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Where to Find
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What’s N www.cio-asia.com.
FOUR websites for fbm enterprise I.T. magazines Fairfax Business Media Asia (FBM Asia) offers four distinct individual magazine websites to benefit you, our subscribers, and to maintain an Internet presence. They include a comprehensive range of social networking, feedback, search and multimedia features. The magazine websites are regional publications CIO Asia (www.cio-asia.com) and MIS Asia (www.mis-asia.com), plus country-specific publications Computerworld Singapore (www.computerworld.com.sg), and Computerworld Malaysia (www. computerworld.com.my). Our greater digital media focus includes 20 weekly e-newsletters, expert blogs, features and breaking news, drawing upon the global content produced by more than 300 IDG magazines and the considerable resources of Fairfax Media in Australia. Here is some of our latest Web-exclusive content:
Cio role
3 buy-in challenges all CIOs face To be able to influence stakeholders and win over their peers, CIOs will need to be more politically savvy and focus on relationship building and fostering better links with relevant stakeholders. Go to: http://tinyurl.com/CIObuyin
LEADERSHIP & management 8 tips for retaining top IT talent
In a competitive market for highly skilled IT workers, what can organisations do to retain top talent? Is throwing more money at them the solution? What if they are already well compensated? To find out whether it is just money and flexibility that IT workers are looking for, or something else, CIO.com queried dozens of IT recruiters and executives. Go to: http://tinyurl.com/retainingtalent
3 ways IT can influence enterprise development 2013 is shaping up to be an interesting year for businesses worldwide as dated techniques give way to many technological advances across enterprises that are designed to meet rising customer expectations. This
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C I O • au g u s t - s e p t e m b e r 2013 • w w w.cio - asia.com
is forcing CIOs to think outside the box as their C-level counterparts sharpen their focus on what technology can do for their businesses. Go to: http://tinyurl.com/enterprisedev
outsourcing
10 IT outsourcing tips to become a ‘very important customer’ The combination of highly virtualised environments inside enterprise networks, along with an explosion of mobile traffic, are exposing the limitations of existing networks, and driving the need for a new era of dynamic and scalable networks of the future, IDC researchers said in a panel discussion at Interop recently. Go to: http://tinyurl.com/outsourcingtips
big data
5 strategic tips for avoiding a big data bust Without a strategic plan that includes coherent goals, strong data governance, rigorous processes for ensuring data accuracy, and the right mentality and people, big data initiatives can easily end up being a big-time liability rather than a valuable asset. Go to: http://tinyurl.com/bigdatabust
Inside
august – september 2013
8 018 0 1 011 0 0 1 1 0 0Cover 0 10 Story 10 108 001 1 0 1 1 1 11 0 11 1 11
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111 1 011 0 0 8 00 01 0 0 0 1 0001 10011 01 1 1 0 1 1 1 0 8 0 0 0 00 0 0111 800 11 8 0 8 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 01 1 1 0 1 11 0 0 0 0 81 0 8 0 1 0 8 1 0 1 0 01 01 1 01 8 0 0 1 1 1 8110 811 8 0 1 It used to be that being labelled a “job hopper” could 0 0 1 1 01 8 1 8 have serious effect on your career. Times have changed. 1 0 1 1 0 08 11 0 8 0 1 10 By Rich Hein 10 0 0 11 1 8 0 01 8 01 0810 0 1 1 88 0 1 8 0 80 0 Investing in ICT to build a more secure IT infrastructure, 8 1 11 8 address an increasingly complex IT+business 0 8 810 1 environment and tackle talent shortage. 0 81 01 By Sandra Ng 1 00 01 0 18 0 01 0 811 088 808 1 0 As changes in decision-making, delivery models, and 8 8 Big Data gold isn’t always where you would expect it. supplier positioning take hold, CIOs will need to take 0 0 8 1 0 By Thor Olavsrud their vendor management game to a new level. 1 00 0 By Stephanie Overby 0 8 8 8 8 00 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 1 8 0 811 1 111 1 8 0 811 81 8 111 0 8 11 0 0 81 8 1 0 0 81 8111 1 1 1 0 0 0 8 The annual CIO Workshop—in its 26th edition—was0110 8 00 10 1 1 08 1 another inspiring congregation of top executives 0 learning new ideas and sharing proven ones to face new challenges affecting the Asian CIO. Hong Kong, Singapore Among 10 Most Innovative By Jack Loo Nations | S. Korea and H.K. Ahead in Smartphone Penetration | Number of Online Shoppers Grows in Hong Kong | India Overtaking U.S. on Number of Developers | HP Reels Together a Converged Present and Future | Microsoft to Undergo Reorganisation Cloud-based human resource apps may be gaining 8
22 Tips to Avoid the Job Hopper Label
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Features
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18 SaaS HR Software Is Ready to Take Off
traction from organisations ditching old, on-premise solutions but cultural and human issues remain. By John Moore
20 Information Revolution Redux
Rick Theiler, Vice-President, Asia Pacific, of Commvault Systems, talks about how organisations should prepare for the Big Data revolution. By T.C. Seow
40 Data Points w w w.cio - asia.com • C I O • au g u s t - s e p t e m b e r 2013
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From the Editor
Broadband Haste Just the other day, a young colleague was telling me eagerly how his fibre-to-the-home network was finally happening over a weekend, and that he looked forward to “fantastic” download speeds of more than 50mbps from then on. Sounds great, don’t you agree? At that kind of bandwidth, everybody would be happy with their Internet experiences—whether it’s about Facebook updates, YouTube downloads or just pure tweeting and chatting. The good times have finally arrived, so to speak, for my dear young colleague. Now just when I thought some congratulatory remarks would be in order a few days after his momentous broadband network installation, he was but cheerful of his new found liberation—from slow download speeds, that is. Surprisingly, he was full of complaints about how slow the office network was, after having experienced the exhilarating times he had with his new broadband connection back at home the night before. Why am I not surprised by his gripings? I guess people who have become too comfortable with high-speed broadband connections are bound to be impatient whenever connections are below par, i.e., inferior to what they have, for having to wait for downloads to complete. The office network? That’s a different tale for another time. At a deeper level, I can sense that impatience becoming a wider problem for so-called Internet-savvy Gen Y, who have never experienced the Internet at dialup speeds, or the early days when downloading a file of just a megabyte in size could take five minutes or more to complete. Now? A minute for a 100MB file is considered slow on a good day. Could all this waiting be the cause of our seeming lack of tolerance for all things in our lives, from queueing up for fancy toys to show tickets to traffic queues across checkpoints? Perhaps the experts might have some answers for us after some extensive, society-wide studies. For mere mortals like us, I think the link is undeniable. Just look at the careless way some people drive on the roads nowadays, oblivious to their divided attention while checking email messages on the go, or worse, returning text messages with both hands on their smartphones and having only their elbows to steer. What happened to voice communication, which, in this case, is far less dangerous to other road users if they could care to use a hands-free kit to talk while driving? I wouldn’t venture as bold as to say these are the social ills we’ve been infected with because of all these smart devices and always-on connections we have. Yet we’re guilty of doing some of the most stupid things behind the wheels. Is there a way to keep out such malpractices? Stiff fines and penalties, you say? Somehow, I don’t think that will work. Perhaps we should go back to basics— educating people what is good practice and what’s not. What do you think?
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Hong Kong, Singapore Among 10 Most Innovative Nations Hong Kong and Singapore are among 10 most innovative nations, according to the Global Innovation Index 2013. Both nations have been ranked at the seventh and eighth spots respectively in the index that indicates that innovation hubs are increasing around the world despite the difficult state of the global economy. Both Hong Kong and Singapore make full use of its local advantages while maintaining a global outlook on markets and talent. The Wor ld I ntellec tual Proper t y Organization ( WIPO) director-general Francis Gurry advises the national-level policy makers not to emulate successful innovation models of other nations but focus more on realising the full potential of innovation in their home country. “Innovation is rapidly becoming a
rallying symbol for forces of progress and reform around the world,” said Bruno Lanvin, the report’s co-editor and executive director of graduate business school INSEAD’s European Competitiveness Initiative. “This is a source of optimism about the future of global innovation and economic recovery.”
Significant Divide Innovation has become global in nature and although high income economies rule the top five list, the GII index includes several new players that have increased their innovation capabilities and outputs. However a significant innovation divide exist between high-income countries and developing countries. Eighteen emerging economies including China, India and Malaysia
demonstrate rising levels of innovation compared with their peers, as per the GII co-published by Cornell University, INSEAD and WIPO. The nations that are not performing can increase their innovation capabilities by establishing hubs in which large c o m p a n i e s, w h o s e b u s i n e s s g o a l s are aligned with the objectives of the innovation hub, can play a significant role. “ These enterprise champions can facilitate the building of hub capabilities and their talent pools by stimulating innovation and by helping to bridge the gap between research and commercial success,” said Barry Jaruzelski, senior partner and leader of the Global Engineered Products & Services Practice at Booz & Company. — Anuradha Shukla
S. Korea and H.K. Ahead in Smartphone Penetration Last year, Singapore was the world’s leading country in smartphone usage or penetration (74 percent), followed by Hong Kong, UAE and South Korea. This year, South Korea and Hong Kong have beaten Singapore in the tally: Singapore is No. 4 in rank, after Norway at No. 3. This is despite the fact that Singapore now has a penetration rate of 78 percent in 2013. When it comes to tablets, Hong Kong is No.1 in the world (55 percent penetration). Singapore was No.2 in 2012 but has slipped down the ladder to No.3 spot this year (42 percent), behind Norway (45 percent). In app usage, South Korea beats all countries in the world with 85 percent usage/penetration. Last year, Singapore was at No.9 with 70 percent penetration.
