Computerworld Singapore November/December 2013

Singapore

The Voice of I.T. Management

computerworld.com.sg

November–December 2013

Inside News P01 YCH Enhances Productivity With WMS-enabled Solution P02 NEC Chooses Singapore for its Fifth Research Centre

Computerworld Singapore celebrates the Leaders of the Year at the Readers Choice Awards.

After page 12.

P04 What Drives an F1 Car? P05 The Sound of Music, Decoded for You P06 2013 Continues to Stress CIOs and IT Budgets P07 ESI International Attains WSQ Accreditation P08 NTUC First Campus Makes Cloud Computing Debut P09 Guidelines Rolled Out For Personal Data Protection Act

feature P10 Changi Airport’s Secret to Good Service

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November – December 2013

what drives an

f1 car?

Nurdianah Md Nur dives into the pit lane for answers on page 04

YCH Enhances Productivity With WMS-enabled Solution The integrated solution will help boost efficiency, productivity, and worker safety standards. urdianah

Md Nur

By Nurdianah Md Nur

S

ingapore-based supply chain company YCH Group recently unveiled an integrated solution that features its Warehouse Management Solution (WMS) and a satellite automated cart storage system.

According to the company, the integrated solution will boost efficiency, productivity, and

worker safety standards through automation coupled with high-density storage solution. It will be installed at its Tampines LogisPark.

Worth over S$1 million (US$800,000), the YCH WMS is equipped with several modules that are customised to customer’s requirements including location assignment logic, picking

logic and storage logic. It merges seamlessly with the satellite warehousing system.

Satellite System

The radio frequency-controlled, satellite automated cart storage system installed in YCH’s facility stores and retrieves individual pallets at the speed of one to one and half minutes per pallet. As conventional systems usually take four to five minutes to do the same job, this cart storage system helps increase efficiency and throughput by three times.

The high density storage racks, which make up a part of the cart storage system, effectively maximise and utilise warehouse floor space by more than 30 percent too.

Since the integrated solution enables automation, operational workers are less likely to directly handle pallets, therefore decreasing the chances of work hazards and incidents. Tay Ee Learn, Vice President of Global Operations at YCH Group, said: “[The enabled automation will also allow] the operations staff to upskill and learn about new technologies and workflow processes. This increases the value of their work and contribution to the company.” ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

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November – December 2013

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NEC Chooses Singapore for its Fifth Research Centre Reasons include government’s support for R&D projects, and ability to provide NEC access to various partners for joint ventures. By Nurdianah Md Nur research centre due to the government’s strong support for research and development projects, said Katsumi Emura, Senior Vice President of NEC. He added that the republic provides NEC “access to a broad range of partners”, thus opening a “gateway to new technology”.

NLS’ Activities

From left: Toshiya Matsuki, Dr. Nobuhiro Endo, Dr. Katsumi Emura,Dr. Keiji Yamada

N

EC Corporation launched its fifth research centre, NEC Laboratories Singapore (NLS), in early September.

Housed in the company’s Singaporebased regional headquarters for Asia Pacific region, NLS will utilise security and big data technologies to provide social infrastructure solutions to global markets.

Nobuhiro Endo, President of NEC, said that NLS will capitalise on NEC’s technologies “to create new value while flexibly engaging in joint research with local partners and proactively participating in a variety of field trials”.

NEC’s other research centres can be found in Japan, America, Europe and China. Singapore was chosen as the next location for NEC’s

Currently, NLS is working on the Safe City Testbed project under the Singapore Economic Development Board. Emura said the project aims to “create systems to protect urban areas from the threat of crime and disaster”.

NLS is also collaborating with customers and research institutes to produce solutions for urban challenges by focusing on areas such as safety, big data, security and smart energy. NLS’ partner research institutes include A*STAR Institute for Infocomm Research(I2R), the Nanyang Technological University (NTU), the National University of Singapore (NUS), and the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD). ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

A*STAR, IDA to Co-develop Cloud Solutions for Local Firms The cloud solutions will help enhance the productivity and competitiveness of Singapore’s ICT industry. By Nurdianah Md Nur

T

he Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) will be collaborating with two members of A*STAR to develop cloud computing-powered technological solutions to benefit local ICT companies.

The two members are the Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC), and the Data Storage Institute (DSI).

The collaboration seeks to promote and accelerate the use of cloud-based services and technologies to enhance the productivity and competitiveness of local ICT companies.

Solutions provided will be powered by IDA’s Cloud Computing and Next Generation Nationwide Broadband Network infrastructure.

Social Media Analyser

Under the agreement, IDA will identify the companies with relevant needs to adopt cloudbased technological solutions. Companies looking for solutions related to analytics can consult IHPC, whose strengths lie in computational modelling and simulation, and data analysis.

One of IHPC technologies that can be leveraged by local ICT companies is the brand-

centric social media analyser, which IHPC is currently working on. The analyser enables customer-facing organisations to monitor, track and analyse near-to-real time social media perceptions about themselves. It also helps identify emerging pertinent social media trends.

As for DSI, it offers solutions involving data

protection, real-time computing, and high performance, low cost systems for cloud storage.

Solutions include the hybrid drive for largescale storage, and high performance data systems with the next generation non-volatile memory. /////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

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November – December 2013

news Feature

computerworld Singapore www.computerworld.com.sg

what drives an

f1 car?

Besides having a powerful engine and good aerodynamic design, an F1 racing team needs to leverage technologies such as analytics and ERP to have a leg up on competitors.

By Nurdianah Md Nur

I

t takes more than just the drivers’ skills and the pit crew’s teamwork for a Formula One (F1) team to clinch the F1 World Constructors’ Championship title. The F1 car and the technologies powering it play a vital part too. Interestingly, the technologies utilised are available in the enterprise market for any organisation to use. We take a look at how some of these technologies are being used by the different F1 teams to provide them with a competitive edge at the recent race in Singapore’s Marina Bay Street Circuit from 20-22 September.

Speed Up With HANA

F1 cars are fitted with numerous sensors that feed engineers with real-time information crucial to a race. For the Vodafone McLaren Mercedes Formula 1 team (McLaren), each car carries over 120 sensors. Data collected from the sensors include pressures, temperatures, gear changes on brakes, tyres and fuel in the car, as well as other factors that affect the performance of the car.

All these contribute to the many gigabytes of data an F1 car generally generates during a Grand Prix. To quickly analyse this huge amount of data, McLaren uses SAP HANA, an in-memory database software system. With SAP HANA, data analysis is achieved 14,000 times faster than the previous solution used, therefore providing results in seconds.

What SAP HANA does is to organise and analyse the data that is fed by the sensors into easy-to-understand visuals and language in real-time. The visuals and analysed information, which provide an overview of the car, will then be presented on a SAP HANA-powered dashboard. The dashboard also contains realtime race predictions and strategy simulations, which are generated within seconds, for improvements throughout the race.

Through the simulations, engineers can determine what might have happened in a particular scenario if they had made a different decision. All the analysed data thus enables “engineers to make real-time split second decisions—such as when to pit and what to change during pit stops—during the course of the Grand Prix,” said Martin Whitmarsh, McLaren’s team principal.

