10 A multi-platform portal for URA planners to easily analyse information on desktops and iPads.
Singapore
6 Why companies are finally switching from consumer services to enterprise class technologies.
The Voice of I.T. Management
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I.T. LEADERSHIP
P2 Lenovo to Launch Global Analytics Hub in Singapore
P12 Be Flexible and Adapt to Change
P4 Opera Announces Regional HQ in Singapore
P16 The Big Data Drive P18 The Business Perspective
P6 Companies to See Benefits of Big Data P8 Alicia Keys Announces Blackberry Scholarships for Women
information infrastructure Customer Care Awards 2013
P20 Introduction P21 Congratulations to All the Winners P22 Listings & Metrics
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Lenovo to Launch Global Analytics Hub in Singapore The Hub will provide insights to help support various functions across Lenovo worldwide. By Nurdianah Md Nur
L
enovo will be launching a global Analytics Hub based out of Singapore, as part of its big data initiative. The Hub will perform data analytics to provide insights that will support various functions across Lenovo Worldwide. Led by Rod Strother, Lenovo’s director of the Digital and Social Center of Excellence, the establishment of the Hub will be set up in phases. Scheduled for completion by July 2013, the first phase will see the company developing the Hub’s framework and building the team. It will also support functional teams, such as Marketing Intelligence and Social Media, through the customer insights it provides. In future, the Hub will help other Lenovo functions, including Customer Service,
Product Development and Global Supply Chain, gain critical insights and improve services. Howie Lau, vice president of corporate development at Lenovo, says the launch of the Hub will allow the company to better understand its customers and businesses across all functions, thereby supporting “its journey to become a global leader in the traditional PC and smart connected devices markets”.
Expanding in Singapore
The establishment of the Hub is part of Lenovo’s expansion in Singapore, following the success of the company’s Digital and Social Center of Excellence (DSCoE) in the city-state.
Established in 2011, the DSCoE aims to strengthen the company’s global marketing efforts by capitalising on the growth of digital and social media. The DSCoE has carried out a number of successful global social media campaigns around Lenovo’s Ultrabooks and convertible devices, which contributed to the 300,000 fan “likes” on the Lenovo’s Facebook page. It has also redesigned the company’s global website. Given that Singapore serves as a global hub for some Lenovo functions and a regional hub for the company’s Asia Pacific and ASEAN operations, the country was chosen as the base for the Analytics Hub. ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Scope Creep a Major Issue for CTOs and CIOs Prominent causes for scope creep include poor project management, staff continuity and changing regulatory environment. By Nurdianah Md Nur
S
eventy-six percent of chief Respondents in Singapore technology officers (CTOs) cited poor project management and chief information (52 percent), staff continuity (44 officers (CIOs) in Singapore are percent) and changing regulatory concerned about scope creep in environment (38 percent) as their jobs, according to a survey by prominent causes of scope creep. recruitment firm Robert Half. What is needed to counter scope This is comparable to the global creep are better planning and clear situation: the percentage of CTOs communication of the project and CIOs concerned by scope creep objectives to senior management worldwide is also high at 76 percent. to ensure that everyone is on the Hong Kong has the highest level of same page. Steve McGowan concern at 82 percent. “According to the survey, 54 Scope creep refers to uncontrolled changes percent of respondents are pushing for or continuous growth in project scopes which better project management to combat scope cause the company to spend more time and creep while 52 percent are trying to improve money on a project than planned. collaboration between departments,” said Steve
McGowan, division director of Robert Half Technology in Singapore.
Growing Concern
He added that this growing concern of scope creep had also caused “an increasing demand for IT professionals with strong leadership and communications skills who can deal with regular changes to the job and project objectives”. It was found that the projects revolving around app development (44 percent), system upgrades and deployment (40 percent), ecommerce (34 percent) and website development (30 percent) are prone to scope creep. ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
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Opera Announces Regional HQ in Singapore It will be a hub for Opera’s operations in Asia Pacific, including greater China, Korea and Southeast Asia BY Zafar Anjum
A
mid browser wars, we often hear about Chrome vs. Firefox vs. Explorer. We don’t hear much about browsers like Opera. It may surprise you that Opera is used by 300 million people in the world each month. To expand its reach in Asia Pacific, Opera today announced a regional HQ in Singapore. The Opera Singapore office will be led by Fabrizio Caruso, Opera Software’s senior vice president for Asia. The new office will be home to Opera’s operator and advertising business, technical support, and marketing activities across the region. According to the browser company, the Singapore office will act as a hub for Opera’s operations in Asia Pacific, including greater China, Korea and Southeast Asia. Opera Software is finding increasing opportunities in the mobile browsing business. In the region, the company has partnered with 17 top-tier mobile operators, rolling out cobranded Opera Mini browsers with competitive
data plans to bring more people online through their mobile phones.
Dynamic and Thriving
“Asia is the most dynamic and thriving mobile market in the world, and there are tremendous opportunities for operators and brands to reach and engage consumers through mobile devices,” said Fabrizio Caruso. “We plan to use
our Singapore office as a hub to fuel the mobile Internet and advertising economy in APAC.” Opera Software’s business has been expanded to the recent launch of its fully-owned subsidiary Opera Mediaworks, the world’s largest mobile ad platform that provides end-to-end mobile advertising and monetisation services. “Opera has offices in China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan to provide client support and grow our user base,” said Tove Selnes, executive vice president of Human Resources, Opera Software. “In addition to these four countries in Asia, we have seen huge growth of our operator business in APAC recent years. It makes sense for us to also have an office in Singapore so that we can offer quicker support to our partners.” With the opening of the Singapore office, Opera now has a total of 17 offices around the world. The company has over 900 employees worldwide. ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
NEC’s Public Safety Business HQ in Singapore Division will focus on growing and developing the company’s expertise in public safety. BY Zafar Anjum
J
apanese IT integrator and networking company NEC Corporation has established a Global Safety Division in Singapore. This is the Global Strategic Headquarters for NEC’s Public Safety Business, the company said in a statement. Tan Boon Chin, managing director of the Regional Competency Centre for Public Safety in NEC Asia Pacific, has been appointed to lead the new division. According to NEC, the Global Safety Division will focus on growing and developing the company’s expertise in public safety. The new division will devise global business strategy, develop new technologies and solutions and provide training and technical support for subsidiaries and partners worldwide. The solutions delivered in the region span across various domains, such as national ID, automated border control, finance, biometric security, critical facilities, transportation, food safety and cyber security. “The new Division is introducing global markets to the message of ‘Safer Cities’,” said
Takayuki Morita, senior vice president of NEC. “We are fully convinced that safety and security are the bedrock for a city’s development, growth and renewal.” NEC said it chose Singapore in order to conveniently access important markets, to capitalise on the business experience and capabilities of the public safety team, and to further enhance its capabilities.
Trusted Hub
“Singapore is a trusted hub for Asia’s mission critical data and ICT infrastructure, and this makes us an ideal location for companies to develop new security-related products and services,” said Jayson Goh, executive director of Infocomms and Media, Singapore Economic Development Board. One of the projects that the Global Safety Division will be involved in is the recently
announced Singapore Safe City Test Bed project, where NEC Asia Pacific was appointed as leader of one of the four consortia managing the test beds. ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
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Companies to See Benefits of Big Data Dell, Intel and Revolution Analytics have collaborated to open the Big Data Innovation Centre. It provides training programmes, proof-of-concept capabilities and solution development support on big data and predictive analytic innovations for Asia. By Nurdianah Md Nur
R
iding on the big data wave, Dell, Intel Corporation and Revolution Analytics— a commercial provider of software and services based on open source R project for statistical computing—have announced the creation of the Big Data Innovation Centre in Singapore. Housed at Dell Solution Centre in Singapore, the Big Data Innovation Centre will provide training programmes, proof-of-concept capabilities and solution development support on big data and predictive analytic innovations for Asia. The creation of this centre aims to boost the adoption rate of big data technologies. A recent NCS SURF Emerging Technology Index revealed that only 9 percent of Singapore companies plan
to adopt big data solutions in 2013 even though the general interest from most sectors in it is generally positive. Sumir Bhatia, Dell’s enterprise solutions regional director for South Asia, said at a media briefing in early June that the Big Data Innovation Center provides the platform for companies to “test-run big data workloads and initiatives to understand how big a difference it could make in their business”.
Skill Sets
Revolution Analytics will also use the centre to equip participants with the “necessary skill sets and big data analytics training to companies”, said Laurence Liew, managing director of Revolution Analytics Asia-Pacific.
He added that the training will equip statisticians with knowledge of Hadoop, how to leverage it and other technologies, while IT professionals will be taught statistics. This fills the knowledge gap of the participants, allowing them a more complete understanding of how they could take advantage of big data solutions. Training will be done on a big data stack that includes Dell infrastructure using latest Intel Xenon E5 processor-based servers, Intel 10GbE networking and Intel Solid State Drivers with Cache Acceleration Software, Intel Distribution for Apache Hadoop Software and Revolution Analytics Enterprise R predictive analytics software. ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Adopting Enterprise Social Collaboration Singapore companies are finally taking the reins of social collaboration, switching from consumer services to enterprise class technologies, according to a global survey by Avanade. By Caroline Ng
W
hile Singapore businesses (87 percent) have exceeded the global average (77 percent) in using social networking, many are using consumer services with little benefit to the company, according to a survey released by Avanade yesterday. The survey is based on 4000 end-users and 1000 business and IT decision makers in 22 countries. The false sense of accomplishment sweeping Singapore businesses is set to change in the next 12 months as the survey has found that 96 percent of businesses intend to adopt enterprise social collaboration. Kevin Wo, vice president of Avanade Singapore, said Singapore businesses would need to invest in the untapped opportunities of enterprise social collaboration to reap its benefits. “Consumer-driven social collaboration technologies lack meaningful enterprise collaboration capabilities such as security and data privacy, online document storage, sharing and editing, and integration with enterprise communications systems,” he said.
Consumer-enterprise Disconnect
Although social networking has breathed new life into collaboration, there is still a distinction between the capabilities in consumer social networks and what is needed in enterprise social collaboration. Consumer-driven social technologies often fall short of key capabilities, including document management and
data security, a business need to effectively collaborate. Among all the social collaboration tools used by Singapore businesses, the survey has found that Facebook, a consumer service, has occupied the lion’s share, at 85 percent. With this, Facebook is used at twice the rate of Microsoft SharePoint (46 percent), three times more than IBM Open Connections (27 percent), and four times more than Salesforce Chatter (19 percent), all enterprise tools. This represents a compelling opportunity for businesses to leverage on workers’ social networking proclivity and transfer it to the underutilised enterprise social collaboration scene. In Singapore, the high adoption of technology, particularly in the mobile space, will ease the transition from consumer to enterprise-based social collaboration, said Wo. “A lot of the collaboration tools that are used in the enterprise are used by consumers who have been using this technology like Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter. A lot of them are using it outside work and they are bringing these technologies into the organisation,” he said. Globally, the majority of IT decision-makers (87 percent), business leaders (67 percent) and end-users (68 percent) report
using enterprise social networking technologies, but most lack enterprise collaboration capabilities. Fortunately, decision-makers have acknowledged the benefits of adopting enterprise social collaboration and expressed the desire to move away from consumer-based technologies.