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This year, Singapore has moved up to No.5 position, with 75 percent penetration. Interestingly, it is still behind Malaysia by one percentage point. Malaysia has 76 percent penetration rate. This is according to a research released by telecom and networking company, Ericcson. Ericsson ConsumerLab undertook analysis of an online panel study of 500 Singapore residents aged 16-60 who are daily Internet users. This was part of a survey of 43 countries covering a total of 38,000 people carried out by TNS. Other major highlights of the study are as follows: Users of Android smartphones have jumped in Singapore between last year and this year. Android devices have now
C I O • au g u s t - s e p t e m b e r 2013 • w w w.cio - asia.com
48 percent penetration while iOs devices have a 40 percent penetration rate. Last year, Android had only 29 percent market share in Singapore. Among the top reasons given by the respondents on their intent to purchase a smartphone included to upgrade their device, to access relevant apps and to surf the Internet. Tablet penetration in Singapore has increased from 31 percent in 2012 to 42 percent in 2013. A noticeable change is the jump in apps usage from 70 percent in 2012 to 75 percent in 2013, which ranks Singapore fifth in apps usage among the 43 countries included in this years’ analysis. In 2012, Singapore was ranked as No. 9. — Zafar Anjum
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Number of Online Shoppers Grows in Hong Kong The number of online shoppers has grown in Hong Kong, according to a newly released GfK Retail to e-tail survey. The number of people who use the Web to shop has grown from 218,000 in 2002 to 1.38 million in 2012. This tremendous growth is attributed to an increase in consumers who use personal computers, smartphones and tablets in Hong Kong. Technology and availability of these screens has encouraged more customers to shop online as it saves them from standing in queues and other problems associated with brick and mortar shops. The GfK Retail to e-tail survey was done earlier this year via online questionnaire and includes responses from interviewees aged 18 to 65 years. Gen Y or people born in the mid-1980’s and later have shown
the highest level of adoption for using smartphone for online shopping. “Intensifying migration to 3G / 4G LTE networks of smart mobile devices, added to the increasing adoption of larger screen sized smartphones which facilitate ease of usage have greatly fuelled the growth momentum of mobile commerce, much to the delight of retailers and new startups,” said Walter Leung, managing director for GfK Hong Kong.
Three Platforms Fifty-four percent of the respondents used at least three platforms to do research before making a decision. Customers turn to search engines, social media and discussion forums for more information. More than four in five online
shoppers used either their laptop or desktop computer; more than half used smartphones; and 40 percent used their media tablets to make online purchases. Clothing, accessories, and shoes are the top three online shopping categories followed by handbags, facial skincare products and books. Other popular products are hotels, flight tickets, and electronic products. Research shows that one third of the online shoppers spent around US$25US$64 during each transaction, and this amount was spent mainly on clothing, accessories and shoes. More than 80 percent of the total online purchases of local consumers recorded in the survey are for items which cost below US$128. — Anuradha Shukla
India Overtaking U.S. on Number of Developers The U.S. may be the global centre of the IT universe, but India will exceed the U.S. in the number of software developers by 2017, a new report notes. There are about 18.2 million software developers worldwide, a number that is due to rise to 26.4 million by 2019, a 45 percent increase, stated Evans Data Corp. in its Global Developer Population and Demographic Study. Today, the U.S. leads the world in software developers, with about 3.6 million. India has about 2.75 million. But by 2018, India will have 5.2 million developers, a nearly 90 percent increase, versus 4.5 million in the U.S., a 25 percent increase, Evans Data projected. India’s software development growth rate is attributed, in part, to its population size, 1.2 billion, and relative youth, with about half the population under 25 years of age, and economic growth. India’s services firms hire, in many cases, thousands of new employees each quarter. Consequently, IT and software work is seen as clear path to the middle class for many
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of the nation’s young. For instance, in one quarter this year, Tata Consultancy Services added more than 17,000 employees, gross, bringing its total headcount to 263,600. In the same quarter of 2010, the company had about 150,000 workers.
Projection Adjusted Its real GDP growth has been about eight percent over the last decade, but there are signs the growth rate may fall, the report said. In 2011, Evans Data projected that India would surpass the U.S. in software developers by 2015. Janel Garvin, the CEO of Evans, said that in 2011, in the midst of the recession, the firm had a lower forecast for U.S. growth than it current does. “At that point India’s growth was not as affected by the recession so the projection was that India would surpass U.S. earlier,” Garvin said. “Since that time there have been improvements in the U.S. and we’ve adjusted the growth projection accordingly in this latest study.” — Patrick Thibodeau
C I O • au g u s t - s e p t e m b e r 2013 • w w w.cio - asia.com
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HP Reels Together a Converged Present and Future Hewlett Packard, one of the oldest household names in the digital age, made good on a promise it uttered half a decade ago. That of the converged infrastructure. And to slam that message home it hosted media from all corners of Asia in a mega announcement of multiple product releases covering every imaginable aspect of any enterprise IT infrastructure, and then threw in some sexy personal computing machines for home, work and play. Speaking at a conference last June in Beijing, China, Jim Merritt, Senior Vice President and General Manager, HP Enterprise Group, Asia Pacific and Japan, looked at “the three big infrastructure trends” his company had seen coming for a while now. “ The first one is around converged infrastructure—it’s really what’s happening in the industry, with customers taking their resources and converging them. Storage, servers and networking-into resource pools, to help them reduce their overall IT costs,” said Merritt. “[Second is] the cloud. This is
really about customers taking cloud implementations—whether private, public or managed cloud implementations-and trying to achieve faster time to market and time to value.” “And the third infrastructure trend that is up and coming is the software defined data centre,” he said. “This is really about customers and their suppliers deciding to use software to automate their data centres, to automate the provisioning of workflows to reduce labour and costs within the infrastructure.” The biggest focus of the day though was HP Converged Infrastructure. For that, a slew of enterprise products have started making their way to the market. “Now if you think back about four to five years ago, HP first introduced the term of ‘converged infrastructure’. At that time we saw that the challenges of managing data centres were too cost prohibitive. Most customers [even today] spend 70 to 80 percent of their IT budgets on keeping the lights on, in terms of maintenance, maintaining legacy technology,” Merritt
said. “The whole convergence trend takes those different siloes of software, storage, servers and networking-converges it and allows customers to use that converged resource pool. This dramatically increases the efficiency of the environment,” he added. — F.Y. Teng
Microsoft to Undergo Reorganisation Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer unveiled what he termed is a “far-reaching realignment” of the company designed to help Microsoft innovate faster and operate in a more coherent and holistic manner as it faces a variety of challenges from rivals big and small. “Going for ward, our strategy will focus on creating a family of devices and services for individuals and businesses that empower people around the globe at home, at work and on the go, for the activities they value most,” Ballmer wrote in a memo sent to all Microsoft employees. The reorganisations’ three main angles are to focus the whole company on a single strategy, improving its capacity in all its business and technology areas and collaborating better around a common
set of goals, he wrote. “This is a big undertaking. It touches nearly ever y piece of what we do and how we work. It changes our org structure, the way we collaborate, how we allocate resources, how we best empower our engineers and how we market,” Ballmer wrote.
Drastic and Extensive As part of the plan, Office chief Kurt Del Bene will retire from the company. Leading the new Operating Systems Engineering Group will be Terry Myerson; the Devices and Studios Engineering Group will be led by Julie Larson-Green; the Applications and Services Engineering Group will be led by Qi Lu; and the Cloud and Enterprise Engineering Group will be led by Satya Nadella.
Rumours that Ballmer was working on a drastic and extensive company reorganisation began popping up weeks ago. He reportedly kept the plan close to his vest, causing anxiety among high-level officials fearful of what their fate might be. Unhappy investors and industry critics have argued for years that Microsoft’s product roster is too heterogeneous and disconnected, housing products as disparate as gaming and entertainment devices, CRM software, desktop and server OSes, collaboration and communication applications, development tools, consumer online services and tablets. A recurrent suggestion has been to spin off some business units as autonomous subsidiaries or independent companies. — Juan Carlos Perez
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cio workshop
Be Flexible and Adapt to Change The annual CIO Workshop—in its 26th edition—was another inspiring congregation of top executives learning new ideas and sharing proven ones to face new challenges affecting the Asian CIO. By Jack Loo
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he common thread running through this year’s CIO Workshop, held from May 28 to June 1 in Singapore and Seoul, Korea, was the need for IT leaders to be flexible and to adapt to consumer technologies. Jointly organised by the Singapore IT Management Association (ITMA) and Accenture, the CIO Workshop is an annual conference that aims to serve as a platform for Singapore’s IT leaders to discuss the challenges facing the technology community. “This year’s CIO Workshop seeks to explore and unravel how consumer technologies are powering world economies and how convergence of the digital, social and mobile spheres are creating opportunities for organisations to innovate and lead in ways that are unprecedented,” said Mark Tham, Managing Director, Health & Public Service, Accenture. Tham is also the chairman of the board of advisors who crafted the direction and theme of this year’s workshop. And the thriving Asian economy gives technology leaders in the region the opportunity to excel, according to Graeme Maxton, Fellow of the International Centre of the independent global non-profit Club of Rome, in his keynote address. In Asia, India’s economy grew three times within a space of 13 years, while Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia grew at least twice their respective sizes over the same period. And China, which in 1990 contributed less than two percent to the global economy, has, by 2013 reached 13 percent, said Maxton. So what are the technology opportunities in the region? The need for improved infrastructure like transportation and healthcare are areas with potential, said Maxton.
