability.

This is what the modern Filipino household needs: a seamless WiFi experience that connects not just devices, but also the whole family. One problem when it comes to household WiFi use is the existence of dead spots, specific areas within a home where the WiFi signal emitted by a router is either too weak or blocked. Dead spots are caused by signals getting blocked due to walls and other objects. With Linksys’ suite of intelligent whole-home Mesh Wi-Fi solutions, Converge ICT subscribers can now have a reliable connection wherever they may be.

Through Converge ICT´s exclusive partnership with Linksys®, the full potential of a pure fiber connection is now unlocked right at home. Aside from having powerful devices which can take advantage of Converge ICT’s pure fiber speeds, subscribers can now fully optimize their spaces and connect anywhere within their homes and offices.

The Linksys Whole Home Mesh Wi-Fi System nodes are crafted with a simple and sleek design that’s visually similar with current trends in IoT (Internet of Things) devices such as home hubs, smart TV boxes, and smart displays. Linksys' Intelligent Mesh Technology allows the router to self-organize, self-optimize, and healing. This simply means that each node automatically connects to your router and even suggests the best spots for you to place it. If ever a node within your home gets disconnected, the remaining nodes instantly regroup and link with each other. The nodes are very easy to set up, all users must do is plug them in, tap a few settings on the mobile app, and let the technology do the rest.

The Velop nodes also have industry-standard features such as parental control, guest access, and native testing capabilities all built into the device.

Converge is offering the Seamless Whole Home Wifi System (AC2600 Dual Band, 2-Pack White) as an Add-on service to New and Existing FiberX subscribers. The offering starts at Plan 2500 for only P600.00 per month for 24-months on top of their internet plan.

Zero Wait, LTE Evolution towards 5G Wins the Future

Huawei delivered a keynote speech at the 2018 AfricaCom on how to build a fully connected Africa. The speech title was "Zero wait, LTE evolution towards 5G wins the future." Huawei is committed to bringing full connectivity values to Africa in most innovative and economical fashion.

Over the last decade, the company has been actively engaging global carriers and connectivity stakeholders to develop a mature LTE ecosystem, improve user experience, and facilitate application innovation. A collaborative environment orchestrated by governments is needed to roll out favorable policies and regulations so that societies can benefit more from wireless broadband, and seize opportunities for new growth in Africa transitioning to 5G.

Africa is seeing faster population growth than the rest of the world and over half of the people across the continent aged under 25. Such rapid increase and demographic structure suggest huge potential. The MBB penetration rate in Africa is only 42.7%, while 4G penetration rate is merely 6.1%. 403 million population are still unconnected. These numbers indicate enormous room for growth for ICT infrastructure.

Walter Wang, President of Huawei Wireless Network Marketing and Solution Sales, remarked during his speech that 4G LTE is still the primary choice for the globe before 2025, when it comes to the radio access technology options among 2G, 3G, 4G LTE and 5G NR. Every LTE investment is a 5G investment.

Huawei Delivered a Keynote “Zero Wait, LTE Evolution towards 5G Wins the Future” at AfricaCom 2018

"Zero Wait, LTE Evolution towards 5G Wins the Future," said Walter Wang. "Huawei has successfully deployed 5G technologies on 4G networks. This not only optimizes the investment structure, but also facilitates operators in achieving optimal LTE evolution. Such solutions aim to help African operators in addressing capacity challenges, including sectorization, Massive MIMO, site densification, and optimum spectrum utilization. In addition, the introduction of Huawei CloudAIR 2.0 will support flexible demand-based spectrum allocation between GSM, UMTS, LTE, and 5G NR increasing spectral efficiency and reducing operation cost."

LTE Evolution with Gbps experience can give rise to WTTx, NB-IoT, and video services, facilitate business growth, and speed up investment return.

Walter Wang also introduced Huawei's 5G progress. Huawei has been actively engaged in providing innovative solutions, such as 3D-shaping and uplink and downlink decoupling, to tackle challenges in 5G deployment. Huawei has also released end-to-end commercial products covering wireless networks, core networks, bearer networks, and terminals in preparation for commercial 5G. To date, Huawei has signed more than 20 commercial 5G contracts with operators from Europe, Middle East and East Asia. There has been over 10,000 sites of 5G equipment in shipment for those operators.