Enterprise Perks
Enterprise social collaboration allows the seamless information flow between colleagues within a secured networked environment. IT decision makers in Singapore have also reported that social technologies make their jobs more enjoyable (88 percent), more productive (65 percent) and more efficient (69 percent). According to Accenture Technology Vision 2013 report, enterprises have to shift from standalone consumer-based social networks and integrate social collaboration into their business processes to improve productivity. Despite the overwhelming response from businesses to include enterprise social collaboration, there is a minority camp of social sceptics. The survey has found that 13 percent of businesses have yet to adopt social collaboration tools. Kevin Wo
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Information-centric IT model to address these challenges
Taming Information Explosion with Optimised Data Storage and Management O
rganisations—ranging from large enterprises to the average small and mid-sized businesses (SMB) – are having to contend with the explosive growth of data across their devices and storage. Managing the information explosion is a major expense for organisations. Globally, SMBs on average spend US$332,000 on managing information, while enterprises spend an average of US$38 million, according to Symantec’s 2012 State of Information Survey. “With an estimated 2.2 zettabytes of combined information for all businesses worldwide, organisations globally spend a whopping US$1.1 trillion on managing their information,” said Ronnie Ng, Symantec’s director for Systems Engineering, Singapore. Costs include accessing the information in the networks; storing information in IT resources such as data centers, devices, backup systems and archives; securing data by adopting security strategies and solutions; and compliance management issues.
Key storage challenges “Unfortunately, despite the importance of information, many companies—globally and in Singapore— still fall short when it comes to effectively managing this valuable resource,” noted Ng. Last year, four out of five Singapore businesses (81 percent) have lost important information in the past 12 months, due to causes including human error, hardware failure, software failure and lost or stolen mobile devices. More than four-fifths (84 percent) have experienced exposure of important confidential information outside the organisation in the past year. “What are the consequences of irrevocably losing an organisation’s information with no chance of recovery? Damage to the brand, lost customers, decreased revenue, and increased expenses,” listed Ng, citing Singaporean respondents of Symantec’s survey. Other challenges include the amount of duplicate information; low storage utilisation; and information sprawl—the overwhelming growth of information that is unorganised, difficult to access and often duplicated elsewhere. These inefficiencies result in businesses spending more than necessary on storing and protecting their information. For organisations considering the cloud, Symantec’s “Avoiding the Hidden Costs of Cloud” survey identified six pitfalls of cloud computing that they should steer clear of. These include unauthorised rogue cloud implementations, overly complex cloud backup and recovery implementations, inefficient cloud storage, inadequate cloud compliance measures, overlooked eDiscovery planning, and Ronnie Ng, Symantec’s director for Systems lack of SSL certificate manEngineering, Singapore agement expertise.
Ng suggests a five-prong approach for large enterprises to implement a holistic backup and recovery storage solution. “Focus on the information, not the device or the data center—build an information infrastructure that optimises the ability of the organisation to find, access and consume critical business information,” Ng said. “Recognise that not all information are equal. Be efficient, be consistent, and stay agile,” Ng added, completing the five strategic thrusts. For SMBs, Ng recommends that they unite virtual and physical backups, consolidate backup and recovery tools in a single appliance, fight infinite retention, and to “stop putting tapes on trucks”. “To modernise data protection, Symantec aims to help large enterprises and SMBs drive out 80 percent of the operating costs associated with backup over the next five years,” said Ng. For data protection, Symantec’s NetBackup 7.5 and Backup Exec 2012 software are designed to address backup issues common to companies worldwide, enabling 100 times faster backup, easier management and simplified disaster. Symantec’s NetBackup Appliance 5000 Series offers scalable deduplication appliance solutions for the enterprise that provides operational simplicity, effective utilisation of bandwidth and storage, and high performance, reducing the size of backups by up to 50 times. Symantec’s storage management and high availability products and capabilities (Veritas Storage Foundation 6.0, Veritas Cluster Server 6.0, and Veritas Operations Manager 4.1) enable IT organisations to build resilient private clouds by transforming their existing infrastructure to make it more agile. Organisations can manage entire business services end-to-end with built in resiliency, even if the business service is run across multiple virtualisation technologies, operating systems, and storage platforms. Symantec has helped many customers in the Asia Pacific address their storage needs, including Yokogawa Engineering Asia Pte Ltd and Sysmex Asia Pacific Pte Ltd in Singapore. Yokogawa Engineering Asia deployed Symantec NetBackup™ 7 with NetBackup Data Protection and enjoyed a fivefold faster recovery of virtual machines, as well as a 50 percent average deduplication rate. Sysmex Asia Pacific deployed Symantec Backup Exec™ 2012 Capacity License Edition and Symantec Enterprise Vault™.cloud to recover all its Tier One systems 2.5-fold faster and to ensure that their recovery goals are met.
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Launching Tokyo Stock Exchange’s Financial Network in Singapore For the first time, financial institutions in Singapore can connect directly to the new co-location service of Japan Exchange and Tokyo Stock Exchange’s systems. By Caroline Ng
T
okyo Stock Exchange (TSE) has teamed up with NTT Communications to launch its arrownet-Global network service in Singapore. Initially introduced by TSE in 2009, arrownet connects financial services to trading and information systems, including co-location racks in Tokyo. The launch of arrownet-Global in Singapore will now allow financial institutions in the city-state to connect directly to the new colocation service of Japan Exchange (JPX) and TSE’s systems. Yoshinori Suzuki, senior managing director of TSE, said: “I hope that straightforward access to the JPX market will strengthen the value of TSE’s IT infrastructure and boost the liquidity of the JPX market so that
and ultra-low latency cable systems, including the Asia Submarine Cable Express (ASE) to strengthen the exchange’s value proposition, as well as expanding its investor pool.
Shortest Route
JPX can achieve its corporate aim to become the ‘Most Preferred Exchange in the Asian Region’.” The partnership will see TSE to leverage NTT Communications’ Ethernet Leased Line service
NTT Communications’ ASE cable system connects key financial hubs in Asia through the shortest possible route so clients can enjoy optimised latency of less than 64 milliseconds from its Singapore Serangoon Data Center to Tokyo. Takeshi Kazami, president and CEO of NTT Singapore, said low latency is critical to the success of financial services. “Our partnership with TSE and the launch of arrownet-Global are some of the initiatives to ensure that our clients enjoy the lowest latency, highest reliability and capacity,” he said. ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Alicia Keys Announces Blackberry Scholarships for Women Blackberry rolls out university scholarships to win more women in Singapore into the fields of science and technology. By Caroline Ng
B
lackberry has today launched 10 full, fouryear university scholarships to engage women in Singapore to develop careers in the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). Named the Blackberry Scholars programme, the scholarship is the brainchild of singer Alicia Keys, who is also the company’s global creative director. “Women are under-represented in fields of science and technology, and we feel strongly that it’s time to drive a change,” said Keys. She added that mentoring and support for women is needed in the fields of STEM across Singapore as global research has shown that 56 percent of them leave the technology industry after entering it.
Level the Playing Field
The scholarship aims to level the playing field by creating more opportunities for women to enter the industry. A panel of accomplished women, led by Alicia Keys, will select the scholars based on their passion and academic merit. ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Alicia Keys
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July – August 2013
Planning Made Easier by Analytics
computerworld Singapore www.computerworld.com.sg
HTML 5, ESRI APIs and JavaScript. This ensures that the system constantly delivers fast and reliable performance, and provides users with the same user interface design regardless of the device used. “[With the mobility the ePlanner system brings,] planners are now able to access related information on a site through their iPads while engaging citizens,” said Goh. By combining all types of external and internal information, planners will be able to make better informed decisions.
Moving Forward
To help facilitate land use planning, Singapore’s Urban Redevelopment Authority developed a multi-platform portal allowing planners to easily analyse various information on desktops and iPads. by Nurdianah Md Nur
T
he Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) strives to create a vibrant and sustainable city of distinction by planning and facilitating Singapore’s physical development in partnership with the community. Planners therefore need various information to help them make informed decisions when planning for Singapore’s urban development. To help them achieve this, the URA uses Geographic Information System (GIS) and 3D urban model technology for land use planning. URA recently implemented the iPad-enabled ePlanner system, which consolidates planning information into a single and user-friendly portal, in September 2012. The agency said that it is the first planning authority in the world to implement such a system.
Information At Your Fingertips
“Before the implementation of the ePlanner system, planners needed to go through many enterprise systems to retrieve relevant information required for land use planning. It took several steps to retrieve these bits of information, some of which were quite complex,” said Goh Siow Chong, director for Information Systems, Applications of the Information Systems & Geospatial Group, URA. The developers of the ePlanner system overcame this problem by integrating both internal and external data from various systems into a single portal that provides planners with data visualisation and advance spatial analytics capabilities. “With this design, planners can access and analyse all land-use planning information at a single touch,” said Chan Sing Eu, executive systems analyst of Information
Systems & Geospatial, URA. Forty nation-wide geospatial datasets under 10 categories from 15 different sources were included in the ePlanner system during the initial launch. The categories of datasets shared include planning, Development Control, Conservation, property market, land sales, car parks, external maps, analytics, 3D models and real-time data. External data, such as Google Map and Street Views, OneMap from Singapore Land Authority (SLA) and traffic information from the Land Transport Authority (LTA), were also tapped for the ePlanner system. With all this information readily available on a single portal, the time and effort spent for cross-department consultation were significantly reduced. Planners could easily make sense of complex data and derive new insights to drive business decisions from it. For instance, a planner could retrieve information on recently approved developments for a particular area, the Design Guidelines for Night Lighting with just a few clicks on the ePlanner system.