McLaren also uses the analysed data to retrospectively examine the performance of its

cars on specific racetracks, such as Monaco’s racetrack that has not changed much over decades.

Whitmarsh said: “[SAP HANA enables us] to compare data from the car in real-time with historical data from past seasons, competitor strategies, and modelling in weather conditions.

The team can thus structure plans of attack for future races [at the same racetrack] and train with specific scenarios in mind.”

Whitmarsh added that in future, SAP HANA will provide McLaren engineers with instant access to 10 years of historical data. “[For example,] the team looking at a particular car setting at a particular Grand Prix over the past five races at that circuit could instantly access that past data.”

The Nerve Centre

During a Grand Prix, data generated from the race cars is constantly moving. The raw data from the sensors onboard the cars is wirelessly transmitted to the garage on the racetrack before being relayed to the headquarters at the team’s base for analysis. The processed data will then be sent back to the garage to help the team make the necessary decisions. To ensure a smooth and quick delivery of data, the Caterham F1 Team (Caterham) relies on its five-feet-tall (1.5 m) half-rack. Anthony Smith, Caterham’s Senior IT Support Engineer, said: “Every piece of data and machine runs through the half-rack—it’s the core of our network.”

Some key features of the half-rack include: • Dell PowerConnect 7048 switches, which handle most of Caterham’s routing and connectivity for servers as well as the power distribution • Three Dell PowerEdge servers that act as ‘physical’ hosts, with about 30 virtual hosts running on VMware vSphere 4 server software • Two Dell EqualLogic arrays used for high performance and bulk storage. The high performance array comprises solid state drives and hosts all the virtual machines. The other array consisting of conventional spinning discs provides storage capacity.

• A pull-out keyboard and monitor that manages all the virtual machines.

• Two UPSs (Uninterruptible Power Supplies) to provide power resilience and prevent blackouts, sags or surges The half-rack achieves its name as it is able to fit Caterham’s trackside infrastructure (consisting of the above technologies) into just half a rack, whereas the infrastructure of other teams generally fill an entire rack. Smith attributed this ability to the use of virtual machines. “If you haven’t got virtual machines like we have here, there could be as many as 30

servers, which would take up [more than half a rack].” Since the trackside infrastructure follows the teams to the Grand Prix around the world, having a lighter infrastructure would help the team save on shipping costs.

Looking forward, the Caterham IT team intends to replace the current half-rack with Dell PowerEdge VRTX, a shared infrastructure platform with integrated servers, storage and networking technology in a single, compact tower chassis. The Caterham engineers believe VRTX will increase the efficiency of its operations by minimising power consumption and cabling requirement.

VRTX will also improve the reliability of the servers as it reduces the cooling requirements.

In addition, Caterham can reduce its spending on shipping its trackside infrastructure to races as VRTX is more compact and lighter than the half-rack.

Reinventing Processes

The Lotus F1 Team believes its Microsoft Dynamics AX ERP platform can help integrate performance and manufacturing systems into a single seamless environment.

The first phase of the project, which went live in November 2012, saw the deployment of Microsoft Dynamics AX for Lotus’ human resources, finance, and procurement departments. The ERP solution offers “a greater level of transparency across these departments […therefore] improving collaboration and productivity,” said Thomas Mayer, Lotus’ Chief Operating Officer.

Lotus’ Technical Director James Allison said the second phase will cover all manufacturing and engineering operations. It is currently being rolled out and is scheduled to go live by November this year. By the end of the second phase, Microsoft Dynamics AX will fine-tune Lotus’ entire business, from manufacturing to racetrack.

The agility of Microsoft Dynamics AX will help Lotus to improve capacity planning across manufacturing, improve management of information to increase operational efficiency, and integrate disparate systems to enhance data accuracy and resource reporting.

“Microsoft Dynamics AX will allow us to plan confidently and collaborate more effectively [… thus] giving our designers and engineers as much time as possible on the design phase. The longer we can spend on this, the faster our car [for next season] will be,” said Allison. ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

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computerworld Singapore www.computerworld.com.sg

November – December 2013

Local 3D Screen Protector Clinches Engineering Prize Built for mobile devices, the EyeFly3D promises to replace the need for 3D glasses

By Jack Loo

A

locally-developed screen protector for mobile devices that can replace cumbersome 3D glasses has won the Technology Innovation category at the recent Institution of Engineers Singapore (IES) Prestigious Engineering Achievement Awards 2013.

The EyeFly3D was first unveiled earlier this year by its creators, a team of researchers from Singapore government research unit Institute of Materials Research and Engineering (IMRE) and tertiary institute Temasek Polytechnic.

The IES award recognises Singaporebased engineering projects that demonstrate outstanding engineering skill and help better the quality of life.

“We are indeed delighted to have been given this award, which endorses our effort in always pushing the boundaries of technology through research & development, while raising the capability of our staff and students in the process,” said Temasek Polytechnic’s Deputy Principal, Lay-Tan Siok Lie. The technology behind EyeFly3D is based

on a simple concept of taking a regular plastic film and engineering about half a million uniform-sized mini lenses onto its surface, turning the plastic into an add-on screen protector that produces unprecedented, distortion-free, brilliant 3D content on mobile devices.

Like a Waffle

The researchers from IMRE and TP employ a combination of materials nanotechnology and integrated software, using a unique nanoimprinting process on the plastic—akin to making a waffle—to create an array of high resolution lenses.

“The versatile and industry-ready nanoimprinting technique allows us to rapidly develop research concepts and designs into functional prototypes that can easily be adapted to mass production,” explained Dr Jaslyn Law, part of the award-winning team and the IMRE scientist who developed the base technology together with TP researchers.

Unlike some thicker glasses-free 3D filters,

The Sound of Music, Decoded for You Baidu-I2R Research Centre launches Singaporedeveloped Music Search Technology

By Zafar Anjum

W

hat could be music to your ears is also a milestone in multimedia search development.

Researchers at the Baidu-I2R Research Centre (BIRC) in Singapore have developed a music search technology using query-by-example music search to help users obtain song information from just a sound clip.

The technology identifies music playing over the air by its “unique music fingerprint” made up of its audio waveform and returns the song title, the name of the artiste, and the album art within seconds.

BIRC is a joint laboratory between A*STAR’s Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R) and Baidu, China’s leading Internet search engine provider.

99 Percent Accuracy

According to a statement from BIRC, the lab came up with this innovative product for smart mobile device users in May 2013.

Launched this year, the Baidu Music Search technology, , ting ge shi qu, which literally translates to “hear a tune and know the song”, is embedded within the Baidu Music App that has been downloaded over half a million times on both Google Play Store and iTunes (China).

Users can also share song information with their friends through various social networking platforms.

According to the lab sources, Baidu Music App shows 99 percent accuracy through continuous technology advancements and optimisations and it taps on several million music items with copyrights from Baidu Music database which synchronises with 17 music lists, including Billboard Hits, the UK Chart and accessed by tens of millions of music lovers worldwide daily.