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Mark Tham There is also rising local competition where domestic companies are taking on their western counterparts. “We are already seeing the likes of Huawei doing so,” said Maxton. While technology hardware is commonly manufactured in Asia, increasing demand for software could see regional developers at some point say “we need our own operating system,” he said.
New Roles & Responsibilities Intense competition among companies is unavoidable in a growing economy when businesses would endeavour to realise maximum returns as much as possible. By extension, CIOs will face a lot of pressure from their CEOs, according to Magnus Bocker, who is the CEO of Singapore Exchange. “[The pressure] will never cease; you are expected to walk on water,” he quipped—almost with a tinge of sympathy for the majority of the audience comprising member CIOs of ITMA. In his presentation titled “Future Role of the CIO”, Bocker put forth key points that he as a CEO expects from his CIO. The first is the ability to understand the business strategy of the organisation—a common enough advice that CIOs have been told again and again in their efforts to uplift their strategic roles with their organisations.
The second is the set of business solutions that the CIO could bring to the boardroom. In other words, if the CIO doesn’t understand the business, he or she would not create the right solutions for the organisation, Bocker said. The third is innovation. “People spend too little time thinking about innovation. You need to allow time for your people to do wrong, but at least, try,” advised Bocker. Risk-taking should be encouraged, so long as it leads to better decisionmaking in the long run. And innovation leads to the fourth point: growth. New ideas, if implemented correctly and quickly, lead to new products and markets—something that CEOs expect all the time, he said. Growth then leads to the fifth point: revenue. This is an all-important focus of the CEO, Bocker said. And when a CIO can achieve revenue generation, “it opens up doors that you cannot imagine possible,” he proclaimed. In short, the CIO is expected to wear the hat of a revenue-generator, in addition to the technology hat that he or she has been wearing traditionally. A panel discussion on the impact of technology on how businesses operate was the next item on the agenda of the CIO Workshop. Jonathan Krause, Executive Partner, Gartner Advisory (Singapore), was the moderator, and there were two panelists—Howie Lau, Vice President Corporate Development, Lenovo, and International Centre of the Club of Rome’s Maxton.
New Opportunities The opportunity to venture into new frontiers saw Singaporebased telco SingTel expanding from its traditional voice and data business. In his presentation, Alfonso Villanueva, Chief Innovation Officer (Digital Life), SingTel, told the audience that his company ramped up a variety of ‘activities’ including acquiring mobile advertising specialist Amobee and social photo aggregator Pixable. There was also a shift in mindset in terms of the speed at which SingTel initiatives are launched. “We used to think in terms of years. If the project was urgent, it would take about nine months. Now, we are looking at weeks,” said Villanueva. NFC technology looks set to be a major component in contactless card operator EZ-Link’s vision of a cashless Singapore society, according to Nicholas Lee, CEO, EZ-Link. NFC technology is a disruptive model that can revolutionise the payments industry, he said. For instance, an NFC-payment platform can replace a more expensive point-of-sales system and its hardware. The operator had already started a number of NFC pilots with various telcos in Singapore and other technology vendors. Lee, however, revealed that the journey towards wide adoption of NFC remained a tough one. There were a
few lessons learned: “One was that ‘standards’ does not mean interoperability,” he said. Numerous devices and readers had to be changed or rewired. And the response was to introduce vigorous qualifying processes to ensure interoperability before commencement of operations, he said.
The Seoul Experience The second leg of the workshop was held in the capital city of South Korea—Seoul. Through the same format, a number of presentations was held, apart from social networking events and site visits. Consumer technologies can disrupt traditional forms of businesses, and one example is the e-retailer Amazon, which has transformed the retail industry, said Paul Daugherty, Chief Technology Officer at Accenture. He was the keynote speaker in Seoul. “Every business is now a digital business. Technology is changing the way we do things. It is obligatory for the CIO to work the enterprise to help change the business,” said Daugherty, who then talked about the trends presented in Accenture’s Technology Vision 2013 report. Quoting from the report, Daugherty said that businesses would need to rethink their digital strategies to move beyond e-commerce and marketing. Although mobile technology, social networks, and context-based services have increased the number of digital connections with consumers, most companies are still just creating more detailed views of consumers, consumer attributes, and transactions. Businesses now have new ways to learn about consumers based on increasingly digital interactions that include email, social media, Web pages, online chat, mobile apps, and tweets. “We are now moving away from transaction to interaction,” said Daugherty. With technology, instead of not having enough interaction, companies can better interact with their customers than before, he said. The key to success is the seamless integration of the various digital channels, he added. Daugherty also listed fashion label Burberry and Virgin Airlines as businesses that have successful multichannel approaches. Another speaker, Jin Lee, Senior Managing Director, Accenture Mobility, asked the audience: “How pervasive is mobility today?” That was to gauge the extent of mobile device penetration in our society today. In his presentation titled “Mobility–Where Are We Headed?”, Lee listed his family’s use of mobile devices as an example of the ubiquity of mobile devices in mature markets such as Korea. “I have 13 connected devices, my wife has three and my son uses two. And he is 24 months old,” he said. Backing up all 17 devices was his home Wi-Fi network rated at 300Mbps, and yet that bandwidth was already considered inadequate at times, he said. His “tech-savvy” son could discern the difference between
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cio workshop Jung-Seong Han, Head Manager of New Trend & Business, Hana Bank, next talked about mobile devices in banking. The bank saw the potential of mobile devices and has ventured into the mobility app space since 2009. “We saw that smartphone users are using their device as a problem solver. So the bank’s approach to mobile banking is to position ourselves and our services where we can help them offer solutions,” said Han. The bank has at least five apps, including one that was built for medical tourism, taking advantage of South Korea’s advanced cosmetic surgery industry. The apps include a slew of features such as personal financial management services and location-based coupon offerings. The bank also added personalised touches, such as using social network services-based user interface and customer support avatars that are actually real customer service agents.
Future Role
Paul Daugherty two different networks—the residential Wi-Fi network and the 4G LTE mobile network—and switches from one device to another whenever he found his YouTube watching experience wanting. “He is a power user. He knows the difference between Wi-Fi and LTE. And he is 24 months old,” said Lee. That anecdote conveys a powerful message on how the consumer market will be like, when the very young generation of today, brought up on mobile devices that constantly provide access to the Internet, e-commerce, information and whatnot. Organisations will need to relook at how they should engage the consumer of tomorrow, who doesn’t have the patience nor the attention span of mature adults today.
A Defence Stronghold While the Android OS has its security gaps, Samsung Electronics is taking steps to address the issue with its management and security system KNOX, said Jae Shin, Vice President, Enterprise Business Team, Mobile Communications Division, from the Korean tech giant. KNOX works by containerising corporate and personal data separately on the Android OS. The software runs in the BIOS (basic input output system) firmware of the Android OS with file system encryption, to protect against data leaks, viruses and malware. Samsung developers have written at least 700 APIs that can be used to help IT shops customise BYOD security policies in partnership with Mobile Device Management vendors such as Mobile Iron, Juniper, AirWatch and Sybase.
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Consumer technologies are transforming the role of the CIO. But how the IT leader can adapt was the main issue raised at a panel discussion in Seoul. One way is for the CIO to work closely with the CEO, said Matthew Johnston, Managing Director, South Asia, Dell, replying to moderator Jayson Goh’s question on where the CIO could start in his or her transformation journey. Goh is Executive Director, Infocomms & Media/Planning & CIO, Economic Development Board of Singapore. Another approach for the CIO can be found in the vertical that the CIO’s company operates in, suggested Samsung Electronics’ Shin. The CIO has to start from the ground up, Shin said. “If the CIO is operating in retail, then start from the sales floor, and understand the various data points, including POS systems,” he added. The conference attendees were then treated to an overview of the nationwide initiatives run by the South Korea government’s National Information Society Agency. The statutory body is in charge of technology infrastructure development and promotion in the country. One programme is the Gigabit Internet Project that aims to improve the current 2 Mbps speed of the Nationwide Broadband Network to 1 Gbps speed levels. “By 2017, the Gigabit Internet Service will be available in 90 percent of Korean territory,” said Sun-Moo Kang, Director, National Information Society Agency. The rural communities in South Korea are not forgotten either, with the Rural Broadband Project launched in 2010, Kang said. “The objective is to build broadband networks in small towns from rural areas to provide high speed Internet service, and provide applications specifically developed for rural residents,” he said. The applications he referred to include home security systems, agricultural training tools and CCTV platforms.