Connected Anywhere, Anytime
Another feature of the ePlanner system is that it allows planners to access information even when they are out of the office in iPads via 3G and LTE. While having systems that can run on different devices is not new, the development process of the ePlanner system differs from other similar systems. “The ePlanner system was designed with a tablet and mobile-first approach, where the program was designed and developed first for the iPad before it was adapted for the desktop with the same programming codes,” said Goh. The ePlanner system was developed using
Having accurate data is important to URA planners. The datasets in the ePlanner system will thus be updated according to the nature of the data, said Goh. Some datasets, such as property transactions and development applications, will be updated in real-time while others will be refreshed periodically when data sources are updated. Goh added that the URA will continually add useful datasets from internal and external sources to help planners meet today’s planning challenges. For instance, the URA is collaborating with public and private agencies for social and transport information. By incorporating these information into the ePlanner system, planners can carry out more analytics. Another new initiative URA is implementing is Big Data spatial analytics. New features for the ePlanner system that will enhance spatial analytics are currently under development. One such feature is the land use scoring application which allows planners to simulate a situation. “For example, the planners can use the app to create a simulation of it using the right available datasets [such as demographics]. This allows them to see which parts of the area are in need of more schools,” said Chan. While the ePlanner system is currently available only for the URA, there are plans to share the technology with other government agencies that deal with land-use planning. Another equivalent version of the ePlanner system that caters to members of the public, called the URA Maps, is available on the URA website (http://www.ura.gov.sg/uramaps/). It contains information useful to the public and business owners such as the Master Plan 2008 with the various land use zoning and also the Change of Use e-advisor, which informs them if the use of a building can be changed (such as converting a commercial building to a service apartment) without requiring URA’s approval. Developers too can use the URA map to identify conservation areas, view if an area has any special building height controls, and many more features. //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
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I.T. leadership
Be Flexible and Adapt to Change The 26th edition of CIO Workshop saw presenters giving examples of how IT leaders can venture into new frontiers. By jack loo
T
he common thread running through this year’s CIO Workshop, held from 28 May to 1 June 2013 in Singapore and Seoul, is the need for IT leaders to be flexible and adapt to consumer technologies. “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. 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. Tham is also the chairman of the board of advisors who crafted the direction and theme of the 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 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 size over the same period. And China, in 1990, contributed to only less than two percent of the global economy, and by 2013, it is powering 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. 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
computerworld Singapore www.computerworld.com.sg
need our own operating system”. In a growing economy there is intense competition among companies. CIOs will face a lot of expectations by CEOs, according to Magnus Bocker, CEO, Singapore Exchange. “It will never cease. You are expected to walk on water,” he said. In his presentation Future Role of the CIO, Bocker unveiled key points that he as a CEO expects from his CIO. The first is the ability to understand the business strategy of the organisation. The second is the solutions a CIO can provide to the enterprise. When a CIO does not understand the business, he or she cannot create the right solutions for the organisation, said Bocker. 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,” said Bocker. And innovation then leads to the fourth point, growth. New ideas lead to new products and markets, something that CEOs expect all the time, he said. Growth then links into 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 added.
Impact of technology
A panel discussion on the impact of technology on how businesses operate was the next item on the agenda. 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. Responding to a question on
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.
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I.T. leadership
computerworld Singapore www.computerworld.com.sg
that she kept micromanaging every single work aspect,” said SMU student Inez Cahyani. Recounting her negative experience was fellow student Asti Andayani Temi. “A discussion ended up being one-way communication from the supervisor,” she said. The internship made her feel the company was not valuing her skills and abilities.
CIO Workshop in Seoul
Mark Tham
how to innovate from existing technology, Lau told the audience that Lenovo launched mobile devices that come with detachable batteries in cities that are not as urbanised as Shanghai or Singapore. While detachable batteries are seen as a more outdated specification among manufacturers, having spare batteries are useful, especially where “it might be harder to find power supply outlets,” said Lau. A similar situation was the dual SIM-card feature that Lenovo rolled out. It was practical for huge countries where a telco might not have network coverage in all the cities. Users can then switch to a different provider for coverage, Lau said. Answering a question on the opportunities for the IT leader to explore, Maxton highlighted that CIOs have so much technical knowledge that they need “to translate to a language that others can understand”.
New Opportunities
The opportunity to venture into new frontiers saw Singapore-based 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. The NFC technology looks set to be a major
component in contactless card operator EZLink’s vision of a cashless Singapore society, according to Nicholas Lee, CEO, EZ-Link. The 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 on NFC pilots with various telcos in Singapore and other technology vendors. It was never an easy journey and there were a few lessons learnt, revealed Lee. “One was that standards does not mean interoperability,” he said. Numerous devices and readers had to be changed or rewired. And response was to introduce vigorous qualifying processes to ensure interoperability before commencement of operations, he said.
New Blood
The final session of the day was a panel discussion that offered a glimpse into the minds of undergrads entering the technology workforce. The audience was able to find out more about the expectations and mindset of these so-called millennials. Playing the role of the moderator was Prof Steven Miller, vice provost (Research) and dean, School of Information Systems, Singapore Management University. There were six students from his faculty. One question to the young panelists was to give good and bad examples of supervision during their internships. “The good instance was that my supervisor gave me space to work and trust my abilities, the bad instance with another manager was
Consumer technologies can disrupt traditional forms of businesses. One example is the eretailer Amazon who has transformed the retail industry, said Paul Daugherty, chief technology officer at Accenture. He was the keynote speaker at the CIO Workshop 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. Daugherty quoted trends from the Accenture Technology Vision 2013 report. One such trend that he spoke on was Relationship at Scale. 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. And just how pervasive is mobility today? asked Jin Lee, senior managing director, Accenture Mobility, in his presentation ‘Mobility — Where Are We Headed?’ Lee listed his family’s use of mobile devices as an example on how ubiquitous mobility is in mature markets. “I have 13 connected devices, my wife has three and my son uses two. And he is 24 months old,” he said. And all 17 pieces are overwhelming his house’s wi-fi network that is running at speeds of 300 Mbps. “My son has a habit of watching YouTube on his Samsung Galaxy tablet but when he cannot get his videos, he pushes it away and pulls his LTE device. It is running 50 percent faster. He is a power user. He knows the difference between wi-fi and LTE. And he is 24 months old,” said Lee.
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
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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. Continuing the conference’s strong focus on mobility is the presentation by Jung-Seong Han, head manager of New Trend & Business, Hana Bank. 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 services where we can help them offer solutions,” said Han. The bank has at least five apps, including one that is 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 like using social network services-based user interface and customer support avatars that are actually real customer service agents.
Future Role of the CIO
Consumer technologies are transforming the role of the CIO. But how the IT leader can adapt was the main issue raised at the first panel discussion of the CIO Workshop in Seoul. One way is for the CIO to work closely with the CEO, said Matthew Johnston, managing director, South Asia, Dell. “Find out what you are required to achieve for the business, and translate that into technology,” he said. Johnston was responding 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. Another approach for the CIO can be found in the vertical that the CIO’s company operates in, suggested Jae Shin, vice president, Enterprise Business Team, Mobile Communications Division, Samsung Electronics. 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 nation-wide initiatives ran by South Korean 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
I.T. leadership
Paul Daugherty
not forgotten either, with the Rural Broadband Project launched in 2010, added Kang. “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”, said Kang. The applications include home security systems, agricultural training tools and CCTV platforms.
New Tech: Yes or No?
The topic of how the development of technologies like big data and cloud will shift IT priorities was raised at the second panel discussion at the Seoul CIO Workshop. The moderator was Yap Chee Yuen, executive vice president, Corporate Services, Genting Singapore. The crucial point is for the CIO to know when or where to apply the new technologies, according to the panel members. There are also times where there is no need for these new technology spheres, they added. “Do not just do big data,” said John G, Jr. Schoen, Global Alliance Director, NetApp. An enterprise-wide initiative started out with the executives looking at the challenges that the NetApp employees are experiencing. One such area was the interactions between clients and sales. It was after a thorough deliberation process that big data technology was then brought in to help executives analyse the millions of transactions and experiences. Instead of staying current with the new technologies, there are many instances where information security is being neglected. “A lot of the CIOs are still saying ‘this does not apply to me’,” said Edward Schwartz, chief information security officer, RSA. “Security has to be embedded in the value proposition of IT,” said Schwartz. IT and security leaders need to create a dialogue with business heads, and understand where to align the necessary risk practices, he added. And it does not always have to be implementing new technologies. The CIO is in a position to see how all the business processes sync together in the company. In the case of BMC Software, the CIO embarked on a massive four-year consolidation exercise. “We trimmed
July – August 2013
our 15,000 physical servers to just 2,000,” said Brian Daley, Director of Sales, Southeast Asia, BMC Software. SoLoMo (Social, Location, Mobility) is one of the latest e-commerce concepts to emerge in recent times, and messaging app LINE looks to help corporate brands reach out to their intended audience directly. “LINE is the world’s fastest growing service with 110 million registered users in 19 months since the initial launch,” said Hyun Bin Kang, Head of LINE Business Office, LINE Plus in his presentation. In comparison, Twitter and Facebook took 49 and 54 months respectively to reach 100 million users, he said. One key attraction of LINE to users is the deployment of stickers. Instead of just emoticons, LINE developers introduced the more colourful and emotional stickers that are centred around four avatar-like characters. There are some 8,000 stickers, said Hyun, and the numbers are constantly expanding. It is through these stickers that corporate brands can reach out to LINE subscribers. One such company is Thai Airways who introduced themed-stickers and promotions to engage audiences. Another feature is a chat room that allows real-time messaging between company and users. All these help improve brand popularity and loyalty, said Hyun.
Site Visits
Following the conference in Seoul, the CIO Workshop conference delegates spent a day on site visits outside of the capital city. The first visit was to the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI), South Korea’s largest government funded research agency. ETRI had been ranked as the top agency out of 237 institutions by US-based magazine Intellectual Property Today for this year. ETRI also won the same accolade in 2012. The firm’s strengths are its research in the areas of telecommunication and software. The visitors were able to view several ETRI’s exhibits, including a LTE-Advanced mobile communication system, an IPTV-based remote medical service and an Ultra High Definition TV broadcasting technology. The next site visit was to the Samsung Digital City. In a guided tour, the delegates saw the formation of Samsung’s Telecommunication Network Business in 1977, the launch of first in-house developed handset SH-100 in 1988, the unveiling of the world’s first five mega-pixel camera phone in 2004, and the achievement of the leading smartphone maker in 2011. The final visit of the day was to Samsung Electronics’ d’light, a concept store of the maker’s electronic products with retail facilities. The delegates viewed the internal composition of Samsung smartphones and tablets, as well as a Home Energy Management System that enables households to track and control utilities usage across a variety of Samsung products in their homes. //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
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information infrastructure
Experts spoke on the latest trends on storage solutions, hardware and software at this year’s Implementing Information Infrastructure By T.C. Seow Summit.
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The Big Data Drive
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he rapid pace of change in storage technology has not gone unnoticed by both the speakers and attendees at this year’s Implementing Information Infrastructure Summit (IIIS), held at Singapore’s Marina Mandarin on 30 May 2013. Jointly held by Computerworld Singapore and the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), the forum had no lack of experts to expound on the latest trends on storage solutions, hardware and software included. PK Gupta, vice-chair of SNIA South Asia, kicked off the forum by first welcoming the attendees, moderators and speakers for the day. He briefly introduced SNIA and what it represents, touting a growing institutional membership of more than 400. Members come together to foster greater PK Gupta understanding of storage trends, share best practices, and sharing knowledge about the latest hot topics such as big data, cloud computing, 400+ professionals worldwide membership.