Huawei advocates concerted efforts among governments, telecom regulators, investment institutions, operators, equipment vendors, and vertical industry partners to promote rapid LTE deployment across Africa. The aim is to bridge the digital divide, and build a fully connected Africa.

Acer Announces AIoT Edge Computing Device with Support for Amazon Kinesis Video Streams

Acer today announced the aiSage, an Artificial Intelligence + Internet of Things (AIoT) edge computing device with a built-in camera. The aiSage offers a powerful live-streaming analytics solution for businesses looking to streamline and improve their operations through real-time business intelligence. It supports Amazon Kinesis Video Streams, a solution that makes it easy to securely stream video from connected devices to Amazon Web Services (AWS) for analytics, machine learning (ML), playback, and other processing, and AWS IoT.

“The aiSage is an AIoT edge computing device that collects and analyzes data to provide real-time business intelligence,” said Maverick Shih, President of BYOC Smart Products Business, Acer Inc. “We are excited to be cooperating with AWS to both provide seamless support for Amazon Kinesis Video Streams and offer scalable and secure provisioning of devices through AWS IoT.”

The aiSage is a commercial-grade edge computing device optimized for AI applications. It has an integrated CPU, GPU, high-definition camera, and wired and wireless connectivity options, all packed in a low profile design that blends in with surroundings. It supports the MXNet framework for deep learning, which produces lightweight neural network model representations that can run on edge devices like aiSage and process data remotely in real-time.

Currently, it can take retail chains days or weeks for their demographic or shopper information to be consolidated and analyzed, with the data’s value deteriorating as it ages. With the aiSage’s edge computing capabilities, real-time metadata tagging via integrated connectivity can securely stream video to services such as AWS with Amazon Kinesis Video Streams for analytics, ML, and other processing.

Customers using aiSage can quickly connect and manage their cameras and stream video to their AWS account using the new AWS IoT Camera Connector Quickstart. The AWS IoT Camera Connector Quickstart is a new solution that automates the discovery, provisioning, and connection of cameras and their streaming video content to the company’s AWS account using AWS IoT Core and Amazon Kinesis Video Streams.

The aiSage will be distributed globally through AOPEN, a member of the Acer Group specializing in integrated solutions for commercial and retail use. It will be on display at this year’s AWS re:Invent event from November 26th to 30th in Las Vegas.

Connecting the Dots, Connecting the Data: How Cloud Delivers Exceptional Customer Experiences

It takes months to find a customer and only seconds to lose one, or so the saying goes. These days, however, it might be more like milliseconds.

Thanks to on-demand information and services available anytime, anywhere, customers are more empowered than ever before and have sky-high expectations. If your customer is bored or impatient, confused or frustrated, for even just a second, there are a myriad of other choices they can turn to. Gartner predicts by 2020, poor customer experiences will destroy nearly a third of digital business projects, and PwC reports that 73% of customers now point to experience as an important factor in their purchasing decision.

In this context, providing a personalized, seamless, predictive customer experience is a core pillar of business success – and the only way to achieve that is by connecting every part of the enterprise and making sure customers are at the center of all decision-making.

Connection and integration help businesses answer that all-important question – how do I maintain a single view of my customer? The average consumer generates a huge amount of data every day, across a vast range of channels; and in fact, an estimated 90% of the data that now exists was created in the past two years. On social, mobile, desktop and connected TV, consumers are creating masses of data based on their interests, purchases, location and brand sentiment. But when all that data remained isolated in business silos, the view of the customer becomes fragmented.

Uniquely, cloud applications enable a single point of view on customer data. Through the cloud, businesses can tear down silos so that more customer data is collected and shared, in an open and usable way, with everyone in the organization. The integration extends from the frontlines of the business to help marketers create more personalized engagements, all the way to the back-office. Finally, data can be quickly and effectively used to streamline interlocking ERP processes across the supply chain, manufacturing, logistics and more, as well as to inform broader strategic initiatives.