The Baidu Music App returns results with at least 10 percent higher accuracy when searching for songs falling outside the regular charts in China for both normal and acoustically challenging environments. ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

this award-winning technology does not affect the touchscreen sensitivity, brightness and resolution of the smartphones. At a mere 0.1mm, EyeFly3D is the first glassesfree 3D accessory that can display content in both portrait and landscape mode, doing away with the need for cumbersome 3D glasses and power-draining and costly builtin 3D screens.

“The award is a testament to an engineering breakthrough that has provided a local Singaporean company the opportunity to lead on the world stage. It also shows how Singapore can couple its creativity into a commercial proposition,” said Nanoveu Founder and CEO, Alfred Chong.

The start-up is licensing the technology exclusively from the researchers, and will be rolling the product out to Europe, the USA, Japan and Australia in time for Christmas this year. China and other Asian markets will quickly follow in early 2014. ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

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November – December 2013

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2013 Continues to Stress CIOs and IT Budgets Less than half of Asia Pacific organisations will increase their IT spending in 2013; Singapore prioritises technology as much as peers in developed economies: Forrester By T.C. Seow

S

o far, the year has been fairly encouraging to the IT community around the region, according to a new report by Forrester Research, which says IT budgets for 2013 in Asia Pacific are in better shape than in the rest of the world, but not by much.

Although 18 percent of organisations in the region will increase their IT spending by seven percent or more in 2013, most CIOs in Asia Pacific are coming under far more budget pressures than in previous years.

Overall, less than half (45 percent) of Asia Pacific organisations will increase their IT spending in 2013, and almost one-quarter (21 percent) will reduce their IT capital spending.

In addition, Asia Pacific CIOs now directly control less than 60 percent of enterprise IT spending. IT groups in Asia Pacific account for 58 percent of IT purchases in 2012—down from 2010, when they purchased 74 percent of their organisation’s IT.

Healthy Growth

In contrast, Forrester’s data shows that business leaders are often growing their IT spending at very healthy rates even as CIOs deal with budget reductions. Business leaders focused on business outcomes and innovation directly controlled 33 percent of regional enterprise IT spending in 2012—a share that is growing quickly.

“Time is running out for CIOs to partner with the business,” according to Dane Anderson, Vice President, Research Director and Asia Pacific Manager at Forrester Research. “Emboldened business leaders across Asia Pacific are increasingly driving reorganisation and retraining efforts to extract greater value from their technology.”

Consistent with the pressures CIOs face, the research findings show that the top two technology initiatives prioritised by IT departments across Asia Pacific are budgetary related: 54 percent cite ‘improving budget delivery performance’ as a priority, while 52 percent cite ‘improving IT budget performance’.

In comparison, ‘data and analytics to improve business outcomes’ ranks as business leaders’ top IT priority for 2013, while it came in third for IT leaders. More importantly, the top reason that business leaders are spending more on technology is because they believe that it’s too important for the business not to be involved.

Two Distinct Categories

Interestingly, the regional story in Asia Pacific has two distinct categories that break along the fault line between emerging and developed markets.

• Singapore is the second closest to North American spending patterns among Asia

Pacific markets, just behind Australia.

Spending 5.8 percent of revenue on IT, organisations in Singapore prioritise technology as much as their peers in developed economies around the world, but similarly suffer from slight growth expectations for 2013.

• While IT budgets in Singapore will not grow as fast as China or India, 35 percent of organisations in Singapore plan to increase spending in 2013, close to double of organisations (18 percent) that plan to decrease it.

In other ASEAN markets, • CIOs in Malaysia and Indonesia are starting from smaller bases than their peers in more developed markets. Malaysian organisations spend 3.7 percent of revenues on IT, while Indonesian organisations spend 4.2 percent • On the bright side, the share of organisations increasing their IT budgets by more than 10 percent is especially high in the Philippines (12 percent), just behind China (14 percent) and India (19 percent) • Based on the above findings, Forrester advises CIOs to adapt to the new business-powered budget reality to be in a position for success. ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Singapore Hospitals Clinch Technology Architecture Award The facilities Ng Teng Fong General Hospital and Jurong Community Hospital will be completed in December 2014 and June 2015. By Jack Loo

T

he planned IT blueprint for two upcoming public hospitals in Singapore has won the Enterprise & IT Architecture Excellence Award for Healthcare category at Architecture World conference in Bangalore, India.

The awards recognise IT architects’ work in creating viable systems for their organisations to thrive. The contest saw entries from chief information officers and IT architects from 27 countries for 15 award categories.

The two facilities Ng Teng Fong General Hospital and Jurong Community Hospital fall under the Singapore government’s administrative arm for the Jurong region, Jurong Health Services (JurongHealth). The hospitals are scheduled for completion in December 2014 and June 2015.

Designed by Integrated Health Information Systems (IHiS), the Singapore Health Ministry’s IT arm, and JurongHealth, the enterprise architecture provides a roadmap for JurongHealth to leverage technology to achieve

its vision to deliver seamless, integrated care for the community.

The opportunity to build two hospitals from ground up has allowed the planners to design a seamless environment for patients, hospital staff and partners, according to JurongHealth’s Chief Operating Officer, Joanne Yap. “Backed by an intelligent IT system, we aim to go ‘four-less’—paper-less, film-less, chart-less and script-less, in our drive to better integrate care and resources,” said Yap.

One Central Record

The IT architecture will have one central record for all patient data, one unified queue to serve patients at hospital touch points, and one consolidated bill for patients, explained Yap. “This will significantly reduce stress and hassle for patients and their caregivers.

For staff, this will definitely add to better collaboration, improved productivity and efficiency with seamless sharing of information

between doctors, patients and other healthcare providers for improved medical outcomes,” said Yap. JurongHealth and IHiS have also planned the enterprise architecture with flexible and robust IT solutions to enable easier future enhancements and adding of new solutions.

The IT team’s competencies will also be systematically developed to support the planned transformations.

“JurongHealth’s enterprise architecture will shape its current and future IT landscape to transform and achieve quality care across its healthcare institutions,” said Dr Chong Yoke Sin, CEO, IHiS. “The technology roadmap prioritises JurongHealth’s IT systems and resources to its vision, and aligns IT efforts to integrate disparate systems and achieve synergies and economies of scale,” added Chong. /////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

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computerworld Singapore www.computerworld.com.sg

November – December 2013

ESI International Attains WSQ Accreditation The Workforce Skills Qualification certification affirms ESI’s curriculum meeting world-class industry standards and best practices. By T.C. Seow

L

eading project management training company ESI International has received the Singapore Workforce Skills Qualification (WSQ) certification from the Singapore Workforce Development Agency (WDA), for its contract management course titled “Managing Contracts”.

The national accreditation system aims to develop the key competencies of employees and enhance their employability against industrydeveloped work standards.

According to ESI International, it is the only project management training provider in Singapore that offers accredited project management and business analysis programmes under the Business Management WSQ (BM WSQ).

The three-day “Managing Contracts” course aims to provide project managers, contract managers and professionals related to contractual work, with the right tools to effectively work with customers, contractors and sub-contractors to accomplish key organisational objects. Trainees are expected to acquire good understanding of the contracting process from the perspectives of both the buyer and the seller.