Hard Disk Isn’t Dead
Next to take the stage was Mark Greenen, president of the International Disk Drive and Equipment Manufacturers Association (IDEMA) and president of consulting firm, TrendFocus. Greenen asserted that “hard drive is not dead. SSDs haven’t taken over the world yet. But five years from now, who knows?” That basically set the tone of his talk on what memory makers are struggling with today and the foreseeable future. Clearly, the diversification of computing environments is driving changes in storage use and deployment. “The market for data storage is changing so rapidly that both manufacturers and consumers alike were concerned about the future trends in the storage industry,” he said. Looking at the PC and tablet trends, Mark Greenen he said that for the period between now and 2017, the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of tablets will be around 32 percent, while the CAGR for PCs will be less than 4 percent. In the SSD space, some vendors talk about cached hard disk drives as SSDs. “However,
cache SSDs are not affecting [the growth of ] HDDs; actual SSDs are the ones hitting the HDDs,” said Greenen. “HDD makers will be putting flash onboard to build solid-state hybrid HDDs. When 128GB SSDs become available at very low price—close to that of HDD—then things will get interesting,” he added. For 2015-16, SSDs will mostly be available in low capacities, he said. Exabyte grade HDDs will continue to grow till 2014-15. NAND supply control may temper cost per Gb declines, affecting SSD adoption, while the production of hybrid HDDs needs multi-source capability, he said. The use of cloud services through tablets and smartphones is growing rapidly, posing a potential threat to HDD and SSD growths. But are consumers willing to give up big storage to cloud? To that question, Greenen said consumers would still want speed, i.e. high performing storage devices with consistent performance quality. And HDD vendors continue to innovate in design, bringing threedisk, 1.5TB standard 9.5mm z-height HDD and two-disk 1TB, 7mm z-height HDDs to the market. His prediction is that, as SSDs price move down, hard drive will be replaced at the low end (128GB) which is enough for 90 percent of business apps. For the enterprise market, HDD shipments track exabyte demands from continued growth of data creation, he said. Nearline HDDs are key to creation of exabyte data volumes, and there are new HDD opportunities for cloud computing and archive purposes. SSDs will drive key performance benefits in servers and storage solutions, and nearline HDDs of higher capacities (from 4TB today), typically of 7,200rpm rotational speed, will be popular. “HDD vendors are moving into SSDs,” said Greenen. For enterprise SSDs, there are three distinct interfaces—SATA, SAS, PCIe—each targetting different workloads. For SAS SSDs, the number one vendor is Hitachi Global Data Systems. Together with Western Digital
and Intel, they dominate the SAS SSD market. Interestingly, Seagate is partnering Virident for PCIe implementation. Toshiba too is partnering Violin to build PCIe devices.
Machine Data
Loo Chiew Hooi, Splunk’s regional sales manager for Singapore and Indonesia, talked about machine data and how organisations can harness this to better understand their business and their customers. According to Loo, Splunk is a company that helps customers explore and visualise large amounts of machine data. In Singapore, Splunk has about 50 customers. It is ranked fourth most innovative business by Fast Company. Splunk’s largest customer collects about 100 terabytes of data per day. In comparison, two customers in Singapore each collects about 400GB of data daily. What type of data are Splunk’s customers collecting? To that, Loo clarified the data consisted of machine codes and logs which do not make sense to ordinary people. “However, logs and ‘footprints’ [left by machines] are very useful and they hold a lot of information such as timestamps, customer IDs, network IP addresses that can be filtered to produce meaningful information,” said Loo. Splunk helps collect and index any machine data, said Loo, behaving much like a search engine—collecting all the information into one centre for further analysis, Loo Chiew Hooi and for correlation between structured and unstructured data. “This can be any amount, any location, any source. There’s no upfront schema, no custom connectors, no RDBMS, no need to filter/forward,” said Loo. In short, it helps turn machine data into
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information infrastructure
operational intelligence through provision of business insights, operational visibility, proactive monitoring, and search and investigation.
Analytics and Big Data
SNIA South Asia’s PK Gupta kicked off the SNIA Education Sessions by giving the audience an overview of the data deluge confronting us today: the world now has more than 1.2 zettabytes of digital data, growing to 35 zettabytes in 10 years. Out of this, 90 percent of the so-called “digital universe” is unstructured. “Just in 2011, the digital universe had 300 quadrillion files,” said Gupta. Making sense of huge amounts of data will become highly important, he said, because of the information derived will enable businesses to adapt to changing market conditions quickly and to strive. Big data analytics has been touted as the new arena of data distillation, but Gupta warned that it requires a very different Thomas Chua approach compared to traditional business intelligence, which “is repetitive, is structured, works with operational sources of data, and typically working on datasets ranging from gigabytes to tens of terabytes in size,” said Gupta. Big data analytics is more experimental and likely to be conducted on an ad hoc basis. It is also mostly semi-structured, and may require external as well as operational sources of data, and handles data volumes ranging from tens of terabytes to hundreds of petabytes. According to Gupta, big data consists of large data set sizes characterised by volume (for example, terabytes in size, and millions in transactions, tables, records and files), velocity (in processing, whether in batch, near-time, real-time, or streaming), and variety (structured, unstructured or semi-structured). From another perspective, BI and analytics can be understood from the kinds of answers businesses are asking. Past data enables the business to understand “what happened” through reporting and dashboards, and “why did it happen” through forensics and data mining. “Real-time analytics answers ‘what is happening’, and real-time data mining seeks to answer ‘why it is happening’,” said Gupta. As the term suggests, predictive analytics answers “what is likely to happen” and prescriptive analytics will be for answering “what should be done about it”. Gupta highlighted the 10 use cases for big data analytics (see sidebar).
Public, Private and Hybrid
Thomas Chua, education instructor with SNIA South Asia, talked about deploying public, private and hybrid storage clouds. He pointed out there are five major characteristics of a cloud—on-demand self-service portal, resource pooling, rapid elasticity, measured service, and broad network access. Cloud services fall into three categories—software-as-aservice (Saas), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). However,
what is deployed will usually depend on cost, whether it is a public cloud, private, community or hybrid cloud. As to what cloud storage is used for, there are several reasons. Elastic demand for Web-based media (such as video, ebooks, audio), backup to the cloud (restore, recovery, “seeding” the backup with hard drive), synchronisation of files to the cloud and multiple devices (Internet “drive” as secondary storage), archive/preservation in the cloud (including compliance, retention and e-discovery), are some of the main reasons warranting cloud storage. He also talked about the data storage interface evolution, which referred to the huge amount of data generated by an ever diversifying set of devices such as mobile phones and tablets. With trends like BYOD and consumerisation of IT, corporate data are being stored in public cloud in unmanaged and unprotected states. This might be prone to be Heoh Chin-Fah compromised. All these changes to storage requirements are leading to the increasing importance of cloud storage. The technical session spent some time on the adoption rate of CDMI, and ended with some detailed treatment of how cloud storage could be deployed, and what technical issues should be addressed before deploying.
Solid State Storage
Heoh Chin-Fah, who is also an education instructor with SNIA South Asia, took the stage to talk about how best to take advantage of flash memory in enterprise storage environments, in particular in recognising the relative advantages of flash tiering, caching and all-flash approaches, with reference to performance, cost, reliability and predictability. After giving a simplified description of flash memory, Heoh went on to explain its inner workings, and why flash “wear” is a real concern in how it should be used within a storage infrastructure. “In the end, capacity, cost improvement brought about by flash, and the attractiveness of its form factor must be weighed against true concerns such as flash performance, reliability and error-handling,” said Heoh.
10 Use Cases for Big Data Analytics 1. Modelling true risk 2. Customer churn analysis 3. Recommendation engine 4. Ad targetting 5. Point-of-sale transaction analysis 6. Analysing network data to predict failure 7. Threat analysis 8. Trade surveillance 9. Search quality 10. Data “sandbox”
July – August 2013
Heoh went on to talk about the technical differences between flash and disk drive memory, fleshing out the key properties of each drive technology. While flash wins in access, Heoh warned of flash “read wear”, an inherent shortcoming of solid-state architecture that does not suit high-speed random read/write input-output processes. Disks on the other hand spend a lot of time seeking and rotating (the disk), compared to data delivery. However, demand on higher memory performance brought about by multiple-core CPUs, data growth, and the consumerisation of IT, is contributing to what Heoh said is the storage I/O crisis. This is further exacerbated by randomisation of the virtualised or consolidated memory architecture due to virtualisation, data consolidation and different cloud architectures. In addition, demand for ever decreasing seek times and higher rotating disk speeds will add further pressure on data storage. Wong Tran There is also the need to understand the application’s I/O “fingerprint”. By that, Heoh meant the app’s requirements like I/O load, memory block size, locality of access, access pattern, and latency sensitivity.
Object Storage Systems
SNIA South Asia’s education instructor Wong Tran gave a talk on the underpinning of cloud and big data initiatives. After describing what constitutes a cloud (according to the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology), he described the five essential cloud characteristics: on-demand self-service; broad network access; resource pooling; rapid elasticity; and measured service. “Things like Google, Gmail, YouTube are examples of cloud services,” said Tran. “Being able to access these systems is the characteristic of cloud computing.” But what kind of storage can meet these criteria? “If you look at the evolution of storage, traditional spinning drives with block storage led to storage arrays and separate file systems that rely on tree structures to handle files instead of raw bits like in a storage array, which makes storing large amount of data a challenge.” With block storage, data is organised as an array of unrelated blocks and access to the blocks is directly controlled by a host. With file and network-attached storage (NAS), data is similarly organised as unrelated blocks but the onboard file system places data on the disks. External systems provide access to the files within the onboard file system. In object storage, the approach is to provide application-centric data storage, access and management. Virtual containers are used to encapsulate data, their attributes, metadata, and object IDs or keys. “The easiest way to store a large amount of data is using a “bucket” to keep different objects within. Object storage doesn’t care about file structures.”. //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
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information infrastructure
Speakers at the IIIS summit discussed how to manage data growth and operate efficiently in a wide-ranging discussion. By Caroline Ng
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he Business Technology Stream of the Implementing Information Infrastructure Summit (IIIS) on 30 May 2013 kicked off with the topic, ‘Storage Optimisation—Managing Data Growth and Operational Efficiency’. It was moderated by Simon Piff, associate vice president of enterprise infrastructure of IDC Asia/Pacific.
Inflection Point
An imminent inflection point is about to come next year, warned David Neo, senior director of sales engineering of Riverbed Technology Asia Pacific and Japan, as he took to the stage. With that, he meant that as up to 80 percent of end-user traffic will move to the WAN, it will result in at least half of hyper-converged solutions to experience end-user dissatisfaction due to the failure to meet business needs. Citing a report from Simon Piff Forrester Consulting, he cautioned the problems organisations often face when leaving infrastructure at the branch since more than half of them have at least half of their data at the edge. Among which, the lack of control, management difficulties, poor backup and increase costs stood out as major hazards for organisations. Outraged over existing poor consolidation in organisations, Neo offered effective consolidation solutions as he believes its ability to shrink data by up to 95 percent. Specifically, he pointed to Riverbed Granite, an industry-first technology that offers centralised IT control between the branch and server. It is also the first time that compute and storage are separated, according to Neo.