AN ADVERTORIAL
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Big Data gold isn’t always where you would expect it. hen it comes to leveraging big data, most companies focus their efforts on four business functions: sales, marketing, customer service and research and development. But companies that look beyond the obvious may find even greater return on investment in areas like logistics or finance, said Satya Ramaswamy, Global Head of Mobility and Next Gen Solutions at US-based Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). TCS surveyed 1,217 large enterprises in nine countries and four regions (U.S., Europe, Asia-Pacific and Latin America) in December 2012 and January 2013 about their big data initiatives. Fifty-three percent of the companies surveyed had undertaken big data initiatives in 2012 and 43 percent predicted an ROI of more than 25 percent. About a quarter or the respondents projected a negative return or didn’t know what their return was. The 643 respondents that had undertaken big data initiatives represented a broad range of investment. Seven percent
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had invested at least US$500 million and 15 percent spent at least US$100 million on big data initiatives. Nearly a quarter (24 percent) spent less than US$2.5 million. The industries that spent the most included telecommunications, travel-related, high tech and banking. The industries that spent the least included life sciences, retail, and energy/resources. Perhaps unsurprisingly, 55 percent of all big data spending goes to four business functions that generate and maintain revenue: sales (15.2 percent), marketing (15 percent), customer service (13.3 percent) and R&D/new product development (11.3 percent). Ramaswamy noted that three non-revenue-generating functions get less of the big data spending pie: IT (11.1 percent), finance (7.7 percent) and HR (5 percent). But while sales and marketing get the lion’s share of the big data budget (30.2 percent), the highest expected ROI came from the logistics and finance functions. Those functions together only constitute 14.4 percent of the big data budget, but logistics managers said they expected their big data initiatives to generate a 78 percent return, while finance managers expected a return of 69 percent. In comparison, marketing executives expected an ROI of 41 percent on their big data initiatives.
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Big Data in Sales
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“This data suggests that activities which companies believe have the greatest potential to benefit from big data go far beyond marketing and sales,” Ramaswamy said. In fact, of the 25 highest-rated activities, there are an equal number in logistics and sales (six). In addition, marketing and customer service had four each. In other words, opportunities to capitalise on big data exist in numerous corners of a large, global company.
Big Data in Marketing TCS found that marketers identified two areas that benefitted the most from big data initiatives: determining campaign effectiveness and channel effectiveness. Marketers also identified tailoring marketing campaigns and promotions offers and determining customer value as areas representing high potential benefit. “Tailoring marketing campaigns can begin with figuring out which prospects should be targeted in the first place,” TCS writes in its report, The Emerging Big Returns on Big Data. “An auto insurance company that we spoke with found that over 80 percent of the over 100,000 households it sent direct mails to had the wrong demographics and would never buy insurance from the firm. In fact, only one percent bought policies as a result of these campaigns. After using analytics to determine the right demographics, the company conducted a more targeted direct mail campaign and increased its response rate tenfold. That boosted revenue and cut marketing costs,” the reports said. TCS also found that marketers feel their biggest challenge in implementing big data is technological. Marketing is typically the least automated function in many companies, and so they struggle to handle the volume, variety and velocity of the data they have.
For sales executives, big data’s greatest potential is in identifying the most valuable customers for the organisation. Finding opportunities to cross-sell products and services came second on their list. TCS pointed to Dell as a textbook case of companies using big data to better identify their best prospective customers. Dell began working with a provider of cloud-based analytics for software in 2007 in an effort to help the Dell salesforce pinpoint its best prospects. By identifying the types of customer behaviour most likely to lead to the purchase of different products, Dell’s sales productivity, efficiency and revenue in Europe nearly doubled. TCS attributes at least part of this success with the halving of the number of leads that marketers forwarded to the sales organisation. The sales function also has its challenges with big data. Sales executives say their biggest challenge is data silos, according to TCS. They find it difficult to get business units to share information with the sales function that could prove valuable in identifying trends and making decisions.
Big Data for Customer Service Customer service executives told TCS that they saw the greatest benefit from big data in identifying customers that were at risk of discontinuing use of the company’s offerings. Analysing the way customers use the company’s website also received high marks from customer service executives. However, it should be noted that even the lowest-rated activity on the list—monitoring products as customers use them to detect manufacturing or design problems—was considered to have more than moderate potential. TCS pointed to Xerox as an example of the latter. The company gathers terabytes of data from the 1.2 million devices it has at customer sites and uses predictive algorithms to determine which ones may stop operating. Like sales executives, customer service executives see data silos as their biggest challenge.
Big Data for Manufacturing For manufacturing and production managers, detecting product defects and boosting quality, along with improving supply planning, represent the greatest potential benefits of big data. “A US$2 billion industrial manufacturer told us that analysing sales trends to keep its manufacturing efficient was the main focus of its big data investments,” TCS wrote. “The company’s products are largely engineered to order. Understanding the behaviour of repeat customers is critical to delivering in a timely and profitable manner. Most of its profitability analysis is to make sure that the company has good contracts in place. The company says its adoption of analytics has facilitated its shift to lean manufacturing,
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cover story and has helped it determine which products and processes should be scrapped.” TCS said manufacturing and production managers believe building strong levels of trust between data scientists and themselves is their greatest challenge. “Perhaps the quants have a harder time relating to managers on the factory floor than they do with other, more ‘whitecollar’ functions,” TCS said.
Big Data for R&D R&D, product development and product engineering managers point to monitoring product quality as the biggest potential benefit from big data. “That indicates they may be more interested in using big data to protect established products than in inventing new ones,” TCS wrote. “However, identifying customer needs for new products and enhancements to current products featured next on the list.”
Netflix is an example of a company that has used its data to do the latter. “The company collects enormous volumes and varieties of data: 30 million ‘plays’ daily (what customers are watching); million consumer ratings of its content per day; billions of hours of streamed video, device and device location data, social media data and other digital information, according to one technology publication’s summary of a Netflix data scientist’s conference presentation in June 2012,” TCS wrote. “Such data told Netflix there was a large market for a remake of the 1990 British Broadcasting Corporation mini-series called ‘House of Cards.’” Since its release, Netflix’s ‘House of Cards’ remake has become the most streamed Web content in the U.S. and 40 other nations, according to TCS. TCS says R&D managers rate finding data scientists as their biggest challenge, followed by getting managers in other functions to share data.
8 Real World Big Data Deployments The amount of data in the world is increasing exponentially; it doubles every 18 months. There’s much discussion of big data, both in terms of the problems it causes and the potential utility it represents. But some people are doing more than talking. Here are eight real-world big data deployments. For even more information, see the TechAmerica Foundation Big Data Commission’s case studies.
1. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Weather Service NOAA has been in the big data business for 50 years. It now manages 30 petabytes of new data per year, collecting more than 3.5 billion observations per day from satellites, ships, aircraft, buoys and other sensors. It then uses direct measurement of atmospheric, oceanographic and terrestrial data together with complex, high-fidelity predictive modelling to provide the National Weather Service (NWS). NWS’ models generate millions of products per day—weather warnings and guidance provided public and private sector forecasters, including government
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agencies like the Department of Defence and NASA.
2. AM Biotechnologies DNA Sequence Analysis Solution Based in Houston, AM Biotechnologies is focused on developing a proprietary new technology for producing chemically modified, DNA-based molecular entities called aptamers. Aptamers have uses ranging from the diagnostic quantification of a particular analyte in a blood sample to the targeted delivery of drugs to specific sites in the body. Developing these aptamers requires analysing up to tens of billions of short DNA sequences. It uses web-based big data analysis tools from CDHIT and Galaxy to crunch its data.
3. NARA Electronic Records Archive Th e N a tional Archive and R ecords Administration (NARA) is the official record keeper of the U.S. It manages 142 TB (and growing) of information, which represents more than seven billion objects, including records from across the federal agency ecosystem, Congress and several presidential libraries. The records that are
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digitised exist in more than 4,800 different formats. NARA is also in the process of digitising more than four million cubic feet (113,000 cubic metres) of traditional archival holdings. By 2016, 95 percent of the electronically archived information must be available to researchers. NARA has built the Electronic Records Archive (ERA) as a “system of systems” to perform the various archival functions and records management governed by different legal frameworks.
4. Vestas Wind Energy Turbine Placement and Maintenance Danish firm Vestas uses supercomputers and a big data modelling solution to pinpoint the optimal location for its wind turbines to maximise power generation and reduce energy cost. It uses a wind library that incorporates data from global weather systems with data collected from its existing turbines. The wind library currently holds nearly 2.8 petabytes of data. Current parameters include temperature, barometr ic pressure, humidit y, precipitation, wind direction and velocity from the ground level up to 300 feet, and
Big Data in Logistics/Distribution Logistics managers rated monitoring product shipments as the most valuable benefit of big data, though it also rated highly the capability to determine locations of inventory shrinkage and the ability to identify spikes in costs. TCS points to Deere & Co., the global manufacturer of agricultural and construction equipment, which is experimenting with technology to help it assess its inventory of parts and other components in real time. Logistics managers see securing the data as their greatest big data challenge, especially keeping it secure from internal parties. They consider figuring out how to use their data to make decisions as their second biggest challenge.