Skills Upgrading

“The need for well-qualified project managers and business leaders who can effectively handle change and uncertainty has become a given, in today’s challenging economic environment,” said Raed S. Haddad, Managing Director for Asia Pacific, ESI International.

Lifelong training and skills upgrading would

also make the difference between retaining the best people and mediocre staff, Haddad said.

“People stick around because they find their jobs fulfilling and interesting. As such, organisations should spend some effort to keep them trained for future challenges.”

Haddad also added that organisations, especially those with succession problems, should have a “talent management” scheme in place, where promising employees are given the right training to move up the corporate ladder over time.

On the question of staff retention, Haddad said organisations could look at providing training incentives rather than subjecting them to on-the-job training only. He explained: “One way is to partly or fully sponsor staff to go for further certification or professional training.

Doing so is a form of staff appreciation, and in return, their tenure will be longer since they would have acquired the necessary skills for greater responsibilities.” ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Maybank Singapore Invests S$55M to Upgrade IT Infrastructure Dimension Data and NTT roped in to upgrade the bank’s IT infrastructure. By Zafar Anjum

M

aybank Singapore has signed a S$55 million (US$44 million) IT contract with Dimension Data Singapore and NTT Singapore, the Singapore bank has announced. The contract is to upgrade the bank’s IT infrastructure to improve service reliability (more reliable 24x7 customer service), customer user experience and ensure that it is well-positioned to capitalise on future growth opportunities, the bank said in a statement.

“This investment will see the bank’s current infrastructure transformed into a world-class IT operation with more reliable, 24x7 banking service for our customers,” said Lim Kuo Siong, Maybank Singapore’s Head of Information Technology and Virtual Banking.

Vision and Growth

According to Lim, Maybank needed an advanced data centre and IT operations to ensure that it could be closely aligned to the business vision and growth, and support the bank’s operations.

“By harnessing the latest technological advances, we can increase our network’s effectiveness and ensure maximum system uptime so that our customers can conduct their banking transactions seamlessly and securely at any time, and anywhere in the world. This will also bring about cost and operational efficiencies through infrastructure virtualisation and consolidation,” he said. ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

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November – December 2013

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NTUC First Campus Makes Cloud Computing Debut The childcare services provider moved from a traditional data centre to a Fujitsu IaaS platform.

By Jack Loo

S

ingapore’s NTUC (National Trades Union Congress) childcare services arm NTUC First Campus (NFC) has migrated its IT infrastructure to Fujitsu’s Cloud Infrastructureas-a-Service (IaaS) platform.

NFC operates over 100 childcare centres in Singapore and is known as the largest childcare provider in Singapore. According to Fujitsu, NFC is the first educational agency to host its infrastructure in its IaaS platform.

“Cloud computing represents the opportunity for us to transform our infrastructure even as we rapidly grow our network of childcare centres,” said Lim Chai Seng, Head of Information Technology at NFC. “The infrastructure is now more effective and responsive to business requirements and, promises flexibility, lower operating costs and managed risk.”

Originally hosted in a data centre, NFC’s new infrastructure is hosted in data centres based in Singapore. The deal will last three years.

Fujitsu also is implementing its Desktop Management Services (DMS) to manage NFC’s

centres as part of the partnership. With child registration and enrolment expected to increase by 50 percent over the next few years, Fujitsu said its DMS will help NFC manage a diverse range of technology tools and respond to an expected increase in capacity. A team of engineers from Fujitsu provides 24x7 support for the implementation, which also includes a monitoring system architecture, replications and disaster recovery services.

Big Step

“Seeing how this is a big step for NTUC First Campus since this marks the first time it embarks on cloud computing, it was evident that we could not develop the platform with a “one size fits all” approach. It had to be customised in order to support NTUC First Campus’ rapid growth, its current technological needs and more importantly, to ensure a smooth migration from its previous data centre,” said David Chee, Country Head for Managed Services, Fujitsu Singapore.

“The key to this successful deployment

was a result of ongoing communication and collaboration with NTUC First Campus,” added Chee.

Further enhancements to the unified platform are also underway as discussions on other projects for network and application services are in progress. The success of this partnership thus far has resulted in NFC hosting their contact centre system within Fujitsu’s data centre facility.

“It was important for us to work with a partner who is able to provide us with the capability to support the technological needs when we open a new centre and at the same time, ensure the ongoing maintenance and management of our existing centres,” said NFC’s Lim. “Fujitsu’s attentiveness and responsiveness to our requirements have resulted in the development of an infrastructure which addressed both our business and technological objectives,” said Lim. ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Millions in Funding for Singapore Mobile App Startup TradeHero secures funding from KPCB China and IPV Capital.

By Zafar Anjum

M

yHero Limited has secured US$10 million (S$12.5 million) in funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers China fund (KPCB China) and IPV Capital.

MyHero is the holding company for the mobile stock market simulation app TradeHero.

This is one of the largest Series A rounds ever for a Singapore-based consumer Internet

startup, the company said in a statement.

“The timely funding will allow us to grow the reach and scale of our user base, build out the technology and drive product availability on different platforms to meet strong demand,” said Dinesh Bhatia, CEO and Founder, MyHero. “Half of China’s 170 million brokerage accounts in China today are online, and TradeHero’s focus on stock tips makes it highly relevant for Asian investors. We are energised and excited by the potential to address these growing markets.”

Top Position

TradeHero has reached the number one position in the iOS app store’s finance category in 75 countries and the top 10 position in over 100 countries. Since its launch six months ago, TradeHero acquired 250,000 users spread over 200 countries.

TradeHero is also running a campaign with Macquarie Group in Singapore to promote warrants trading. /////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

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computerworld Singapore www.computerworld.com.sg

November – December 2013

Guidelines Rolled Out For Personal Data Protection Act PDPC’s guidelines were crafted based on public feedback submitted during the public consultation conducted from February to April 2013. By T.C. Seow

S

ingapore’s Personal Data Protection Commission (PDPC) has issued Advisory Guidelines to provide clarity to the Personal Data Protection Act 2012 (PDPA), which will be enforced from 2 July 2014.

The Key Concepts and Selected Topics guidelines will help organisations adjust their business processes or implement necessary data protection processes to comply with the PDPA. Leong Keng Thai, Chairman of PDPC, said: “The Advisory Guidelines aim to provide greater clarity to organisations and individuals on the provisions of the PDPA. For businesses, it is important that they prepare in advance and

review their own operations and processes to comply with the provisions.”

Definitions

The Key Concepts guidelines provide interpretations and definitions of important terms used in the PDPA and key obligations of organisations.

The guidelines also elaborate on the Data Protection and Do Not Call Provisions in the PDPA. For instance, organisations can only send marketing messages to Singapore telephone numbers after they check the Do Not Call

Registry or obtain clear and unambiguous consent from the individuals.

To better understand how PDPA applies to specific issues and domains, organisations can turn to the Selected Topics guidelines.