Evolution of Data Centre
David Neo
Meanwhile, the evolution of data centre to optimise storage was illustrated by Joubert Uriarte, technical
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the business perspective consultant from NetApp. While performance and efficiency were innovations that have transformed businesses till 2010, scale has been the driving innovation since then till 2012. Scaling has resulted in the rising importance of thin provisioning as regular volume no longer does the job. More so, with the fast moving nature of technology that makes storage migration a chore. “How do you move from one storage to the next? You don’t know how long that technology nowadays last for? Two years from now, there is a new product out there,” he added. Beyond migration, the management of keeping applications online proves to be another concern for businesses as the capacity of their data is expected to balloon with time. “A lot of companies buy 10TB of data of capacity on day number one because they are afraid within five years time, they Joubert Uriarte will have to replace the storage. When you start to replace the storage with immense capacity inside, how do you manage?” he asked.
data protection as an enterprise challenge. Specifically, he zeroed in on the domination of ‘supply discussions’ as a problem since they are responses to a demand for resources. He meant that supply can be considered as costs, in a way that it costs to supply resources. While demand, on the other hand, can be seen as revenue being generated from applications that are demanding resources. In his view, an effective discussion should include a healthy equation between ‘cost versus benefit’ but this is lacking at the moment. “At some point, simply trying to address these challenges without supplying more resources is going to be ineffective. You need to start managing demand by understanding what is being required,” he said. In order to supply the right resources, he believes it is critical to assign the right value to data, including backup data. “What’s happening in the Raymond Lambie industry these days are vendors like us are starting to look at these repository of information as pieces of value, not costs,” he added.
Data Protection
Security and Management
Raymond Lambie, product marketing manager Asia Pacific/Japan, HP, talked about
Bjorn Engelhardt, vice president, strategic sales and cloud, Asia Pacific and Japan, Symantec
Panel Discussion 1: Cloud to Optimise Storage The first session was followed by a panel discussion between Riverbed’s Neo and NetApp’s Uriarte, focusing on the use of cloud for storage optimisation. Neo stressed on the increasing cost of data storage since “an astonishing amount of data is being created in organisations every year with growth rates of 30-40-60 percent upwards.” With cloud costs dropping from 10 to one cent per gigabyte per month, Neo said cloud is becoming a very cost effective way to store data for backup and archive purposes. Uriarte echoed similar benefits of using cloud to optimise storage. Beyond cost-savings and better return of investments, he further highlighted the time-saving aspect of migrating into the cloud. “It is about the RTO and RPO if you are talking about moving the workloads into the cloud. I have seen users that drop their RTO and RPO from 24 hours down to 3 minutes using the optimisation solutions,” he added. Optimism runs high for the panel that cloud will add tremendous value to organisations.
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information infrastructure
Corporation, talked about security and management in infrastructures. Using the analogy of a vehicle’s brake where the real reason behind is to enable speed, he reasoned that similarly, security is an enabler to increase productivity. Instead of being an inhibitor to block traffic. Specifically, he referred to BYOD as the weakest link in companies. “Sixty-five percent of organisations allow access on mobile devices through the corporate networks. So by allowing that access, you are opening up another ingress point into your organisation,” he said. Besides, as about Bjorn Engelhardt 30 percent of existing malware are stealing information without users’ knowledge, cyber security threats are legitimate and should be ringing alarm bells. Engelhardt unveiled the main motive behind freeware is to the steal usage patterns
Panel Discussion 2: Strategies for BYOD HP’s Lambie and Symantec’s Engelhardt took part in a debate session, which focused on topic of BYOD. The duo shared their views on the strategies needed to secure BYOD in the workplace. Lambie said the understanding of how data is consumed or created is fundamental in implementing the right policies for different custodians of information. Meanwhile, Engelhardt regards BYOD as the ability to segregate personal and corporate applications and information on personal devices. In order to have a secure management in companies, he believes strongly in having a corporate app store, which should serve as the only way for employees to access to the corporate network. With a corporate app, companies are then able to impose security and data management policies through a control point. “So, creating a control point inside your organisation will give you secure management,” he added. The discussion was rounded up with the future of BYOD and the potential evolution to BYOE (Bring Your Own Environment). Raymond remains optimistic that technology will make BYOE possible. “Why should a company necessarily pay good money to provide a place of work for an employee who already has one? Why not just make it possible for them to use their preferred environment within the management structure of the organisation,” he stated.
and information for organisations as their monetisation model. “Free is never free. Free always come with a penalty,” he cautioned.
Data Boom
The next presenter was Harmeet Malhotra, director marketing, enterprise storage and networking solutions, Dell Asia Pacific and Japan, who shared with the audience some findings from IDC and Gartner on the data boom in the next decade and the increasing costs to manage it. IDC has estimated the Harmeet Malhotra growth of managed data to increase 50 folds in the next decade while Gartner has predicted an average of 3 percent increase in IT spend. “There is more data generated in the last two years than in the history of mankind,” he illustrated. This explosion of data has challenged organisations in several aspects, in particular, in the identification of hot data. “Hot data is growing at a strategic pace that is very important for our customers,” he said. “In fact, it is the definition of the hot data that has forced our customers to buy some of the really expensive solutions and that is definitely justified.” To better manage the data boom while limiting costs, Malhotra suggested thin provisioning as a cost-effective solution. Specifically, he referred to the concept of storage tiering since solid hard drives are very costly.
Scalable Architectures
The last presenter, Gavin Cohen, director of marketing, Nimble Storage Asia Pacific,
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offered solutions to the challenges customers often face in building highly scalable architectures. Following the thin-provisioning topic that was discussed earlier on, Cohen observed in dismay that it is under-utilised due to the stigma of a potential space shortage. He opined that many organisations are often fearful that space constraints would handicap their ability to effectively and smoothly run applications. In a bid to dispel the misconception, Cohen clarified that thin provisioning can be safely Gavin Cohen implemented to avoid waste—a method that is prided as a default way for Nimble. In fact, this is where space reduction technologies like compression and deduplication come into play, he explained. However, as such compression technologies are rarely used, it remains as a challenge to optimise storage. In order to reduce hefty storage costs and maintain performance, Cohen suggested a ground-up hybrid design that marries flash and disk to deliver the best of both. As traditional backup and disaster recovery are often costly and inefficient, he recommended the integration of the two components through a snapshot device. Finally, Cohen stated that the management of storage should not be complex as “it is just a piece of infrastructure” that could be worked under a modern interface with automated management. //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Panel Discussion 3: Automation and SSD The final session between Dell’s Malhotra and Nimble’s Cohen focused on automation and solid state drive (SSD) in the enterprise. Both speakers substantiated the thriving existence of SSD and automation. “The point I’m trying to make is that solid state is here. If somebody is still thinking that solid state doesn’t go with data centre, I tend to disagree with them,” Malhotra asserted. In fact, new solutions like thin provisioning are “in the genes of storage.” Malhotra shared that this is why Dell has acquired EqualLogic for US$1.4 billion in 2007, to provide virtualisation solutions in a burgeoning internet storage market. For Gavin, the ability to migrate seamlessly from one data centre to another using automation is “almost like a saving grace because traditionally, migration was an absolute nightmare, if not an impossibility, unless you are willing to take significant downtime.” Despite security challenges self-managed systems often face, Gavin said the benefits outweigh the concerns given the right policies in place. “The reality is I think the world is changing, there is so much advantage to make what people do from a support and analytics and a diagnosis and troubleshooting perspective,” he said. He gave the example of Asia, which has been traditionally very conservative, to have a relatively high adoption rate. The debate ended with the future of virtualisation where Piff implored the audience to deliberate about “the higher value role.” In his eyes, Piff regarded the higher value role as “moving away from managing the mechanical physical infrastructure, to understand the founder of the information that you have inside those environments.” “The whole virtualisation platform is about leveraging a huge amount of automation,” he concluded.
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In Tune with the Customers
On the following pages you will see the winners of the seventh edition of our Customer Care Awards (CCA) programme. As with previous editions, this year’s CCA involved the survey of this nation’s most progressive IT executives. They were asked to evaluate the performance of technology solution vendors in the delivery of service to customers throughout their entire engagement period—from implementation through post-implementation stages. When we had determined the results, we informed the representatives of the winning companies and invited them to a party held in their honour. At this informal gathering on 7 June, we handed them their awards. For a look at their photographs as well as key metrics in marking the win of vendors for all categories, turn the page.
Congratulations to All the Winners Categories
Company Name
Page
Desktop & Notebook PCs
Hewlett-Packard Singapore
22
Physical Infrastructure – Intelligent Power Management
APC by Schneider Electric
22
Physical Infrastructure – Networks
CommScope
23
Server Hardware
Dell Singapore
23
Storage Hardware
IBM Singapore
26
Business Intelligence & Analytics Software
SAP
26
Collaboration & Workflow Productivity Software
Microsoft Singapore
27
Database Management Software
Microsoft Singapore
27
Desktop & Server Management Software
Hewlett-Packard Singapore
28
Enterprise Content Management Software
28
Storage Management Software
EMC
29
SingTel
29
VMware
32
Anti-virus/Anti-spam Solutions
Symantec Corporation
32
Firewall/VPN Solutions
Fortinet
34
Intrusion Detection/Protection Solutions
Check Point Software Technologies
36
Telecommunication Services
SingTel
34
VOIP/IP Telephony Systems
Cisco Systems
36
HARDWARE
SOFTWARE
CLOUD Cloud Services
VIRTUALISATION SOLUTIONS Virtualisation
SECURITY SYSTEMS
COMMUNICATION SERVICES
22
July – August 2013
www.computerworld.com.sg
Hardware Desktop & Notebook PCs Hewlett-Packard Singapore
Consistency Counts
Hewlett-Packard Singapore was able to rake in solid scores in both implementation and post-implementation, staking its win in this category for the fourth time running. Jack Loo (right) of Fairfax Business Media handing over the trophy to Alan Yeo, Operations Manager for Singapore Customer Support and Services, SEATH Printing & Personal Systems. 10 8
7.39
Vendor average on a scale of 1 to 10. Hewlett-Packard Singapore Nearest Competitor
6
7.23
10
10
8
8
6
7.35
6.97
6
4
4
4
2
2
2
0
0
0
implementation
post implementation
7.37
7.1
overall
Hardware Physical Infrastructure – Intelligent Power Management APC by Schneider Electric
Front Runner
The competition was never going to catch up with APC from the start. A strong score in post implementation then put the issue beyond any doubt. (Recipient on the left) Low Seh Min, Head Channel Sales — Singapore & Brunei IT Business.
10
10
8
8
7.83
Vendor average on a scale of 1 to 10. APC by Schneider Electric Nearest Competitor
6
7.14
6
10 8
8.15 7.05
6
4
4
4
2
2
2
0
0
0
implementation
post implementation
7.99
7.09
overall
July – August 2013
23
www.computerworld.com.sg
Hardware Physical Infrastructure – Networks CommScope
Strong Start Seals Win
CommScope built a solid lead during implementation and it was enough to put the competition away for good.
Mark Hobson (right) of Fairfax Business Media handing over the trophy to Stanley Lee, Country Manager, Singapore.
