WEEKLY INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND ECONOMY NEWSPAPER
Bringing together ICT managers and providing a fertile environment for sharing knowledge and experience related to the industry; the CIO Vision Meeting was held with great interest and participation this year. The event was sponsored by QlikView and Intel Security and Digital Transformation was discussed. This year’s meeting topic was “Digital Transformation and Cloud Strategies”. The sector’s most professional and competent members discussed how companies are preparing for digital transformation how road maps are shaped, what kind of difficulties are faced by CIOs and what would be the advantages of Digital Transformation. Informatics Association of Turkey İstanbul Branch President Ahmet Tosunoğlu delivered the opening speech and various presentations were made afterwards. The most interesting of those belong to Bahçeşehir University Faculty of Medicine Dean Prof. Türker Kılıç invited to the meeting to add a different perspective to this year’s meeting and to interpret the informatics concept in an unorthodox way titled “Brain, Consciousness, Life”. The brain is perceived as an information machine In his presentation, Prof. Kılıç talked about the changing theory of brain and stressed that our perception of life changed and we now see technology with a very different perspective. Prof. Kılıç stated that: “We do not perceive brain anymore as a piece of meat created by a hundred billion neurons. We now perceive it as an information machine including 2 over 100 billion possibilities. With this point of view, the brain is not just defined as a process center enabling body balance but also an organ creating mind.” With this new point of view, Prof. Kılıç mentioned about the Human Connectom Project aiming at explaining with which mathematical model the brain creates mind and he stated that the scientists now question whether life can be explained via a mathematical system with this project. Kılıç mentioned about everything that exists has a response as information and brain is an information
CIO’s discussed Digital Transformation The sixth of CIO Vision meetings co-organized by Turkey Informatics Association and BThaber was held recently.
mechanism making sense of life by processing this information. Revealed by Maxwell in 1867 and questioned by theoretical physicists; “Can you transform information into energy?” question was among the highly discussed topics at the European Academy of Science and Art last year. Stating that Maxwell showed that it was possible via his experiment carried out in 1867; Kılıç said that an experiment was realized this year in Japan using this idea in generating energy of a cooling system. QlikView Turkey Consultancy Support Director Emre Çabuk made a presentation during the event and talked about the data in this digitalized world topic. Whenever the digitalization issue is mentioned, everyone is focuses on data said Emre Çabuk and added that as QlikView, their approach to the subject includes data flow actualizing from information technologies towards business units while data transforming into information and the data being transformed into information by business units. Explaining the reason behind; Emre Çabuk highlighted that business units would like to have easy technologies that they use daily in the business environment. He stated that
due to the generally central structure of the information technologies; they are in a constant quarrel with business units on permissions and authorizations and QlikView addresses those problems to create solutions. Expressing that they aim to create a synergy between business units and information technology using information; Çabuk stressed that overcoming these problems is possible with digitalization. As QlikView believes, the owner of data is business units rather than IT and they offer a platform combining data and conveying it to business units. Emre Çabuk ended his presentation with a demo of Qlik Sense product. The routine is broken in security Speaking in the CIO Vision Meeting, Intel Security Turkey & Azerbaijan Regional Director İlkem Özar with a speech title of “The routine is broken in security” stated that organizations’ working, making innovations and growing securely is a must. Özar stressed upon the importance of trained manpower in the field of cyber security for the successful implementation of the security strategies. İlkem Özar drew attention to digital
transformation in her speech pointed as an indispensable a part of every business today and added: “Customers now want to get immediate service from all communication channels regardless of time and location, and this makes digital transformation inevitable. This process of change with a wide quality from finance to manufacturing, from marketing to human resources has an impact on the processes of all institutions. Even some institutions are hiring Digital Transformation Leaders in order to manage digital transformation accurately. Similarly, the security should be managed by established organizations and the number of institutions should increase which take a step in that direction.” We adapted a great structure into the digital world Albayrak Holding CIO Erdal Nalbant mentioned about a great structure’s digital transformation process in his speech titled “Digital Journey” reminding that Albayrak Holding consists of 79 active companies. He stated that the IT infrastructure of the company is taken over by Albil Central Services. According to Nalbant, they aim to overlap
their actions in IT side with the business units and stated that in our day and age IT departments are asked to take actions to contribute revenues. Besides; by the strategic decision taken in 2013, they carried all the media servers to the cloud. This means that the availability of media companies in the holding structure was highly increased. We are increasing our service quality by digital transformation Doğtaş and Kelebek Information Technologies Manager Yavuz Selim Hindistan told the story in which they went through digital transformation within the company. As a company, they aimed at improving the quality of the services they provide to its customers and took the digital transformation journey according to Yavuz Selim Hindistan. They also established a rapid and flexible platform in all distributors to collect value adding data. Thanks to the application they put it into practice, all forms of customer needs are noted on computers and tablets and being digitally processed and Hindistan stated that they use SaaS software as a service and talked about Minerva system and its features.