Key topics highlighted in these guidelines include data for research, collection of personal data through Closed-Circuit Televisions (CCTVs), and the use of NRIC numbers. These guidelines incorporated public feedback submitted during the public consultation from February to April 2013. ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

SingTel Group, Samsung Partner to Enhance Mobile Experience Partnership will commence this month with joint projects beginning from the fourth quarter this year. By Zafar Anjum

T

he SingTel Group has entered into a strategic partnership with Samsung focused on driving next-generation mobile communication, infotainment and technology services in Asia, the telco has announced. The collaboration is built around SingTel Group’s scale and Samsung’s innovative products and services.

The SingTel Group and Samsung partnership commenced in September with joint projects

beginning from the fourth quarter of this year.

According to a statement by SingTel, both parties will offer applications and digitial services to customers of SingTel Group companies. These include Advanced Info Service (Thailand), Airtel, Globe Telecom (Philippines), Optus (Australia), SingTel (Singapore) and Telkomsel (Indonesia).

The SingTel Group will also work closely with Samsung to identify opportunities for

joint launches and marketing campaigns of key Samsung device announcements.

“Not only will our companies mutually benefit, but our combined 400 million mobile customers will be able to take advantage of the unique offerings that will be provided in the future,” said Mark Chong, CEO International, SingTel Group Consumer. ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

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November – December 2013

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Changi Airport’s Secret to Good Service The secret lies in One Changi, a centralised platform that enables CAG and its partners to monitor their service quality and improve staff productivity. Nurdianah Md Nur

S

ingapore’s Changi Airport is one of the best airports globally, winning the ‘World’s Best Airport’ at the Skytrax World Airport Awards this year. The Skytrax Awards are based on a survey format that focuses on passenger satisfaction. The 2013 win means that Changi Airport has won the accolade for the best airport four times.

To ensure that Changi Airport remains competitive, the Changi Airport Group, the business unit in charge of running the airport, has introduced a technology initiative called One Changi that aims to help keep the quality of passenger service consistent.

With a total investment of US$3.8 million, One Changi is a centralised platform enabling the Changi Airport Group (CAG) to share information with its partners and tenants to collaboratively provide good customer service.

Steve Lee, CIO and Senior Vice President (Technology), Corporate IT & Technology of Changi Airport Group, explained that One Changi is necessary to service the 51.2 million passengers it receives annually as the airport is a “complex system of systems”. Besides its 1,400 employees, it also oversees the staff performance of over 200 airport partners. Airport partners include ground handling officers, emergency services officers, and cleaners.

One crucial aspect of One Changi is a set of customer-facing solutions that help transform and enhance the current service standards, said Lee. The customer-facing solutions are the feedback management SWIFT system, the tablet-based SWEET system, social media channels, and the customer management CTPRM solution.

Taking SWIFT Actions

The Service Workforce Instant Feedback Transformation (SWIFT) system is an integrated feedback management and business intelligence system that helps CAG and its partners “monitor service quality and improve staff productivity”, said Lee. It is made up of two components: the Instant Feedback System (IFS) and e-Inspection system.

As the name suggests, IFS allows customers to rate their satisfaction levels immediately after using a service or their encounter with a frontline staff on touchscreen devices at various locations in the airport. These devices come in 7-inch, 10-inch or 15-inch-sized screen formats, and can be found at toilets, check-in, immigration and information counters, as well as retail and F&B outlets.

“IFS enables us to quickly take corrective

actions on customer complaints,” said Lee. For instance, when a customer comments that the toilet is dirty via the feedback device, an SMS will be instantly sent to the supervisor’s smartphone. A cleaner will then be dispatched to the particular toilet to rectify the situation.

The IFS thus encourages CAG’s partners to be more responsive in addressing feedback.

Lee added that the IFS results are regularly shared with CAG’s partners and tenants to provide them visibility to the level of customer service provided by each staff. This visibility enables partners to conduct trend analyses for better resources planning, “reward employees who render good service, and allocate resources to help employees who need to improve”.

While IFS focuses on the services rendered to customers, the e-Inspection system focuses on the quality of airport facilities. e-Inspection tracks the real-time working condition of the airport facilities, and ensures timely response to service lapses or facility faults. Airport facilities monitored by e-Inspection include toilets, aerobridges, and safety equipment such as emergency lights escape routes, said Lee. Lee illustrated that when a fault or service failure is discovered during routine inspection, the inspecting staff will use e-Inspection (on a company-owned Samsung Galaxy Tab or Note) to send a real-time report to the maintenance supervisor. Photos and videos can be included in the report to help the supervisor assess the situation and decide what needs to be done.

Upon completing the corrective action, the staff will complete a mobile form which contains the time they took to complete the job and a visual of the fixed problem (if possible).

After the implementation of e-Inspection, corrective actions are carried out within 20 minutes, as opposed to 30 minutes previously.

A SWEET Experience

In line with its aim of providing customers with a good experience, CAG rolled out the Service Workforce Empowerment & Experience Transformation (SWEET) system that runs on company-owned iPads.

Lee said the SWEET system features updated and detailed flight information, events on ground, and airport information such as terminal maps, store directory, and 3D visuals of attractions in the airport. The ground staff, namely the Changi experience agents and duty terminal managers, thus use the SWEET system to assist customers when needed.

The SWEET system can also be used for staff resource planning and allocation. Using

Steve Lee

information on the flights arriving and departing from all three terminals, the ground staff can position themselves at passenger influx areas to offer help to customers, said Lee.

Responding to Feedback

Another component of OneChangi is the Customer, Tenants & Partners Relationship Management (CTPRM) solution. Running on Salesforce’s cloud, the CTPRM solution consists of relationship management portals that process, manage and track interaction cases between CAG and its customers, partners, and tenants. Interaction cases are based on feedback and enquiries from various channels including information counters, Changi Airport website, email, phone, hardcopy forms, surface mail, and the SWIFT system.

The first component under the CTPRM solution is the customer relationship management portal. It integrates all feedback and enquires received from customers across the different communications platforms mentioned above. CAG’s customer service officers (CSO) can thus reply to simple enquiries immediately or channel feedback to the respective agencies for follow up.

The CTRPM solution also contains dedicated portals for partners and tenants to have a single view of feedback across all channels for case closure and continuous improvement. When feedback requiring corrective actions appears on the portal, the partners’ or tenants’ CSO can accept, follow up, update and close cases by themselves on the portal. CSOs can also use the portals to explore previously resolved cases to solve similar ones.

To motivate tenants and partners to continually provide good customer service, performance reports from these portals will be graded as part of CAG’s quality service management programme. Employees of agencies that scored well will then be “rewarded in terms of actual dollars and cents”, said Lee.

Looking Ahead

CAG is also using social media channels, namely Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, to reach out to tech-savvy customers. As these channels contain customers’ compliments, queries and complaints, Lee plans to link the feedback to CAG’s CTPRM by early 2014. //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

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computerworld Singapore

readers choice awards 2013

www.computerworld.com.sg/rca_2013

18th

Computerworld Singapore Readers Choice Awards 2013

Celebrating the Leaders of the Year

computerworld Singapore

www.computerworld.com.sg/rca_2013

readers choice awards 2013 overview

The Infocomm Development Authority’s Intelligent Nation 2015 (iN2015) strategic vision called for Singapore to be an intelligent global city-state that is powered by infocomm technologies by the year 2015.