10 8
7.6
Vendor average on a scale of 1 to 10. CommScope Nearest Competitor
6
7.42
10
10
8
8
6
7.4
7.41
6
4
4
4
2
2
2
0
0
0
implementation
post implementation
7.5
7.41
overall
Hardware Server Hardware Dell Singapore
First-ever Win
The turning point in this sub-category came when Dell maintained its consistency during post implementation. This means a first ever win for Dell in this area in the seven-year history of the CCA. (Recipient on the left) Lee Kin Thong, Senior Manager, Singapore South Asia, Marketing.
10
10
8
8
7.62
Vendor average on a scale of 1 to 10. Dell Singapore Nearest Competitor
10
7.65
8
7.62
7.5
7.62
6
6
6
4
4
4
2
2
2
0
0
0
implementation
post implementation
7.58
overall
Thank you once again
Š 2013 CommScope, Inc. All rights reserved. AD-106983-EN.SG
Best in Physical Infrastructure – Networks Computerworld Singapore Customer Care Awards 2013 For the third year running, Computerworld Singapore readers have chosen CommScope as the winner in the Physical Infrastructure – Networks category for the Computerworld Singapore Customer Care Awards 2013. Your selection affirms our continued efforts to provide cutting-edge solutions that address and resolve the needs of our customers. As a vital industry contributor, CommScope plays a distinctive role in virtually all the world’s best communication networks. We create the infrastructure that connects people and technologies through every evolution. CommScope solutions like Groundsmart® Copper Clad Steel and LazrSPEED® 550 OM4 fiber continue to position us at the forefront of high-performance cabling infrastructure. Our innovative solutions are designed to address the most demanding infrastructure challenges in healthcare, education, telecommunications and finance. As technology evolves, our goal remains the same: to help our customers create, innovate, design and deploy — faster and better. We accept this distinguished award with gratitude and will remain committed to providing the trusted, strategic advice that enables our customers to connect and communicate in today’s global marketplace. Thank you for your vote of confidence!
www.commscope.com
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Hardware Storage Hardware IBM Singapore
The Big Blue One
IBM roared into an early lead during implementation and made sure of its lead with a solid score, reclaiming the title that it last won in 2008. (Recipient on the left) Raymond Ang, Product Manager, System Storage, Systems & Technology Group.
10
10
8
8
7.71
Vendor average on a scale of 1 to 10. IBM Singapore Nearest Competitor
10
6
8
7.54
7.16
6
7.14
7.62 6
4
4
4
2
2
2
0
0
0
implementation
post implementation
7.15
overall
Software Business Intelligence & Analytics Software SAP
Hat Trick Hero
There was no answer to SAP’s unassailable leads in implementation and post implementation. With this win, SAP completed a hat trick of consecutive wins that started in 2011. (Recipient on the left) Kowshik Sriman, Managing Director, SAP Singapore.
Vendor average on a scale of 1 to 10. SAP Nearest Competitor
10
10
10
8
8
8
6
6.99
6.61
6
6.81
6.2
6
4
4
4
2
2
2
0
0
0
implementation
post implementation
6.9
6.4
overall
July – August 2013
27
www.computerworld.com.sg
Software Collaboration & Workflow Productivity Software Microsoft Singapore
Hammer Time
Already ahead, Microsoft drove home the final nail in the coffin during post implementation, and in the process, completed a hat trick of wins that began in 2011. (Recipients) Alan Andrew Dias (left) Senior Product Marketing Manager, Office Division, Marketing & Operations and Gerald Leo (right) Information Worker, Business Group Lead, Marketing & Operations.
Vendor average on a scale of 1 to 10. Microsoft Singapore Nearest Competitor
10
10
10
8
8
8
6
7.31
6.83
6
7.4
6.67
6
4
4
4
2
2
2
0
0
0
implementation
post implementation
7.36
6.75
overall
Software Database Management Software Microsoft Singapore
Consecutive Wins
Microsoft made things count during post implementation, winning the award for a consecutive year.
(Recipients) Lee Tarn Hwei (left) Solution Specialist, Enterprise & Partner Group and Harish Aitharaju (right), Server and Tools, Business Group Lead, Marketing & Operations.
Vendor average on a scale of 1 to 10. Microsoft Singapore Nearest Competitor
10
10
10
8
8
8
6
7.12
7.13
6
7.28
7.06
6
4
4
4
2
2
2
0
0
0
implementation
post implementation
7.2
7.09
overall
28
July – August 2013
www.computerworld.com.sg
Software Desktop & Server Management Software Hewlett-Packard Singapore
Turn It On
Hewlett-Packard Singapore cranked up the pressure during post implementation, streaking away with a win that it last won in 2008. (Recipient on the left) DG Carole Ann, Operations Manager, PPS Singapore Customer Support & Services.
10
10
8
8
7.38
Vendor average on a scale of 1 to 10. Hewlett-Packard Singapore Nearest Competitor
10
6
8
7.46
7.32
6
7.24
7.42 6
4
4
4
2
2
2
0
0
0
implementation
post implementation
7.28
overall
Software Enterprise Content Management Software Google
Icing It
Google coolly dispatched its competition during implementation, made sure it kept itself ahead in post implementation, and scored its maiden win in the Customer Care Awards.
10 8
Vendor average on a scale of 1 to 10. Google Nearest competitor
6
7.87
7.37
10
10
8
8
6
7.24
7.22
7.55 6
4
4
4
2
2
2
0
0
0
implementation
post implementation
7.3
overall
July – August 2013
29
www.computerworld.com.sg
Software Storage Management Software EMC
Romping Home
Already in an early lead from implementation, EMC put the game away with a sterling post implementation performance. (Recipient on the left) Ayyaswamy Thangavel, Specialist SE Manager, Presales—Southeast Asia.
10
10
8
8
7.65
Vendor average on a scale of 1 to 10. EMC Nearest Competitor
6
6.95
10
7.76
6
8
6.96
7.71 6
4
4
4
2
2
2
0
0
0
implementation
post implementation
6.96
overall
Cloud Cloud Services SingTel
This is Singapore
SingTel made full use of its home ground advantage, silencing any doubters to become the first winner of an all-new award. (Recipient on the left) David Tan, Director – Cloud Services, Enterprise Data & Managed Services, SingTel Enterprise Group.
10
10
8
8
7.4
Vendor average on a scale of 1 to 10. SingTel Nearest Competitor
6
10
7.28
8
7.49
7.42
7.44
6
6
4
4
4
2
2
2
0
0
0
implementation
post implementation
7.35
overall
SingTel adds Cloud Services Award to its Telecommunications Dominance SINGTEL’S CORPORATE VISION makes its leadership intention clear to both customers and competitors. “To be Asia Pacific’s best multimedia solutions group” demands a great performance, especially in the key field of customer relations. We should perhaps not be too surprised, therefore when, in Computerworld’s 2013 Customer Care Awards, SingTel gets first place in “Cloud Services” in addition to winning “Telecommunications Services” for the sixth time in a row. Customer Focus is one of SingTel’s core values, along with Teamwork, Challenger Spirit and Integrity. SingTel strives to ensure customer satisfaction by delivering a positive experience through all customer touch points. “We always listen to, and connect with, our customers and treat them with dignity and respect,” said Koh Hwee Miem, Head Customer Service and Support, SingTel. “By putting ourselves in our customers’ shoes and by anticipating and understanding their needs, we make it easy for them to do business with us. And, of course, we aim to provide our customers with high quality services and great value, to enrich their lives and enhance their business success.” SingTel is clearly cognizant that its reputation is based on the ability to fulfil promises to its stakeholders, particularly its customers. The company does this by being honest in its dealings, taking responsibility for the success of its services, and being accountable for its actions. SingTel believes that it should treat everyone the way its own staff would like to be treated. To this end, SingTel is proactive in identifying issues and coming up with solutions.
Maximising customer outreach “We engage our customers through different touch-points,” said Koh. “These start with oneon-one account planning with customers who have complex needs. We hold customer seminars to showcase new product launches. Customers can also attend solutions clinics, which help them to understand how to obtain the best possible advantage from our services. We hold customer advisory councils, at which we engage with thought-leaders to understand the future needs of specific industries.” SingTel also holds Business Innovations Forums at which it engages with a wider group of customers. At SingTel i.luminate in November 2012, an award-winning biennale business forum, close to 3,000 global industry leaders and decision-makers congregated to learn industry trends, share best practices and view over 200 cutting-edge ICT solutions. i.luminate was repeated in Hong Kong during April 2013, when it attracted 800 customers, making it one of the largest ICT events in the SAR.
SingTel’s repeatedly dominant position in Computerworld’s Customer Care Awards is the product of a long-term strategy. “We continue to build a strong culture of customer focus in the organisation,” said Koh. “We have a customer experience programme managed at SingTel Corporate level, where every touch point is measured by an external survey. This means listening to the customer and applying our accumulated knowledge to every case. To achieve this, we must continue to re-invent ourselves and our business processes to make things work for our customers.” SingTel staff keep their eyes focused on the customer’s needs all the time – despite the changes occurring in the environment, and in products and technologies. Vendors must always take a customer-in view, and ensure that they set objectives that matter to the customers. The company also has to align its viewpoints across different business units to focus on common customer-in metrics. “Our customers expect professional, competent and passionate people, who are eager to solve their business challenges in a timely manner and with excellent service,” said Koh. “Customers expect us to partner and innovate with them as they deal with their business challenges.”
Maintaining customers service through SLAs Whether SingTel is providing cloud services or managed services, its service mindset and service delivery are based on the same purpose: that is, to provide the services that meet the customers’ business needs and to exceed their expectations. For many of SingTel’s cloud services, the customers themselves can take full charge of the way that they are provided, by utilising an online portal for self-provisioning. “SingTel also helps organisations manage the full range of its ICT infrastructure needs to satisfy the needs of enterprise-wide outsourcing,” said Koh. “Based on committed service level agreements, these outsourcing services are delivered consistently and efficiently, guided by standards-based methodologies. As part of the outsourcing arrangement, we can provide resources to help manage key functions in an enterprise’s IT operations.” For on-premises deployment, dedicated equipment is deployed at the enterprise’s premises, solely to meet its requirements. With deployment over a private cloud, enterprises can enjoy carrier-grade computing and storage without having to invest in dedicated infrastructure. This will enable organisations to have the full benefits of outsourcing without undertaking any capital investment. SingTel has to address both small but technically advanced markets like Singapore and Hong Kong, and also vast but developing markets like Mainland China and India. Both good business practice, and the needs of multinational customers, make it important that the same standards of customer care are maintained, and this is achieved by SingTel’s operation of its Global Operations Centres.