Turkish game developers expand to the world market METU TECHNOPOLIS partners Europe’s biggest game fair ‘Gamescom’ held in Cologne, Germany on August 17-21 along with Turkey Game Developers Association (TOGED). Electronics and Electrical Services Exporters’ Association (TET) contributed Turkey’s partnership at Gamescom and aims at developing and increasing recognition of Turkish gaming industry. Earning revenues close to $ 100 billion in the world; gaming industry gained steady momentum with the development of mobile technologies and the possibility of playing games anywhere, anytime. The gaming industry is expected to grow 8.5% by the end of 2016. Turkey’s share is not very high yet but the games offered to the market by Turkish game developers attract great interest. The export ratio increased remarkably in recent years along with international success and achievements of local games. Gamescom hosts more than 700 gaming companies from 100 countries each year and it is Europe’s biggest gaming exhibition where the developments related to the game industry are shared with the participation of the world’s game developers. Turkey became a partner of the Gamescom exhibition where companies display their most popular games, thanks to contributions of METU TEKNOPOLIS, TOGED, Turkey Exporters Assembly, Electrical, Electronics
and Services Exporters’ Association, Prime Ministry Investment Support and Promotion Agency of Turkey and Ankara Development Agency. 20 companies participated in the exhibition from METU TEKNOPOLIS. The companies in the Turkey Pavilion got the chance to display their projects and teams to the participants and the world. METU TEKNOPOLIS enables some idea initiatives to join the Gamescom with the support of Ankara Development Agency and paves the way of those ideas and enterprises.
Everything is for clean and green technology… Organized by the European Union Institute of Innovation and Technology, the world’s largest environmental ideas competition ClimateLaunchpad 2016 hosted Turkey as well as a participating country this year. Funded by the European Union and organized by the European Union Institute of Innovation and Technology, ClimateLaunchpad Competition has been held since 2015 on a global basis and this year, the competition opens its doors for ideas that will represent Turkey. The Turkey finals are in August 10 and the world finals will be carried out on October 7. The competition will be held in Estonia’s capital city Tallinn. EY Turkey Climate Change and Sustainability Services Leader Zeynep Okuyan said that: “ClimateLaunchpad offers support and finance to the ideas with high potential in order to be brought to
life.” The contribution of the EY in this competition is providing support for participating teams by giving ideas about the world of corporate business and enabling them the opportunities to update products for the needs of the market. This would provide the produced clean technology products or services in the open market to be a solution to the current problems. Zeynep Okuyan added: “By the way, the competition is being held in many countries but this year is a first in Turkey. ClimateLaunchpad competition is carried out among the European Union (EU) countries. Although Turkey has only participated in the competition this year, we managed to be in top 5 with the number of
applications received among 30 countries. We can say that once the awareness of this competition increases, the program will gain a stronger momentum in the years ahead.”
BKM Express.Dark Passage will represent Turkey Turkey’s first digital wallet BKM Express Turkey is the main sponsor of the leading electronic sports club Dark Passage’s League of Legends (LoL) team and owned League of Legends Champions League Turkey’s Grand Final Championship Cup. BKM Express.Dark Passage will take place in International Wild Card tournament in Brazil to represent Turkey. E-sport’s most spectacular event in Turkey,
the League of Legends Turkey Grand Final was held with the participation of 12 thousand spectators in the Ülker Sports Arena on August 13. A great excitement was felt as the BKM Express.Dark Passage defeated SuperMassive team and won the championship by a net score of 3-0. BKM Digital Solutions Vice President Serkan Yazıcıoğlu made a statement on the subject:
“We are aware of the fact that the young population who is interested in electronic sports as they live hand in hand with digital technologies demands speed and quality in their internet and mobile payments. With the support we give to the e-sports field, we aim at introducing BKM Express solutions regarding secure, fast and easy payment solutions to the players and audience.”
No more licenses and annual usage fees in Satellite Competitive Telecommunication Operators Association (TELKODER) announced that the regulation on abolition of user fees on satellite terminals is now published in the Official Gazette and entered into force. The license and the annual usage fees of
broadband satellite internet terminals were obstacles in front of the expansion of satellite internet services. The fees charged for satellite take up 10% of monthly wages and this is one of the reasons why the satellite internet subscribers are not increasing, according to TELKODER.
TELKODER emphasized on that with the new regulations they expect satellite broadband internet market to reach 20 thousand subscribers and 50 million TL and more increase in the following years. Since 2012, Ministry of Transport, Maritime Affairs and
Communications and BTK supports TELKODER to work on the issue, TELKODER Chairman Yusuf Ata Arıak gave the following information: “With this decision, everyone will benefit equally from the services offered in the Turkey’s digital transformation process and
internet usage will increase as well as satellite internet where cabling is not possible and the internet will be offered to the end users with reasonable prices. High speed and economical satellite internet will be a complementary service to ADSL, fiber and mobile internet services.”