For that to happen, the initiative calls for the public and private sectors to work closely together to build infocomm capabilities, to improve the way Singaporeans work, live, learn and interact.

But it takes more than just innovative products and services, or robust infrastructure, to create an intelligent nation.

It takes people, people who are passionate to truly complete the vision of the intelligent nation.

This is where the winners of the Readers Choice Awards (RCA) come in.

Feedback from our readers indicate that the user community is not just looking for working products and services, but supportive vendors who can grow together with their businesses.

As leaders of their respective categories, the RCA winners can help Singapore companies exploit technology to seize business opportunities. And in the long run, help shape the iN2015 initiative.

At Computerworld Singapore, we would like to recognise these technology giants as the Leaders of 2013 for their customers and Singapore.

The winners are chosen by Computerworld Singapore readers. And that speaks volumes about their unique way of dealing with customers and in delivering products and services. Therefore we would like to present to you the winners of the 18th Computerworld Singapore Readers Choice Awards.

Contents 14 Honour Roll 15 Winning Products 30 Celebrating the Leaders of the Year

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readers choice awards 2013

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Honour Roll

Computerworld Singapore congratulates the winners of the Readers Choice Awards 2013 Platform & Tools

Enterprise Resource Planning

Mid-Range Servers

System Management Software

SAP SAP Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)

Application Servers Software

Red Hat Red Hat CloudForms

Database Management System

SAP SAP Supply Chain Management (SCM)

IT Asset Management System

Enterprise Mobile Communication Devices

Cisco Systems Cisco Catalyst 3K switches (Catalyst 3560/3560-E/3560-X and 3570/3570-E/3750-X Series Switches)

Enterprise Mobility Management Suite

Citrix Citrix NetScaler

Unified Communications Software Suite

Consulting and Integration

Citrix Citrix XenApp 6.5 Feature Pack 2 Microsoft Singapore Pte Ltd Windows Server 2012 Microsoft Singapore Pte Ltd SQL Server 2012

Symantec Corporation Symantec Altiris Asset Management Suite

Security

Information Security Suite

Symantec Corporation Symantec Endpoint Protection

Enterprise Firewall and VPN

Check Point Software Technologies Check Point Firewall Software Blade

Intrusion Detection/Prevention System

Fortinet FortiGate Series

Unified Threat Management

Fortinet FortiGate Series

Enterprise Applications

Customer Relationship Management

salesforce.com Salesforce CRM

Business Intelligence

Performance Management

Supply Chain Management

Communications

Samsung Electronics Samsung Galaxy Note and Samsung Galaxy Tab Symantec Corporation Symantec Mobile Management Suite

Cisco Systems Cisco Unified Communications Manager

Unified Communications Hardware Provider

Cisco Systems

WAN Optimisation

Blue Coat Systems Blue Coat MACH5

Storage

Enterprise Disk System

IBM Singapore Pte Ltd IBM System Storage

Storage Management Software

Hewlett-Packard Singapore HP ProLiant Servers

High-End Enterprise Servers

IBM Singapore Pte Ltd IBM System x

Power Management

APC by Schneider Electric APC Smart-UPS

Enterprise Routers and Switches

Physical Infrastructure - Networks

Services

Hewlett-Packard Singapore HP Technology Services

Support and Maintenance

Hewlett-Packard Singapore HP Technology Services

Data Centre and Hosting

SingTel SingTel EXPAN Managed Hosting Services

Managed Connectivity

SingTel SingTel Managed Connectivity and Managed Services

Managed Print Services

IBM Singapore Pte Ltd IBM Cognos Business Intelligence

EMC Corporation EMC Unisphere Manager

Fuji Xerox

Data Analytics

Backup System

Desktop Virtualisation Provider

Virtualisation

SAS Institute SAS Analytics Suite

Symantec Corporation Symantec Backup Exec

Citrix

Collaboration Platform

Hardware

VMware

Lenovo ThinkPad series

Hewlett-Packard Singapore

Microsoft Singapore Pte Ltd Exchange Server 2013

Enterprise Content Management

Microsoft Singapore Pte Ltd Sharepoint Server 2013

Mobile Computers

Entry-Level Servers

Hewlett-Packard Singapore HP ProLiant Servers

Server Virtualisation Provider Storage Virtualisation Provider

Cloud

Cloud Services Provider

Hewlett-Packard Singapore

computerworld Singapore

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readers choice awards 2013 winning products

platform & tools

System Management Software

Application Servers Software

Citrix Citrix XenApp 6.5 Feature Pack 2

Microsoft Singapore Pte Ltd Windows Server 2012

Citrix XenApp helps IT to centralise a single instance of each application in the data centre, delivering it to users for online or offline use. This offers a highly secure way of accessing Windows applications from a centrally managed location, and can also serve to reduce costs. A well-established name in this field, XenApp delivers a seamless user experience to any device, including Mac computers, thin clients and mobile phones. The latest XenApp 6.5 Feature Pack 2 (FP2) shares many of the innovations with the XenDesktop 7 release, and offers a number of new functionality. One notable feature is local application integration, which allows applications installed on the local computer to be accessed from within the hosted desktop environment. FP2 also enhances delivery of apps through a newly redesigned unified app store and clientless Citrix Receiver, while hardware-based GPU sharing of OpenGL-based apps lowers the cost of delivering 3D graphics apps.

Unveiled in the second half of 2012, Windows Server 2012 came with a host of new capabilities to replace the ageing Windows Server 2008. For one, access control to files and processes has been strengthened, while multiple Windows Server 2012 machines can now be managed as a group from a single console. Moreover, the embedded version of Microsoft’s hypervisor, Hyper-V, can now work in multi-tenant configurations. Released in August this year, the Windows Server 2012 R2 update delivers a number of notable changes, including the ability to run UEFI-based virtual machines, faster VM deployment, deduplication capability for Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) files, and automatic tiering capability to store the most frequently accessed files on the fastest physical media.

In addition, it will come with Windows PowerShell v4, which includes a Desired State Configuration (DSC) feature, and the latest version of Internet Information Server (IIS) 8.5.

Database Management System

IT Asset Management System

Microsoft Singapore Pte Ltd SQL Server 2012

Symantec Corporation Symantec Altiris Asset Management Suite

Rolled out in the second half of last year, SQL Server 2012 is a major release that replaced SQL Server 2008 R2. Among others, SQL Server 2012 offered a number of substantial features such as Business Intelligence to help companies analyse business data, an AlwaysOn availability and uptime enhancement, Contained Databases for managing databases as a group, and a quick-query tool called ColumnStore Index.

Since then, Service Pack 1 (SP1) of SQL Server 2012 was released in November of 2012. SP1 includes all fixes and Hotfix solutions included in SQL Server 2012 Cumulative Update 1 and Cumulative Update 2, and addressed a number of supportability enhancements and issues. Beyond that, the SP1 update also offers important capabilities such as support for cross-cluster migration of AlwaysOn availability groups, the ability to access and mash-up data from various sources using Excel’s PowerPivot, the creation of visualisations from data using Power View, as well as being able to work with hundreds of millions of rows, which is powered by xVelocity in-memory technologies.