“By putting ourselves in our customers’ shoes, and by anticipating and understanding their needs, we make it easy for them to do business with us. And, of course, we aim to provide our customers with high quality services and great value, to enrich their lives and enhance their business success.” —KOH HWEE MIEM, Head Customer Service and Support, SingTel
Building the Singapore Government’s cloud In 2012, SingTel won a critical contract to deploy and maintain the first private cloud computing infrastructure for the whole of the Singapore Government. The G-Cloud is an advanced infrastructure providing multi-tenanted services with the high standard of security necessary for government eServices. The G-Cloud is bulit by Innovum, a collaboration between SingTel and HP. Innovum, which is formed from the words ‘Innovation and ‘Continuum’ will deliver continuous innovations and the best technology for G-Cloud. The G-Cloud provides government agencies with the flexibility to scale IT resources and reduce initial set-up time. With scalability, resources At SingTel, customer-centred initiatives never stop. With SingTel’s M2M become elastic and can be turned on & managed (Machine-to-Machine) coverage in the region and multiple geographies, we through the use of a self-service portal. Agencies offer technically advanced M2M capabilities that let customers take advanare able to monitor and track resource utilisation tage of the end-to-end information control of their connected devices at a for better planning as well. faster speed to reach new markets quickly and easily. SingTel M2M, a power“SingTel provides users with great agility, espeful SIM-management platform provides our customers with enhanced control cially in provisioning server capacity for developand visibility of connected devices throughout the APAC region. ment and other projects. Ultimately, this technology SingTel has a mobile customer base of 400 million users in the region. adds up to better customer experience.” Many of the company’s enterprise ICT customers give a high priority to mobile technologies. This generates a very large demand for support services. We are able to leverage our associates’ and partners’ networks to Supporting the Internet of Things provide one-stop convenience for management such as centralised sourcing The predicted “Internet of Things” means that and procurement with localised experience for operations support which the number of devices connected to the Internet includes order fulfilment and help-desk. will greatly increase in the near future. “With the SingTel had also recently introduced new services on its mobility netexplosion of mobile devices coming on stream, work. Once such service helps customers manage their roaming expenses to we are training our customer support staff to be reduce ‘bill shocks’. SingTel is also developing mobile applications that will conversant with a variety of products, and be adept serve our enterprise customers’ needs better. With these applications, our at giving customers the appropriate advice for enterprise customers can purchase and manage their enterprise services specific devices,” said Koh. “Customers naturally with more control and ease. demand that the cost and capabilities of all the There are three channels for customers to work directly with SingTel– emails, hotlines and mobile device. Customers can also reach SingTel devices that they use should match their business through its island-wide network of retail shops. Through these avenues, requirements as closely as possible. Therefore, we SingTel is available 24 by 7 for customers to contact the company for the need to be familiar with the characteristics and full range of mobile support – including service activation, fault resolution, positioning of third-party devices as well as our and general inquiries. There are special technical teams for handsets like own SingTel products.” Apple iPhones and Blackberry, and also for special services, such as Mobile Device Management applications. At the end of the day, “we aim to provide the best customer experience possible to our customers. To this end, we practise what we preach and keep customers at the heart of everything we do”, says Koh.
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www.computerworld.com.sg
Virtualisation Solutions Virtualisation VMware
Double Double
VMware posted comfortable leads in implementation and post implementation, clinching the award two times in a row.
10 8
Vendor average on a scale of 1 to 10. VMware Nearest Competitor
10
8.03
8
7.87
10
8.12
8
7.56
6
6
6
4
4
4
2
2
2
0
0
0
implementation
post implementation
8.08
7.72
overall
Security Systems Anti-virus/Anti-spam Solutions Symantec
End-to-end Stuff
Symantec came out on top over the course of a thrilling two-leg blockbuster, winning the award six times in a row. (Recipient on the left) Heng Chun Wei, Sales Director (Government).
Vendor average on a scale of 1 to 10. Symantec Nearest Competitor
10
10
10
8
8
8
6
7.2
7.16
6
6.96
6.97
6
4
4
4
2
2
2
0
0
0
implementation
post implementation
7.08
7.07
overall
“Symantec is committed to enabling customers to protect their information assets and identities so that they can fully embrace the latest IT trends to leverage the full benefits of the connected world with confidence.” TAN YUH WOEI, Country Director, Symantec Singapore
Robust and Complete Protection for the Modern Enterprise Symantec’s unparalleled knowledge base of security threats and comprehensive portfolio of award-winning solutions secure the IT systems of their customers now and into the future.
UNDERPINNED BY THE ONE OF THE WORLD’S most comprehensive vulnerability databases, Symantec provides its customers with support and intelligence capabilities generated by its Global Intelligence Network, which comprises 69 million attack sensors and records thousands of events per second. This network monitors threat activity in over 157 countries and territories through a combination of Symantec products and services. These resources enable customers to be apprised of emerging trends in attacks, malicious code activity, phishing, and spam—and cement the trust and loyalty that customers have towards Symantec’s solutions. “More than ever, enterprises are looking to do more with less by making IT work harder for them, and this is where Symantec can help. Symantec continues to be committed to helping businesses protect their critical information,” said Tan Yuh Woei, Country Director, Symantec Singapore. “Our customers leverage on our strong experience and expertise in security, software and systems management to automate the repetitive tasks that consume a huge amount of precious time, so that they can have the peace of mind to concentrate on their business and what they do best.” It is no surprise that Symantec has won the annual Computerworld Customer Care Award in the Anti-virus/Anti-Spam category for the sixth consecutive time since 2008.
Helping customers ride three major IT trends “We are seeing three broad IT trends driving customer preferences in Singapore and across Asia Pacific – Big Data, Cloud Computing and Cyber Security,” Tan shared. “Symantec is committed to enabling customers to protect their information assets and identities so that they can fully embrace the latest IT trends to leverage the full benefits of the connected world with confidence,” Tan said. The Symantec Enterprise Solution for Hadoop, for instance, allows enterprises to take advantage of Apache Hadoop, a distributed framework for processing large data sets. The solution addresses Hadoop’s storage limitations and is built on the Cluster File System, a high-performance file system for fast failover of applications and databases. The solution enables customers to run Hadoop while minimising investments in a parallel infrastructure, greatly reducing the storage footprint to reduce cost and complexity. This realises the benefit of running analytics where the data resides, without the costly data moves or storage capital expenditure. “Our vision of safe clouds is that, in five years, companies will operate in a converged IT world of cloud, virtualisation and mobile, where public and private clouds are safe, and where IT organisations will have better visibility, control and compliance across their private and public clouds,” enthused Tan. Symantec foresees future clouds that will be safe, agile and efficient. “From our conversations with customers, however, we understand that clouds
add to IT complexity, specifically when it comes to protection, data management and control. Three possible cloud adoption models we encourage customers to adopt are consuming existing cloud services, extending their IT to leverage third party clouds, and building their own private and public clouds,” detailed Tan. Symantec has a comprehensive cloud portfolio that includes new and existing solutions to help solve the challenges that its customers face around creating protection policies and protecting information, identities and infrastructure in the cloud. PSB Academy, a leading private education institution in Singapore, has deployed Symantec.cloud services (Symantec Endpoint Protection.cloud and Symantec Email Security.cloud) to protect its computers, communications and data across its IT network. “The successful implementation of these solutions enabled PSB Academy, with a population of close to 10,000 students, to achieve a 70 percent reduction in time spent on administration and a massive reduction in the volume of spam,” revealed Tan. In the area of cyber security, Asia Pacific Telecom (APT) has implemented Symantec Endpoint Protection 12 to protect its endpoints from malware and other threats. The solution incorporates Symantec Insight and SONAR to offer an intelligent and innovative security approach that can detect malware as soon as it appears. “Since the deployment of the solution, APT has had no endpoint security incidents. In addition, Symantec Insight is able to reduce the overhead of virus scanning by automatically identifying and whitelisting Symantec trusted high-reputation files. This eliminates significant scanning activity from each endpoint, improving user productivity,” Tan divulged.
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July – August 2013
www.computerworld.com.sg
Security Systems Firewall/VPN Solutions Fortinet
Stroll in the Park
Fortinet had the answers to every challenge thrown by the competition, winning the award for the first time. (Recipient on the left) Andy Tan, Channel Director, SEA & HK.
10
10
8
8
7.63
Vendor average on a scale of 1 to 10. Fortinet Nearest Competitor
10
6
8
7.51
7.19
6
7.3
7.57 6
4
4
4
2
2
2
0
0
0
implementation
post implementation
7.24
overall
Communication Services Telecommunication Services SingTel
Where it Matters
SingTel made things count when it outscored the competition during post implementation. It has won this award six times in a row. (Recipient on the left) Ang Wan Tiang, Director, Order Mgt & Settlement, Customer Service & Support.
10
10
8
8
7.65
Vendor average on a scale of 1 to 10. SingTel Nearest Competitor
10
7.6
8
7.51
7.27
7.58
6
6
4
4
4
2
2
2
0
0
0
implementation
post implementation
7.43
6
overall
Fortinet – Always Evolving to Stay Ahead in Customer Service THE WORLD OF IT SECURITY is a complex one, with online threats becoming more plentiful and sophisticated by the day. To properly defend against this dynamic threat landscape, organisations need security processes and systems that evolve and adapt to the changing threats. For Fortinet, which won the 2013 Computerworld Customer Care Award in the Firewall/VPN Solutions category in Malaysia and Singapore, this evolution extends to its customer care approach and customer support infrastructure too. The three key areas in which the company is evolving and improving for the benefit of customers are its FortiGuard Labs threat research services, channel ecosystem and product range.
Threat Research and Response Services
that are compromised or are behaving abnormally. The service uses historical analysis, honeypots, botnet analysis and other techniques to provide immediate protection for Fortinet’s FortiGate, FortiWeb and FortiDDoS platforms against wide scale automated attacks. The service also continuously learns from a global footprint of threat sensors, tracking malicious events to IP addresses in real time. FortiGuard Labs will launch more services for fighting advanced threats later this year. In addition, to augment FortiGuard Lab’s global threat research efforts and services, Fortinet will soon also deploy probes in Malaysia and Singapore to better understand the local threat landscape. Information gathered will be exchanged with national/regional cybersecurity bodies to more effectively combat threats facing enterprises and consumers today.
Channel Support Fortinet sells through a two-tier channel composed of distributors and resellers. To provide outstanding customer service, the company invests heavily in partners to support its products, giving them thorough training and frequent solution updates. In the last two years, Fortinet has strengthened relations with systems integrators and resellers, as well as expanded its channel ecosystem to cover new geographies and train partners to handle new and more complex types of deployment. This year, the company will also round up key partners in Southeast Asia and set up a partner advisory council to better understand customer concerns and more quickly address emerging issues. End-user events scheduled in the various countries will also be designed for greater interaction and engagement. Besides improving the channel ecosystem, Fortinet has built up a robust direct-touch account management team in the region. By working directly with key accounts, the direct-touch team is more attuned to the unique needs of each customer, thereby increasing Fortinet’s ability to address their security requirements. These customers have benefitted from Fortinet’s quicker response and tailored solutions.