Customer-centricity isn’t just about what customers can see – it’s a way an entire organization works that starts from the inside out. When the existing business environment is integrated and interoperable, without the perils of siloed technology and thinking, continual innovation is finally possible.

Bold organizations are setting an example of improving the customer experience at the front office and driving new innovation at the back office, to go above and beyond for customers in a competitive landscape. They’re doing this with investments in the cloud so that they can use data in a more robust and connected way.

ZALORA, the largest e-commerce fashion company in Southeast Asia, is an organization that illustrates how the right back-end system can drive new levels of customer loyalty. It was important for ZALORA to have a tool that helps them listen and respond in real-time to each personalized interaction with the customer, extracting the data that matters in customer interactions. With Oracle Marketing Cloud, ZALORA has moved from a batch and blast model to become an orchestrator of personalized conversations, where they are able to speak to customers in a relevant and tailored manner. Some of the benefits achieved by ZALORA from Oracle Marketing Cloud include the halving of time needed for a lead conversation to capture a large customer base, resulting in a multifold increase in revenue.

Eco-friendly pest control service, Killem Pest is another fantastic example of a company that is using the connective power of the cloud to provide the best customer experience. Through the Oracle Service Cloud, Killem Pest is able to collate requests from customers or potential new leads via a user-friendly portal, email or on the phone. This allows them to effectively manage to resource across scheduled assignments and locations in real time with their Oracle Field Service Cloud, and handle feedback in a proactive manner.

It’s a similar story for Australian airline Jetstar, which is currently leveraging the cloud to enact a company-wide transformation aimed at better engagement with customers on their own terms. A cloud data management platform is helping to provide a more robust, single view on customers so that the business can speak to them as individuals; in the right place and at the right time. Recently, teams were able to unite an email activity with display advertising in order to reach a disengaged customer segment. The result? A growth of up to 70 percent on incremental revenue.

Connected information is the fuel that drives customer-centricity. When businesses connect all the data and all the dots across the organization, they can deliver rich internal insight and provide truly excellent experiences for customers. The next wave of customer service is already here, bringing significantly enhanced experiences to customers and re-defining which companies will come out on top. 

Huawei CloudAIR Solution Awarded as ‘Innovative Network Solution of the Year for Connectivity’ at IMC 2018

Huawei’s CloudAIR solution was awarded by the "Innovative Network Solution of the Year for connectivity", presented by The Ministry of Communications (MoC, India) and Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI).

This is in high recognition of Huawei's efforts to address the challenges facing air interface resources on mobile broadband networks. CloudAIR uses cloud technologies to centrally schedule and efficiently utilize air interface resources, enabling operators to optimize resource utilization, unleash network potential, and deliver an overall better user experience.

Huawei’s CloudAIR solution was awarded by the "Innovative Network Solution of the Year for connectivity" at IMC 2018

India boasts a large communications market with 1.1 billion mobile network subscribers. As the Indian government continuously promotes a "Digital India" project, its nationwide terminal penetration rate is on the rise. In addition, reduced tariffs as a result of fierce industry competition also contribute to the rapid development of data services. Video, social media, e-commerce, and many other services have successfully permeated into every facet of people's lives.

On the other hand, the number of existing 2G/3G subscribers remains high while 4G services are in full swing. Indian operators are in urgent need of getting more spectrum resources and expanding bandwidth. However, the spectrum resources are so expensive and scarce that operators find it rather challenging to increase revenue while slashing the cost of operation.

Huawei's CloudAIR multi-RAT spectrum sharing solution can introduce an efficient method to address the spectrum challenges faced by current operators. In addition to guaranteeing the experience of GSM and UMTS users on the network, the solution is also capable of coordinating spectrum resources for LTE users, facilitating the introduction of LTE technologies. It not only helps slash the spectrum cost by over US$ 100 million and the site addition requirement by 20%–30%, but also enhances user experience of data services and increases service revenue.

CloudAIR has been deployed by a number of operators in multiple states throughout India and will be promoted to more cities and suburbs. It is believed to be an ideal answer to the high spectrum and bandwidth requirements brought by a sudden upsurge in LTE services. Up till now, the CloudAIR solution has been commercially applied on more than 80 networks worldwide, with the number of deployments expected to exceed 100 by the end of 2018.