Big Data for Accounting Finance and accounting managers see a great deal of big data value in two areas, according to TCS: measuring risk and improving budgeting and forecasting. TCS said they
the company’s recorded historical data. Vestas plans to add global deforestation metrics, satellite images, historical metrics, geospatial data and data on phases of the moon and tides.
5. IRS Compliance Data Warehouse In 1996, The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) initiated a project to upload a single year of tax return data for analysis. The project has resulted in the Compliance Data Warehouse (CDW ), which contains more than one petabyte of information. Most of the legacy data is structured, but new data from electronically filed tax returns, international tax treaty partners and third parties come in XML or other semi/unstructured formats. The IRS research group runs analytics on the data for jobs ranging from estimating the U.S. tax gap to predicting identity theft, measuring the taxpayer burden and simulating the effects of policy changes on tax behaviour.
6. University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT) Medical Monitoring UOIT, in conjunc tion with IBM, has
are less interested in using big data to reduce internal or external theft. Finance managers identified determining what data to use for different business decisions as their primary challenge in generating value from big data. They also point to getting other functions to share information.
Big Data for HR Human Resources managers are most interested in using big data for employee retention. They want to figure out which employees are most likely to leave so they can discourage them from doing so. They also want to use big data to understand the effectiveness of recruiting campaigns and to gauge employee morale. HR managers said their biggest big data challenge is understanding where to focus investments. They also struggle with finding data scientists.
undertaken Project Artemis, an effort to improve medical monitoring technology to allow it to detect warning indicators before vital signs reach critical levels— like nosocomial infection, which is lifethreatening to premature infants and first presents as a pulse that is within acceptable limits but not varying as it should. Project Artemis is based on Streams analytic software, an information processing architecture that enables near real-time decision support through continuous analysis of streaming data.
7. TerraEchos Perimeter Intrusion Detection TerraEchos specialises in technology designed to protect and monitor critical infrastructure. One of its clients is the U.S. Department of Energy Labs, which relies on it to protect its scientific intelligence, technology and resources. It needed a technology solution that would detect, classify, locate and track potential threats (mechanical and biological)—essentially distinguishing the sound of a whisper from that of the wind from miles away. To do so, the solution uses sensors, analytic software
and high-performance computing to continuously consume and analyse massive amounts of information-in-motion, from human and animal movement to atmospheric conditions.
8. NASA Human Spaceflight Imagery Collection, Archival and Hosting NASA’s Johnson Space Center (JSC) is the hub for the U.S.’s astronaut corps and home to International Space Station (ISS) mission operations. Since 1959, it has collected more than four million still photographs, 9.5 million ft (2.9 million m) of 16mm film and 85,000 video tapes and files representing 81,616 hours of video in analogue and digital formats. The collection is used for media content as well as by the scientific and engineering community. NASA has created an application called Imagery Online (IO) which links imagery file names to all of the metadata associated with it. But the agency still faces a big challenge in making the collection available to the public in both its raw, native form and transcoding it into smaller, more accessible formats.
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cloud solutions
SaaS HR Software Is Ready to Take Off Cloud-based human resource apps may be gaining traction from organisations ditching old, on-premise solutions but cultural and human issues remain. By John Moore
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ecently, BPR-Rico Manufacturing decided it was time for a change in its human resource systems. The Medina, Ohio-based engineering outfit, which builds lift trucks and other material-handling equipment, had been using Sage North America’s Abra HR solution. The onpremises deployment was more than a decade old and had acquired some eccentricities. The system would randomly change employee dental insurance deductions to the two-year prior rate. An employee who generally worked a 32-hour week would occasionally flex to 40 hours, but the system would still pay for only 32 hours. As it happened, Rico Manufacturing already was replacing its paper-based time card system with cloud-based time and attendance software from Kronos. The company decided to tap Kronos to replace its human resources and payroll system as well—and move it to the cloud. The company went live on Kronos’ Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) human resources platform last July. The time and attendance system kicked in two months later. Kent Stelmasczuk, CFO at Rico Manufacturing, says the Kronos SaaS approach is cost-neutral with respect to the on-premises system, just considering the software licensing fees and not taking the cost of hardware into account. “Anything we save on hardware is all upside,” Stelmasczuk said, noting that the company had been preparing for a server upgrade prior to the cloud shift. The fundamentals of SaaS human resources are lining up for other organisations as well. The Department of Veterans Affairs is working towards a pilot launch of a SaaS HR system under a 10-year, US$123 million contract with IBM. That deployment will replace a legacy human resources application that dates from the early 1960s. Indeed, the sheer age of many human resources systems
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encourages migration to a new platform and that often means SaaS. Jason Averbook, Chief Business Innovation Officer at cloud services provider Appirio, says the HR application sector is in the midst of a replacement cycle. Averbrook was previously CEO at Knowledge Infusion, a human capital management consultancy Appirio acquired last year. Up to 90 percent of the Fortune 1000 will replace or reimplement its core HR system in the next four years,” he says. “Most of the software that’s out there was written before the Internet was born. It doesn’t meet the needs and expectations of employees and managers. That’s why you see so much activity around the cloud.”
Cloud Benefits CIOs opting for human resources in the cloud have a number of choices from companies that grew up in the cloud or have moved to SaaS delivery following a history on on-premises products. Vendors offering human resources management applications in SaaS form include ADP, Ceridian, Kronos, Oracle, SAP and Workday. Averbook said a pending on-premises upgrade of a legacy human resources system can trigger a move to SaaS. Many ageing in-house systems have been customised beyond recognition and require a ton of internal support to keep them running, he pointed out. “CIOs want to get out of the business of maintaining back office systems. When the time to upgrade comes, it’s natural to look elsewhere.” Rico Manufacturing avoided a legacy system and infrastructure upgrade and also offloaded the ongoing chore of updating an in-house application. The company used to receive quarterly state and federal tax updates from its previous HR vendor. But the updating task was susceptible to human error. The in-house software, for example, let customers select which portions of the
update they wanted to install. (In one case, prior to Stelmasczuk’s arrival, the state tax updates were applied, but not the federal.) In addition, the updating process involved downloading the update file, applying the update to the software and then going into the application and launching the updates. Stelmasczuk explained: “It was a multi-step process.” Now, Kronos handles the job of keeping the software current. “We don’t have to do the application of the updates and patches,” Stelmasczuk said. “It is all happening behind the scenes.” “For [the] VA, a vendor-hosted HR solution just makes sense,” added Paula Molloy, Associate Deputy Assistant Secretary, Human Resources Management, Policy & Planning, at the VA. “It allows us to deliver functionality without a major infrastructural investment, and frees-up our IT resources to focus on those applications that truly need to be ‘in-house.’” The VA, meanwhile, also benefits from the hosted system’s shared-services pricing model, according to Adam Jelic, partner at IBM Global Business Services. He said IBM is providing the VA’s human resources application through an HR Line of Business Shared Services Center. The hosted system’s advantages, he said, include sharing cost across multiple clients, keeping software up-to-date and speed of deployment. IBM is working on the application design, development and testing phase of the VA project. The company will eventually operate the hosted system, which will be built around Oracle PeopleSoft, Monster Government Solutions and IBM software. Deployment of a production application is slated to begin in January 2014 with the rollout to be completed by year-end 2015.
Implementation Hiccups Installation time is often cited as a benefit of the SaaS model, but the duration of the rollout varies according to the size and experience of the customer and the scope of the project, industry executives say. The VA’s phased-deployment will span a couple of years—but the system will support more than 300,000 employees. In contrast, said Stelmasczuk, the core SaaS human resources deployment at Rico Manufacturing—which employs about 100 people—took about a month and a half. Bob DelPonte, senior product line director at Kronos, said that, while SaaS removes the infrastructure component, the approach doesn’t save time in configuration or other aspects of a rollout. SaaS providers must hold discussions with customers on how the application should be set up, he said: “Those conversations still need to be happening with the business folks.” Averbook concurs that the technical aspects of SaaS deployment go much faster compared with on-premises solutions. The people and process side, however, takes time. “What isn’t necessarily faster is the cultural change that
goes into deploying these new tools,” he said. Averbook said SaaS vendors can get a customer live in six to 12 weeks, “but that doesn’t mean people are going to use it [the cloud app] or understand why you did it.” A six- to 12-month initiative is a more reasonable expectation for an organisation’s human resources SaaS deployment, he added.