Symantec Asset Management Suite improves visibility into IT assets at every point in the lifecycle to reduce costs and fulfill compliance initiatives. Currently at version 7.1, the suite helps organisations eliminate unnecessary software and hardware costs, as well as proactively manages vendor contracts. For instance, users can have better visibility of software licences and hardware contracts within the enterprise. This helps to save money by avoiding over-purchasing even as it ensures that the right software is up to date for each desktop and laptop. One key feature is the Configuration Management Database (CMDB), which manages hierarchical relationships of assets, including assets to other configuration items, users, locations, departments, cost centres, and associated contracts to give users gain real-time asset information. Moreover, the software also identifies the impact and risk associated with the change management process to reduce outages that occur as a result of changes in the environment.

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Computerworld Singapore

Reader Choice Awards 2013

Putting Customers First

Profile

SingTel

Even as SingTel thrives in multiple markets, and consolidates its strength in Asia, it continues to forge ahead and break new ground in the areas of cloud services and mobility.

P

lacing a priority on customers has always been the cornerstone of SingTel’s service philosophy. It is therefore no surprise that SingTel has once again won the Data Centre & Hosting, and Managed Connectivity awards at this year’s annual Computerworld Singapore Readers Choice Awards.

Today, SingTel is well positioned to help customers address their data challenges – whether it is managing and storing big data, or transporting data. This is made possible with service offerings that include Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing, fully secure data centres, and a strong, scalable data network infrastructure.

According to IDC, SingTel/Optus took the lead position in international MPLS-based IP VPN services with a market share of 18.6 percent, in the first half of 2012. SingTel’s international Ethernet-VPN (E-VPN) and dedicated P2P services (E-Line and IPLC) also lead the market with a commanding share of 20.4 percent and 13.1 percent, respectively.

On a global scale, SingTel provides its customers with a greater array of options for their International Private Leased Circuit (IPLC) and Ethernet connections via its diverse network of submarine cables. Domestically in Singapore, customers can now procure fully redundant connections into key data centres.

SingTel has not rested on its laurels, but is continually strengthening and enhancing its fundamental infrastructure to increase resiliency. The provider recently upgraded its core network with more than 1 Terabit per second of capacity on the Asia-Pacific Cable Network 2 (APCN2), JapanUS Cable Network (JUCN), Unity and South-East Asia Japan Cable (SJC) networks for routes connecting key global cities.

The provider had recently revolutionised its layer 1 & 2 networks with the implementation of the Auto-Switched Optical Network (ASON) and Carrier Ethernet technologies which enable SingTel to deliver new services such as point to multi-point E-Line service and electronic

bandwidth on demand (eBOD) (connectivity-as-a-service) for E-Line.

Said Lee, “Our infrastructure is built with best in class design. For instance, KCTC-2, SingTel’s state-of-the-art data centre, is built according to TIA942 Tier IV specifications, the highest classification for data centre reliability, with fully redundant infrastructure, designed for no single point of failure. This ensures maximum up-time for our customers, many of whom rely extensively on data for the running of their business.”

Today, SingTel continues to lead the market for connectivity services in Asia. In Asia-Pacific, SingTel owns 106 points-of-presence (POPs) in 60 Asian countries, and more than 200 POPs in 160 cities globally. SingTel’s deep coverage and service consistency within China and India, has enabled it to win connectivity contracts for multiple sites in the two emerging countries.

Beyond connectivity, SingTel continues to drive the adoption of cloud services, as well as venture into new markets by developing capabilities in the machine-to-machine (M2M) space.

Everything as a Service

SingTel understands that customers’ needs evolve along with the everchanging business environment. Organisations today face a challenging environment, with rising IT costs and thinner business margins. The rise of the global organisation has resulted in geographical dispersion, with differing IT policies across different branches. Other challenges include managing an increasingly mobile workforce, the rampant growth of big data, and the challenges of storing, transporting and using it.

To help customers address these challenges, SingTel offers a comprehensive suite of cloud services, making a host of IT resources and infrastructure available “as a service”. This helps businesses avoid expensive capital investment in hardware purchase and software licensing, while achieving greater flexibility with on-demand, pay-as-you-use deployment models.

Ahresty Makes In-Roads into China and India with IP VPN Without an Internet Protocol Virtual Private Network (IP VPN) linking all of its offices and factories in Japan, the United States, Mexico, China, Thailand and India, Ahresty faced challenges when it came to keeping its finger on the pulse of things.

However, things took a turn for the better when the aluminum die casting automotive parts manufacturer chose to use SingTel’s ConnectPlus IP VPN. Since then, Ahresty has gained a seamless any-to-any connection to its global offices, with the ability to monitor and track real-time end-to-end performance of the enterprise network – 24/7, 365 days a year.

Simple and manageable, with minimal need for additional resources to operate,

ConnectPlus IP VPN’s ability to share information has enabled a centralisation of management information and decision making, thereby improving productivity.

A welcome bonus in using SingTel’s ConnectPlus IP VPN is the ability to connect more factories than with its previous service provider, at the same cost. Said Yutaka Nagata, Ahresty’s Management Planning Department IT System Section Manager: “With ConnectPlus IP VPN’s cost effectiveness, we were able to add India and Thailand into the global network and power ahead our operations.”

Being able to keep track of the network at any point was a key feature that Ahresty found helped them stay on top of the game.

SingTel included TOPS-0 (Traffic Optimisation

Profiling Service – Level Zero) that gave the company enhanced visibility into their network traffic patterns and client application sessions.

“During outages, we were given visibility on the troubleshooting status as SingTel proactively provided updates,” explained Nagata. “We knew we needed a more detailed analysis whenever network congestion occurred, which is something SingTel was able to provide with clarity and accuracy.”

Within China, Ahresty’s factories came together virtually as SingTel worked out a mesh IP VPN tailored to the company’s unique business specifications, which consolidated the domestic Internet network so as to have a more secure work environment within China.

Computerworld Singapore

Profile SingTel

Reader Choice Awards 2013

Driven by the value its customers can derive from cloud services, SingTel has moved beyond well-established cloud services like Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Software-as-a-Service and Platform-as-aService, to offering less conventional cloud services such as Securityas-a-Service and Connectivity-as-a-Service (electronic bandwidth on demand), constantly pushing the envelope of its cloud offering.

“We aspire to offer ‘everything as a service’, to empower business IT to become more agile and better able to respond to the fast-changing needs of the business. This is especially relevant in today’s context, when businesses are pressured to drive costs down in order to remain competitive,” said Lee. This year, SingTel plans to launch Unified Communications-as-aService (UCaaS), extending the cloud all the way to the end-user device to enable better and more cost-effective collaboration capabilities. This comprehensive suite of communications and collaboration applications encompasses voice, telephony, conferencing, instant messaging and presence, in a single cloud platform. It will empower users to communicate across a growing range of mobile and stationary devices with a single, familiar user interface; connect cost-effectively via least cost on-net or VoIP calls anywhere in Asia; and optimise communications between branch offices both in Singapore and regionally.