Fortinet is the only network security vendor in the world to have its own global threat research and response team continuously monitoring the threat landscape and providing customers with real-time protection against the latest Internet threats. FortiGuard Labs has more than 175 dedicated research analysts, engineers and forensic specialists operating in security labs around the globe. These researchers constantly analyze the threat landscape and delivers research and rapid signature updates to provide customers with near-instant protection from new and emerging threats. FortiGuard Labs’ Security Subscription Services, which enable unified protection against multiple and blended threats, include: 7dj_l_hki i[hl_Y[ 7dj_ifWc i[Ykh_jo i[hl_Y[ M[X i[Ykh_jo i[hl_Y[ :WjWXWi[ i[Ykh_jo i[hl_Y[ 7ffb_YWj_ed Yedjheb i[hl_Y[ ?djhki_ed fh[l[dj_ed i[hl_Y[ M[X \_bj[h_d] i[hl_Y[ Lkbd[hWX_b_jo cWdW][c[dj i[hl_Y[ Earlier this year, FortiGuard Labs launched Broadening of Solution Range its cloud-based sandboxing and IP reputation Products are the closest touch-point customers have with services to help organisations protect against Fortinet. That’s why as Fortinet branches out from being advanced persistent threats (APTs). an integrated multi-threat appliance provider to become The FortiGuard cloud-based sandboxing seran end-to-end security player, it has broaden its product range to offer enterprises vice uses behavioral attributes to detect malware security that extends from the client, to databases, to Web applications, to the overall by executing them within a virtual environment. network. This broad-based solution portfolio is serving us well and we expect to continue This serves as an additional protection layer that to benefit from it globally across all sectors. complements the FortiGate appliances’ existing Recently, the non-traditional solutions Fortinet has launched include FortiDDoS, antivirus engine and inline lightweight sandbox. FortiDNS, FortiVoice and even FortiCamera, which is Fortinet’s first product for the video Suspicious files can be submitted automatically security market. Updates of FortiMail, FortiWeb and FortiClient were also rolled out in to the new hosted service for further scanning the past few months. without significantly impacting a FortiGate appliLater this year, the market can expect a new line of application delivery controller ance’s performance. products from Fortinet, following our acquisition of Coyote Point Systems, an enterpriseAs part of its IP reputation service, FortiGuard class application delivery, load balancing and acceleration solution provider. Labs will continually investigate and monitor IPs With so many solutions to address customers’ diverse needs, as well as rich FortiGuard research offerings and a strong channel infrastructure, Fortinet expects to continue to lead the industry for customer service.
“Fortinet is the only network security vendor in the world to have its own global threat research and response team continuously monitoring the threat landscape and providing customers with real-time protection against the latest Internet threats.” —GEORGE CHANG, VP, Southeast Asia & Hong Kong, Fortinet
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Security Systems Intrusion Detection/Protection Solutions Check Point Software Technologies
Return to Winning Ways
Check Point Software Technologies picked apart the competition with military-like precision, winning the award that it last won in 2009. (Recipient on the left) S. Raj, Regional Director—South Asia.
10 8
Vendor average on a scale of 1 to 10. Check Point Software Technologies Nearest Competitor
10 8
7.98
8
7.67
6.88
6
10
6
6.79
4
4
2
2
2
0
0
implementation
6.84
6
4
0
7.82
post implementation
overall
Communication Services VoIP/IP Telephony Systems Cisco Systems
Seven and Counting
Already in a healthy lead, Cisco System made post implementation a mere formality to clinch the award. It is the only vendor that has won the same award every year since Customer Care Awards began in 2007. (Recipient on the left) Low Loong Shiew, Regional Marketing Manager.
10
10
8
Vendor average on a scale of 1 to 10. Cisco Systems Nearest Competitor
6
10
8
7.26
6.74
8
7.49 6
7.38 5.87
6
4
4
4
2
2
2
0
0
0
implementation
post implementation
6.3
overall
Better Together A Winning Partnership WHILE CHECK POINT is noted for its technological innovation, the commitment to its customers is what makes it a truly exceptional company. Customers appreciate the value of the winning combination of constant innovation and strong customer focus, and have voted Check Point as the Computerworld Customer Care Award winner for Intrusion Detection/Protection Solutions in the Security category. Since creating the first firewall using “stateful inspection”, Check Point has grown from strength to strength to be a security firm with a global footprint and 3,000 staff. It has cornered one third of the global security software market, and all the Fortune 100 and Global 100 companies use its security software. When Check Point found that providing a single point of contact raises customer satisfaction, it went all out to put in place a support programme to meet these customer needs. “We have consistently found that customers prefer a single point of expert contact. Therefore, Check Point’s support programme presents a hands-on, direct-line contact which draws on our corporate expertise and knowledge to help our customers,” said Rajlingam Sokalingam, Check Point’s Regional Director for South Asia. Check Point’s comprehensive and flexible appliance support plans include enhanced service level agreements (SLA) for partners and customers. “We never stand still. Check Point is extending its onsite support programmes and adding new support plans for onsite appliance support,” said Sokalingam. Check Point’s appliance support programmes provide technical support, software updates and upgrades, and replacement of faulty hardware. Check Point is now offering next business day onsite support (Standard or Co-Standard) and fourhour onsite support (Premium or Co-Premium).
global ThreatCloud service and this intelligence will then permeate to all our customers worldwide. Similar threats will immediately be stopped when they occur, whether such threats attack networks, hosts and servers, desktop nodes, laptops, tablets, or even smartphones,” explained Sokalingam.
Educating and Equipping Check Point believes in equipping and educating customers with the most current knowledge, through its training and development programmes that portray and detail the latest threats, best practices, security policies, and technologies. Besides equipping its customers, Check Point is offering its customers free 3D security assessments, in order to better understand the best approach to cyber security, and to enable customers to refine their security policies, improve internal education programmes, and plug any holes in their security implementation. “A perfectly functional security implementation is no guarantee for tomorrow’s threats, which is why continuous assessment is critical, to ensure that security is assured for today and tomorrow,” said Sokalingam. An area Check Point is focusing on in 2013 is to help customers secure their branch offices and remote nodes. Centralised networks can be easily managed and secured, but for some organisations, remote nodes or branch offices may not have adequate protection. In summary, Check Point’s key to success is to return to the fundamentals—which is to listen to and to please the customer. “Customers are the reason of our existence, and the spark to our relentless pursuit of technological excellence. Our local team, together with our channel partners, work alongside with our customers to address any issue and to ensure their needs are always served first,” said Sokalingam.
Constant Innovation Even as cyber attacks grow more sophisticated each year, Check Point relies on constant innovation to continually secure the Internet to ensure a businesssafe environment. And it is this strong partnership with customers that has enabled Check Point to continually deliver cutting edge technology that helps to prevent attacks on customers’ networks. For instance, Check Point recently rolled out “ThreatCloud Managed Security Service” and “Incident Response” to provide real-time response and mitigation of new threats as they occur, after extensive field feedback and research. “Since its inception, Check Point Software values customers as collaborative partners in combating the avalanche of network security threats. Our local accounts team strives to provide dedicated attention to our customers, anticipating what they need and recommending solutions that will serve them dutifully for the long haul,” said Sokalingam. “We do not believe in researching and developing solutions in a vacuum. The best solutions are always uncovered and refined with a synergistic team of people with common goals. Our customers are our partners.” Another recent innovative offering is the “Threat Emulation Blade” that takes on advanced threats with the preventive approach. This is built on Check Point’s Software Blade Architecture, which provides an efficient and developer-friendly sandboxed model to build on even as cyber threats continue to evolve and become more virulent. “What’s innovative about our Threat Emulation Blade is that once a new threat is identified while sandboxed, the incident will be reported to our
“We do not believe in researching and developing solutions in a vacuum. The best solutions are always uncovered and refined with a synergistic team of people with common goals. Our customers are our partners.” —RAJLINGAM SOKALINGAM, Check Point’s Regional Director for South Asia
38
LOGGING OFF
July – August 2013
www.computerworld.com.sg
Look At Yourself and Then Make That Change
Editorial EDITOR Jack Loo SUB-EDITOR Subatra Suppiah ONLINE EDITOR Zafar Hasan Anjum ReporterS Caroline Ng, Nurdianah Md Nur Correspondent AvantiKumar (Malaysia) Designer Yasin
C
onsider this scenario. A shopper spends her time in an electronics goods shop examining the product she likes. Once satisfied, instead of paying for it, she takes out her smartphone and
Advertising/MArketing/Reprints Sales Director
Glen Myles Tel: +65 6395 8018
buys the same product from an e-commerce site.
Regional Account Director
And what is the reason for her actions? The online portal offers a cheaper rate.
Ng Yi-lin Tel: +65 6395 8045
This is the new state of retail, Marcelo De Santis, Director for Information Systems and Business
Francesca Lee Tel: +65 6395 8041
Process Excellence, Asia Pacific Region, Mondeléz International, said to me.
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And there is something that IT can learn from retail. Projects such as ERP implementations can take years to complete. For instance, the sizing and blueprinting stage takes up a significant portion of the
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Tissie Adhistia Tel: +65 6395 8012
project timeline. Instead of taking months, why not think about how to finish the programme in terms
circulation & PRODUCTION
of weeks or even days? De Santis said.
Circulation and production specialist
But when things are smooth sailing, why take risks and implement changes? But with innovation comes the ability to disrupt markets. Think about the iPhone and how it redefined the concept of a smartphone. In a similar way, the vendor landscape is undergoing changes to stay relevant in a competitive and fastpaced playing field. Many players in recent years have been transforming themselves. Some have become service providers, while others have merged software with hardware. They know this: It is by understanding and keeping pace with customer demands that they can survive in a competitive global technology industry.
Josephine Goh Tel: +65 6395 8060
how to contact the editor We welcome your letters, questions, comments, complaints and compliments. All should be addressed to the Editor, Jack Loo: Tel: +65 6395 8062 Email: jloo@fairfaxbm.com Address: 152 Beach Road, #11-06/08 Gateway East, Singapore 189721 fairfax business media ASia
It is all about the customers. But yet the concept that the most important person in the organisation is
Asia regional manager Mark Hobson finance manager Allan Chee
the customer seems to be an alien notion to many. Thankfully, the winners of the Customer Care Awards featured in this issue have been able to keep in tune with their customers’ requests and specifications. They know the truth. And the truth is this: The most important person in your organisation is not your boss, it is also not your boss’ boss, and it is not even your CEO. It is actually the customer. This is not new. This is an old truth. Understanding it is easy. Knowing it comes naturally. But adopting it as a way to operate is difficult. And so, for your stellar efforts the past year, I salute you winners of the CCA 2013.
operations manager Alison Lim
about fairfax business media information with integrity Fairfax Business Media (FBM) is the business information and publishing arm of Fairfax Media, Australia’s oldest and biggest publisher of quality newspapers and magazines. The company’s products are icons in their markets, and include The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Australian Financial Review and BRW. Subscriber services & Updates Please contact Josephine Goh Email: subs-cws@fairfaxbm.com Subscription rates for one year Singapore — S$20.00 Countries within Asia — US$28.00 Countries outside Asia — US$38.00 This publication may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form in whole or in part without the written express consent of the publishers.
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