Channel Partners as Consultants Averbook said a human resources cloud project slants 90-10 towards people and process vs. technology. That’s in contrast to enterprise resource planning (EPR) projects, where Averbrook could spend perhaps 70 percent of his time on technology and 30 percent on process and cultural change. Process-oriented installations provide an opening for channel partners with a consultative focus. Averbook said Appirio aims to help customers “re-imagine” how workforcefacing tools can be used. Human resources software doesn’t have a good reputation among workers, who may resist using it. But the consumer technology-inspired interfaces of the newer cloud solutions provide an opportunity to make human resources software an everyday tool that employees want to use. “Let’s not try to figure out how to get it adopted,” Averbook said of SaaS human resources. “Let’s try to figure out how [employees] get addicted to it.” SaaS human resources vendors recruit partners to extend their market reach. Workday’s partner ecosystem includes 29 service providers, for example, with Accenture, Appirio, Deloitte, IBM and PwC among the companies on the roster. Leighanne Levensaler, a Workday vice president who oversees the company’s human capital management product strategy, said those partners can provide implementation help as well as business transformation and change management services. Since Workday does all the infrastructure set up, Levensaler said, “The systems integrators are doing far more than they had been able to do on legacy providers’ implementations. They can focus on some very strategic engagements as well as configure the system for production.” DelPonte said Kronos works with about 120 channel partners, who offer the company’s small and medium business products. He says that channel generates about 45 percent of the company’s SMB revenue. Channel partners hope to secure work easing customers’ human resources cloud transition. But the buyer’’ own experience with SaaS in workforce-related areas can also help pave the way. Jelic noted that the VA had been using an SaaS-based learning system prior to the full-scale human resources engagement and added that other public sector clients use SaaS-based recruitment systems. “It gives them an example of how certain components of human resources can be handled through SaaS and encourages them to expand,” he said.
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big data
Information Revolution Redux Rick Theiler, Vice-President, Asia Pacific, of Commvault Systems, talks about how organisations should prepare for the Big Data revolution. By T.C. Seow
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hat’s the big concern about big data? It is its sheer volume, generated by ever-increasing number of devices, data sources and applications. Market research firm IDC predicts that more than 4,200 petabytes (PB) of new storage must be deployed just this year to keep pace with data growth. Speaking of growth, organisations are also facing challenges brought by changing data retention requirements, and industry regulations necessitate that some types of data be kept longer than what’s required before. Apart from storage solutions, CIOs are also hard pressed to deal with the plethora of data categorisation, archiving, and retrievals. Again, IDC estimates that the world generated more than one zettabyte (ZB), or 1,000,000PB, of data in 2010. By 2014, that number will reach reach 72ZB a year, fuelled in part by the rapid rise of machine-generated data, in addition to the growth of unstructured data (like images, audio or video files) as well as semi-structured data (emails and logs) add yet another layer of complexity to data management. In an email interview, Rick Theiler, Vice-President, Asia Pacific, of Commvault Systems talks to CIO Asia about how organisations should prepare for the big data revolution.
(b) Increasingly complex marketplace. A lot of mistakes are being made by CIOs in Asia today because the marketplace is becoming increasingly competitive, and damaging decisions are being made by selecting products that are not correctly matched to the specific requirements they have. Often we see decision-makers wanting to make quick fix solutions, and ultimately using multiple different point solutions from vendors which they might be familiar with unnecessarily. Data is a CIO’s most critical asset but is also an increasingly complicated one. Overcoming this particular pain point has to begin with firms specifying and addressing the business problem that they want to solve, before looking for the appropriate big data analytical and management tools.
Where are the pain points before reaching the next big thing on data processing and analysis? In my opinion, the three main pain points that CIOs face before being able to maximise the value of their organisation’s data are: (a) The unrelenting growth of data. Industry analysts estimate the amount of data produced globally more than doubles every two years—1.8 trillion gigabytes in 500 quadrillion “files”. Across all industry sectors, and even within the smalland medium-sized business sector in Singapore, our customers
(c) Ensuring compliance. Compliance is an interesting driver for data management purchases in certain Asia Pacific markets. The Singapore government’s implementation of the Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA) in January 2013 is aimed to safeguard consumers’ personal data against misuse by regulating the proper management and processing of personal data, for example. This is perhaps the biggest direct example of where compliance legislation will impact organisations that market to any individual citizen. This legislation places new responsibilities on any organisation that has ownership of personal
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are experiencing data growth of between 30 and 50 percent in the next 18 months. While that is not gigabyte volume increases, for companies of that scale, managing such growth still represents a massive challenge—especially when they are trying to use that data to establish a competitive advantage. Stringently evolving data retention requirements, solution scalability, and stretched IT budgets will also need to be considered.
contact details of any kind and drives the need for greater data and information management to ensure compliance. Similar processes are already in place in New Zealand, and Japan— perhaps more so than in some western markets. Whether it is compliance or data growth elements that drive business to assess their data management, organisations across the Asia Pacific need to understand that data will always be central to gaining insight, and supporting decisions to innovate and enhance service delivery. This means technology alone is not enough. A combination of tools, methodologies and information management styles and sources need to be adopted, and that is certainly a globally consistent factor. What new skills must be acquired then to be ready for this data revolution? As the market evolves, entire new skill-sets are now becoming critical for a CIO and his staff to continue to achieve competitive advantages for organisations. Identifying and extracting business value by combined analysis of structured and unstructured datasets definitely requires specialist skills, which have (until recently), not been required because the technology did not exist to make them necessary. Increasingly prominent in major Asia Pacific organisations these days are the data scientists or other data analysis roles. There has always been a prominence of these roles in the financial or scientific research sectors, but we are now seeing these types of analysis being required by a much wider set of vertical sectors to mine insights and trends. Solid skills in computer science and applications, modelling, statistics, and maths are obviously important for these roles, but make up only the academic requirement for individuals to acquire to maximise the potential of big data. New skills gained from working with modern, multi-structured data types that are required to really analyse big data today and the experience of using new tools that can combine these. Successful analytics projects also require input from business analysts, data officers, analytics officers, legal and IT professionals with skills in data integration, preparation, protection, and data quality assurance. In addition enterprise content management, data warehouse architecture, large-scale database management, as well as overseeing scalable infrastructure and information architecture is critical. IT departments, vendors, consultants and partners need to work together to fully understand large data sets, leverage new types of information from various sources—for example, location and sentiment, and operational data—while combining structured and content data for new use cases. Can organisations build an infrastructure to take advantage of big data? The simple answer is yes, and more and more businesses, especially in the Asia Pacific region, are doing this very successfully.
Organisations need to focus on gaining new insights and intelligence from the huge amounts of data they are capturing from external sources and generating internally. In order to apply the increasingly granular analytics that deliver that competitive advantage insight, CIOs need to be able to access and manage data more effectively. We’ve seen this happen successfully in a number of instances with our customers across the region. One example of an organisation really taking advantage of big data and building an internal cloud infrastructure capable of doing so is the Singapore National Institute of Education (NIE). They needed to increase the volume of information being gathered quarterly for their internal Customer Satisfaction Survey. The survey feedback is used to identify trends, requirements and improvements to the future state of IT service provision at the NIE. Through their CommVault Simpana implementation, the survey is now able to easily consolidate feedback from multiple channels, including video, audio and social media content, as part of the process, massively increasing the amount of raw data able to be incorporated. Obviously consolidating, larger volumes of data, in multiple formats, presented a significant challenge from a data management process perspective, which had been impractical to achieve prior to the implementation. Enabling more ways for students to provide feedback however has, significantly increased the overall participation and feedback levels. Ultimately the private cloud infrastructure deployment, along with the increased scope of the types of data being included enabled the NIE to gain more value from the results and therefore, implement more effective policies for the future of students and staff. In terms of building new infrastructure and data management processes to utilise big data in the financial sector, The Stock Exchange of Thailand (SET) has also made a hugely significant implementation. The SET had long recognised that the larger the volume and variety of electronic trade information they could store—such as trading transactions and analysis of price feeds—the greater the level of granularity that could be applied to the exchange’s reporting. With this achieved using the Simpana platform, a wider variety of service applications could be made available to their customers. At the SET, the ability to identify trends and predict the future effectively is also the key difference between success and failure, so the deeper the granularity of data that the SET is able to identify, manage and access, the better business decisions the stock exchange is able to make. With an improved IT infrastructure, the SET is now able to directly realise relevant business details from previously un-integrated, unstructured datasets. Voice, video and new media all present new ways for the SET to extend their market understanding, while being able to better track potential rogue traders for compliance and legislative purposes.
w w w.cio - asia.com • C I O • au g u s t - s e p t e m b e r 2013
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cio Career
Tips to Avoid the Job Hopper Label Times have changed in the IT job market. It used to be that being labelled a “job hopper” could have serious effect on your career potential, but in today’s economy with corporate downsizings, big business bankruptcies and startup failures even some of the best employees have had the rug pulled out from under them. And it’s not unusual for it to happen more than once to good IT workers. By R i c h H e i n
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one are the days where you work for one employer for an entire career. “You rarely have guys on your programming team with 5-plus years with the company and it’s becoming less and less. People are moving around and it’s not necessarily frowned upon anymore,” said Iman Jalali, president of TrainSignal. “If you are fortunate enough to move often but not too often, you probably can point to experience in a number of different industries and exposure to a variety of challenges, which can lead companies to believe you are flexible and a quick learner,” said Tracy Cashman, partner and general manager in the IT division of staffing agency WinterWyman. That said, some companies are still suspicious of people who have too many stints of one year or shorter. They either feel that the prospective employee gets bored easily or perhaps they get laid off frequently because they are not a top-tier employee. Others still, wonder if the prospective employee has more of a contractor mentality. However, Cashman said that in her experience more companies are reluctant to hire people who have been at one place for several years for their whole career. “Companies may feel that those people are not motivated enough in their career progression or are so ingrained in a particular culture or way of thinking that they won’t be able to adapt to a new environment,” said Cashman. Jayne Mattson, senior vice president of Keystone Associates, said that while it is more acceptable in today’s IT to have some shorter stints, it still raises concerns with some employers. “Job hopping is a red flag for employers. What type of decision did you make going into the job? Did you do your due diligence to make sure that job was the right fit? Unfortunately, a lot of job seekers, when they get an offer, are excited and they think, ‘It’s a job and I can do it,’ but in reality they don’t fit into the culture. That’s many times what I see as the reason for these
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shorter-term employments,” said Mattson. While thoughts on the matter vary from business to business, there are things you can to mitigate the risks in your quest for employment. To help light the way, we spoke to hiring managers and career coaches to help define how to best handle this delicate topic.
Job Hopping Exceptions In many situations, according to Jalali, IT pros could be job hopping through no fault of their own. It could be a case of outsourcing, downsizing or a failed startup. These are situations prospective employees have no control over. “We definitely don’t screen them out for that reason. When we look at resumes we spend a lot less time looking at how long they spent at a job. We definitely look at it and if it’s questionable we’ll bring it up in the interview. What we typically find is that companies are hiring tech guys or developers to come in and work on some big projects that may last 18 months or so, but after that they have to move on. You can’t treat that the same way you would other positions at a company,” said Jalali.
Handling Interview Questions What Mattson, in her role as a career coach, tells clients to do in interview situations is to answer this question before it’s asked. “When you take control over telling your story, you’re not as apprehensive about waiting to be asked. Sometimes people get nervous, but I encourage them to take control, give the business reason as to why they are no longer there,” said Mattson. She also encourages clients to admit what they would have done differently. She offers this as an example: “As I look at the last five years of my career, early on I made great career decisions staying longer and working my way up through the ranks, but the past few years I perhaps didn’t do enough due diligence to make sure it was the right fit to do my best work.
What I’m doing moving forward is to make sure I ask the right questions to make sure it’s a good fit for you and a good fit for me.”
What Interviewers Don’t Want to Hear There are a few reasons an employer definitely doesn’t want to hear, according to experts. Boredom is seldom a compelling reason for leaving, for example. Another bad reason is financial gain, employers don’t like to see someone who is simply job-hopping to get more money. “It is frowned upon when someone is clearly doing it for financial or monetary reasons,” said Jalali. He goes on to point out, however, that it happens regularly and many times people are able to increase their salary by as much as 10-15 percent. They also don’t want to hear that an employee has left more than one position because they didn’t get along with their boss or coworkers. It’s never a good idea to bad mouth your boss or your last employer In the end, they’ll likely think that you are the common denominator in those situations.
Resume Adjustments Adjusting your resume is a great way to draw attention somewhere else—for example, to your skills or accomplishments. Below are two tips Mattson offers to do just that: • Refocus your resume: For example, highlight your achievements. “It’s really about your work history and so sometimes you need to refocus your resume, you may need to provide a little explanation, like ‘start-up company acquired,’ something that tells a little bit more about the story,” notes Mattson. • Create a strong social presence that highlights achievements: For example: Build out your LinkedIn and Google+ pages making sure to highlight all your relevant achievements. “Honestly, if we are looking at someone who has a history of job hopping we definitely look more closely at all angles. We go so far as to look for recommendations on their LinkedIn profile,” said Jalali. Having a strong social presence is more important than ever, get out there and start and start building your brand.
Tell Your Story “Job hopping used to be the kiss of death on your resume and the candidate who only stayed at his or her companies
for one or two years was considered to be potentially unstable,” said Cashman. However, with the economic instability and more workers coming to the realisation that the days of working for one company for your career are essentially over, there seems to be a new norm where companies and recruiters are beginning to have a different view of the job hopper—seeing them [job hoppers] “as someone who is young but wants to gain experience rapidly, someone who is also flexible, resourceful and learns fast,” said Mattson. “Your resume should tell the reader why you were important to the success of some project or company and should show that you have grown over time gaining increased responsibility, scope and success. Probably the most important thing is to be able to demonstrate that no matter where you worked, or for how long, that you were someone who was critical to the success of a project or the company as a whole,” said Steve Kasmouski, President of the Search Divisions at WinterWyman. The bottom-line is you have to know what value you bring to the table, keep a record of your accomplishments and be prepared to explain your logic. Employees who know how to handle the situation and have prepared can turn that red flag into an offer letter.
Hiring Managers Take Heed “As a hiring manager, your radar goes off when you notice this [job hopping] and you have to poke around a little more. If it’s something that was out of their hands, it’s always good to really spend more time on their references. Try to get references that validate or support their statement. Validate the fact of why someone was job hopping,” said Jalali. Here are some additional tips for IT employers: 1. Know the facts before discounting a prospective employee for job hopping. Give the prospective employee an opportunity to explain the situation. 2. Look at their achievements more than the date ranges on their resume. 3. Follow up on references to verify the reasons they left a previous position. “You have to truly understand why that person made those moves and what factors are behind them,” said Jalali.
w w w.cio - asia.com • C I O • au g u s t - s e p t e m b e r 2013
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idc view
A
Building IT-Marketing Partnerships Investing in ICT to build a more secure IT infrastructure, address an increasingly complex IT+business environment and tackle talent shortage. By Sandra Ng
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sian C-suite executives are investing in ICT to build a more secure IT infrastructure, address an increasingly complex IT+business environment and tackle talent shortage in an intensively competitive marketplace. The top technology spending identified by the C-suite are mobility, security and business continuity/availability as well as software applications including software-as-a-service (SaaS) as businesses actively look to ICT to woo new customers, manage escalating operations cost and introduce new innovations to compete differently. The increasing influence of Line of Business (LoB) is impacting CIOs and their IT departments. While not all companies have allowed, intentionally or otherwise, LoB to influence or procure technology investments, more CIOs are collaborating with LoB to improve the business outcomes of ICT projects. This year, IDC has identified the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) community as the partner of choice and benefit for CIOs with mobility as the top technology spending category. Marketeers in Asia Pacific clearly understand that mobility is the online platform and customer engagement channel. Already more than one-fifth of the CMO respondents have direct IT budget and procurement authority in their organisations. With the convergence of social media/ business, mobility, business analytics and cloud, the power of CIO+CMO cannot be under-estimated. Businesses and governments who are looking at finding innovative ideas to propel forward in highly competitive markets where economic growth is slowing and markets are becoming borderless, understand this and other CIO+LoB partnerships are critical. IDC believes that the role of the CIO will not be eliminated anytime soon. The rising dependence on technology and the growing need for governance, compliance and regulations (GRC) in supporting and enabling business mean that ICT roles will still play a significant part in organisations. The challenge is in the ability of IT executives to deliver business value.
These are some of the key findings from the IDC Asia/Pacific C-suite Barometer 2013, an annual C-level research conducted to understand business and technology priorities, concerns and challenges. Each year, IDC modifies the questionnaire to take into account the latest dynamics and evolving procurement and consumption behaviours. This year, over 1,000 C-level executives participated, including 496 CIO/CTO (i.e. traditional technology buyers), 325 CMO and 182 CFO/other LoB. More than half of the respondents have C-level titles and all are in-region decision makers within their organisations.
Business+tech Priorities Respondents identified their top business priorities as operational efficiency and productivity (22 percent); overall cost savings (20 percent) and market expansion (12 percent). Sandra Ng To increase operational efficiency and productivity, respondents say they are increasingly focusing on delivering automation from IT. Last year, businesses focused on finding new customers and reducing customer churn. This year, however, the emphasis is on white space opportunities. This indicates the intense hunger to deliver growth and the challenge in achieving it given that the Asian region had already experienced hyper/high growth over the last decade or so. The region has also begun to see one to three years of moderate/low growth.
Decision-making Structures IDC identified four categories of IT decision-making structures in the region: Transformational IT Federated or Distributed IT IT Centre of Excellence (or shared services) Centralised IT With Transformational IT structures, the CIO or the organisation (typically with the CEO as the executive sponsor) pushes to deliver business outcomes from the large majority of IT investments/projects. These CIOs/IT heads bring to live business ideas through the use of ICT. Federated/Distributed IT is the most complex of all the structures and it typically includes a group CIO with country CIOs or a centralised IT department with IT resources also within the LoB/Business Unit (BU). The IT Centre of Excellence or shared service centre is
one where a centre is dedicated to deliver IT resources. This is typically the most conservative of all IT structures and the charter is technical in nature. Finally, with Centralised IT structures, decisions are made centrally. For emerging Asian enterprises (EAE), this means decisions are made in the region or in the headquarter country. This group presents the latest and newest set of growth opportunities for the ICT industry as these businesses look to IT automation and innovations to compete better against foreign multinational corporations and to capture new markets. Sandra Ng is GVP, ICT Practice, IDC Asia/Pacific.
Budget Adjustments in 2013 When polled about their 2013 ICT budget/spending, 49 percent of respondents expect it to increase, 39 percent expect no change, eight percent expect a decrease and the remaining four percent were unclear on actual spending direction. With greater reliance on technology, CIOs are finding it tough to support the level of business growth with the budget allocated (increase or otherwise). The research also shows that the top three IC T challenges were limited budget, growing complexity and varied user needs as well as the lack of skill sets to effectively execute ICT. These challenges are a direct result of both increased business demands and the aftermath of consumerisation of IT where ease of use of “consumer IT” is leading to IT complexity.
Filling Talent Gaps Talent gaps remain a global phenomenon with emerging markets facing the most severe challenges. These gaps will take time to address. According to the C-suite surveyed, their immediate-term measures to address the talent gap and resource shortage in their ICT enablement and support environment within their organisation include: 67 percent deploying standard/ off-the-shelf solutions 39 percent partnering with ICT vendors with strong support/training capabilities 3 1 percent partnering with more niche/dedicated sector ICT vendors (industry) 31 percent hiring business process resources with some ICT skills 29 percent increasing outsourcing/managed services spending Source: IDC Asia/Pacific C-suite Barometer, 2013
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vendor management
Up Your Outsourcing
Vendor Management Game As changes in decision-making, delivery models, and supplier positioning take hold, CIOs will need to take their vendor management game to a new level. By Stephanie Overby
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here’s no question that the IT outsourcing industry is undergoing some fundamental changes. IT leaders are looking for more innovation from their partners. Business users are bypassing IT to procure their own technology services and products. And outsourcing providers are struggling to understand the shifting dynamics of their deals and relationships. Yet, amid all this transformation, many buyers continue to employ an outdated approach to IT outsourcing governance, according to a Forrester report earlier this year on the state of the IT services market. “The combination of business-led innovation, new vendors and delivery models, and the shakeout in the provider ranks means that senior IT management has to fundamentally change how it approaches supplier governance,” the authors of the Forrester report wrote. “The endless focus on a costbased procurement model has left companies with rock bottom prices, but poor delivery and execution track records.” As changes in decision-making, delivery models, and supplier positioning take hold, CIOs will need to take their vendor management game to a new level, says Forrester Vice President and Principal Analyst John C. McCarthy, who coauthored the report. IT leaders need to remodel their vendor management groups from a centralised procurement-centric organisation to a more decentralised supplier management group focused on business outcomes, according to McCarthy. Here, McCarthy talks about what CIOs can learn from the outsourcing mistakes of Boeing and Mattel, which IT organisations are vendor management rock stars, and why IT leaders who want innovation from their providers “need to stop looking out the window and start looking in the mirror”. You say that CIOs need to move from outsourcing procurement to true vendor management. What’s the difference? Procurement is one aspect of the outsourcing transaction, but it’s a subset of a much longer three-phase lifecycle—first, understanding demand, then doing the deal and, finally, the
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ongoing management of suppliers. But, as Boeing learned the hard way, it’s not enough to just subcontract the building of a next generation jet. If you’re giving suppliers more responsibility, you’ve got to put in place the proper governance. Vendor management organisations are dealing with a much more diverse IT supplier environment today. As we found in our recent study of the IT service market, the business is taking more direct responsibility for buying IT services and managing suppliers. So the vendor management groups, used to working with IT, now need to work with the business. Why aren’t IT or vendor management groups paying as much attention to vendor management as they ought to? In the middle part of this decade, they were expanding their capabilities to be full vendor management organisations. But with the great recession of 2008 and 2009, they went back to their procurement-centric focus and looking for the lowest price. But just because you got a good deal doesn’t mean your vendor is now a member of the Psychic Friends network capable of reading your mind and understanding what you need. You have to manage your suppliers. And there are some very clear examples of what happens when you don’t. Boeing failed miserably, delegating much of the responsibility for the design around the 787. Mattel had to recall a million toys made by a contract manufacturer in China because they were covered in lead paint. Conversely, Apple has done very well, not just based on their
strength on the innovation side of the house but on the supplier governance side of the house. Boeing’s Dreamliner disaster, Mattel’s lead paint debacle— those are very dramatic and real ramifications of lax supplier management outside of IT. But what’s the worst that can happen due to poor IT outsourcing vendor management? In this day and age, IT and the business are so intertwined that supplier governance has a huge effect. One day, your mobile app doesn’t work with the new operating system. Or, like NatWest Bank, your systems are crashing for weeks on end. Is the lack of investment in vendor management solely attributable to recessionary cost-cutting? Procurement is an easy thing to fall back on. It’s easy to prove your benefit if you cut costs by 20 percent with your last contract. But how do you put a number on that project that didn’t go off the tracks. Does good vendor management start much earlier in the outsourcing cycle? Yes, companies that are good at this do a good job of understanding demand. They do a good job of contracting; they don’t just throw a contract over the wall to vendor management. It’s all intertwined. What companies are good at IT outsourcing vendor management? Firms like Nike, Cisco, Capital One, Bank of New York Mellon. They all have very mature vendor management practices. Why is decentralised supplier management critical for IT organisations today? The business is spending an increasing amount of its own money on technology. IT is not the sole source of technology decisions. IT is going to have to evolve to a consultant and orchestrator rather than a heads-down doer. Are most IT organisations capable of making that shift? I’d say 85 percent of them still have the blue-collar, let’s-do-itall-ourselves mindset. Far fewer see themselves as white-collar designers or consultants. There are still too many IT organisations whose favourite movie is “Dr. No.” But more organisations are starting to figure out that if they deny the business, the business will get what they
need on their own. When we talked to people who made IT decisions without the involvement of IT, it wasn’t because they didn’t like IT. IT was because what they needed to do was too important and IT didn’t have the time or money to invest in it. IT leaders say they want more innovation from their IT service providers, but it doesn’t seem that they’re making the necessary changes internally to get it. Forrester’s survey of more than 1,000 IT outsourcing decision makers found that 59 percent were adding more specific technical SLAs while just 38 percent were adding more business-outcome-level metrics. Clients need to stop looking out the window and start looking in the mirror. They want innovation, but they lack the internal vendor management focus and processes to get there. The good news is that for the first time in the eight years that we’ve done this survey, cost was not the number one criteria [in IT outsourcing decisions]. As we enter this unprecedented period of innovation, things are going to have to change. IT leaders will have to look at costs not just at the rate level, but also at the lifecycle level. If you get a good rate, but have to do something over three or four times to get it right, it’s not such a good rate anymore. What are some of the best practices of those IT organisations that get vendor management right? They separate innovation from ongoing operations in the contract and in the management. You’ll see a very different set of attendees from the client and the vendor on their innovation councils than those involved in system implementation or operations. They embrace concepts like our 10 steps of systematic multi-sourcing. They understand what they’re trying to accomplish from a business point of view versus an IT point of view. When IT made all the IT outsourcing decisions, presumably its experience determining demand and contracting with vendors helped make up for what may be lacking in the vendor management department. But if business users with much less experience are making these big technology decisions—and no one’s managing the vendors well—the potential ramifications would seem to multiply. One of the biggest problems that’s going to confront this industry is that while the rate of innovation is clearly going up, the investment in governance needed to make those innovations successful is not happening. That’s going to come back to the end user and the IT organisation and bite them both in the butt. Those on the business side will tell you that their technology acumen has gone up, and that’s true to some extent. But more often than not they’re relying on a vendor like Salesforce to manage their infrastructure for them. I’m not going to go the “chicken little” route. But the business is still in its technological adolescence. And as anyone who’s even had a teenage kid knows, they damn well need to be supervised in adolescence.
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DATA
points Hong Kong and Singapore are among 10 most innovative nations. Both nations have been ranked at the seventh and eighth spots respectively. — Global Innovation Index 2013
Forty-two percent of Singapore employees demand a salary between S$1,500 (US$1,178) and S$3,499 (US$2,747). Hong Kong employees had higher salary expectations – 38 percent of them expected a salary between S$2,449 (US$1,922) and S$4,899 (US$3,846). Malaysian employees (69 percent) on the other hand sought a salary between S$400 (US$314) and S$2,000 (US$1,570). — jobsDB Asian Consumer Market survey
Singapore Infocomm Technology Federation has helped secure more than US$2.3 million in pledged funding from investors for Singapore startups in the past year and has provided support to 38 startups to date. — Singapore Infocomm Technology Federation
“According to Euromonitor International, 2011, the Internet retailing market in Malaysia is expected to exceed RM1.9 billion [US$623 million] by 2016 from RM842 million [US$264 million] in sales in 2011.” — General (Retired) Tan Sri Datuk Seri Panglima Mohd Azumi bin Mohamed, chairman, CyberSecurity Malaysia
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WeChat, the mobile app owned by Chinese Internet giant Tencent, has racked up 70 million overseas registered users, adding about 20 million users in less than two months. — Tencent