“With the launch of UCaaS, we achieve true fixed-mobile-cloud convergence: seamless communications between fixed and mobile devices, delivered through the cloud infrastructure. This is a gamechanger for the business, providing a future-proof platform that can withstand the rapid changes in communications trends and technologies,” said Lee. Recognising the growing trend towards mobility and BYOD, SingTel has invested in developing managed mobility solutions for the enterprise, to help businesses address the needs of an increasingly mobile workforce. With easyDataRoam and global Wi-Fi roaming,

“We aspire to offer ‘everything as a service’, to empower business IT to become more agile and better able to respond to the fastchanging needs of the business. ­­– Mr Lee Han Kheng, Vice President, Global Products

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SingTel’s customers have access to cost-effective 3G/4G data while abroad, and over 1.2 million global Wi-Fi hotspots with the world’s largest commercial Wi-Fi network whenever they travel. Customers can also subscribe to Mobile Device Management (MDM) to access a suite of smartphone management solutions that enable better data security and cost control without compromising end user privacy.

As more enterprise mobility solutions are developed, SingTel will be integrating them into its UCaaS offering to enable its customers to leverage on the latest mobile applications for their business communications.

To help customers migrate easily to UCaaS, SingTel offers risk-free deployment options, with professional consultants who can design a UCaaS solution to work seamlessly with, and complement existing communications infrastructure.

SingTel’s Outlook

Going forward, SingTel expects cloud computing to remain important.

“The cloud will continue to be relevant and increase in importance as businesses grow, change and metamorphosise,” said Lee. Besides continuing to expand its cloud service portfolio, SingTel will continue to streamline its operations to drive greater synergies between Singapore and Australia, and develop Hong Kong as another key Asian hub in order to engage the North Asian markets. Recent events like i.Luminate Hong Kong, China CIO day and Next Gen ICT Forum in Japan CIO were well-received, and demonstrated a strong prelude to the extension of SingTel’s ICT capabilities into the region.

For SingTel, its strong customer focus, undergirded by the continued drive for innovative services has allowed its customers to derive greater value from their network to build business success. As the leading onestop ICT provider in the region, SingTel has succeeded in simplifying IT management with its comprehensive suite of ICT solutions.

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readers choice awards 2013 winning products

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security

Information Security Suite

Enterprise Firewall and VPN

Symantec Corporation Symantec Endpoint Protection

Check Point Software Technologies Check Point Firewall Software Blade

Symantec Endpoint Protection is a suite of product consisting of anti-virus, anti-spyware, firewall, intrusion prevention and device and application control. The software protects workstations and servers, and is designed with both physical and virtual environments in mind. A centralised management console serves as a one-stop management tool for administrators, offering reporting and advanced analytics from a single dashboard. Endpoint Protection protects 32- and 64-bit Windows systems and Mac OS X, as well as Novell Open Enterprise Server and popular Linux distributions such as Red Hat Enterprise, SuSE Linux Enterprise, Fedora and Ubuntu.

Symantec Endpoint Protection 12.1.2 offers the latest features for improved security, performance and management. For example, traditional scanning of every file has been replaced with scan elimination and deduplication through Virtual Image Exception and Shared Insight Cache. With access to the largest Global Intelligence Network, EndPoint Protection is able to skip known good files to scan faster and smarter.

Check Point’s Software Blade architecture consists of virtualised appliances that serve as modular building blocks that can be quickly configured based on specific business needs. Multiple Software Blades run on hardware containers where they are centrally managed through a single console. Software Blades are available for any combination of protection, including firewall, VPN, intrusion prevention, application control, mobile access, data loss prevention, URL filtering, anti-spam, anti-virus, and advanced networking and acceleration. The latest R77 release of the Software Blade Architecture platform comes with various key enhancements such as the Threatcloud Emulation Service and HyperSpect Technology. The former is a sandbox that emulates potentially malicious code to better determine if it is a threat, and is designed to defend against zero-day exploits and new variants of malware. On its part, HyperSpect is an adaptive content inspection engine that leverages hyper-threading and a wide spectrum of optimisations and accelerations for a significant performance boost.

Intrusion Detection/ Prevention System

Fortinet FortiGate Series

Fortinet FortiGate Series

Fortinet’s FortiGate family offers a wide variety of hardware appliances. On the hardware level, the FortiGate platform incorporates sophisticated networking features such as high availability for maximum network uptime, and virtual domain capabilities to separate various networks requiring different security policies. Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) capabilities built into each FortiGate device help to protect networks from both known and new threats. Malicious network activity is detected using a combination of predefined and custom signatures, protocol decoders, out-of-band mode and packet logging, while custom IPS signatures can be created to extend protection further. Specifically, custom IPS signatures can be used to protect unusual or specialised applications, or even custom platforms from known and unknown attacks. In addition, custom IPS signatures can be used for specialised network traffic analysis and pattern matching. Fortinet’s IPS technology can be installed on Forti WIFI platforms to protect the network core and network edge from both external and internal attacks.

Unified Threat Management

Suitable for small businesses to very large enterprises, Fortinet’s FortiGate family delivers exceptional performance by relying on purpose-built hardware and software. The use of custom ASIC processors provide multi-Gigabit speeds for extremely high throughput, low latency and minimum packet processing when scanning the data for threats. Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) capabilities aside, the FortiGate platform also comes with Unified Threat Management (UTM) ability to protect enterprise-class protection against a wide range of threats that operate at the network, content and application-levels. Each FortiGate appliance includes core security technologies such as firewall, application control, web control filtering, VPN, antispyware, WAN optimisation, and anti-spam, and can be centrally controlled and monitored from Fortinet’s FortiManager. Fortinet is continually releasing new FortiGate chassis models and blades. The FortiGate 5001C blade, for example, offers up to 40 Gbps of firewall throughput, 17 Gbps of IPsec VPN tunneling bandwidth and 9.8 Gbps of IPS throughput.

Computerworld Singapore

Reader Choice Awards 2013

Profile

Salesforce.com

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Enabling the ‘Customer Company’

I

n business today, it is no exaggeration to say that everything is connected.

Current Internet technologies allow individuals, enterprises and communities to develop relationships and associations that would have been unimaginable a few years ago. However, companies that manage this pervasive connectivity wisely can both efficiently organise these complex communications and develop relationships that drive growth directly to the bottom line.

Salesforce CRM is the award-winning Customer Relationship Management software that enables enterprises of all sizes to connect with their customers, employees, partners and products in entirely new ways. It is no surprise that Computerworld Singapore readers voted overwhelmingly for this next generation platform that gives them the power to transform their enterprises into ‘customer companies’ that fully utilise all the types of communication and interaction with their clients that social, mobile and cloud technologies enable.

The Customer Company New social and mobile technologies are triggering a seismic shift in every industry, and those who ignore the implications will be left wondering how their competitors overtook them. This social revolution is driving the biggest shift in marketing in the last 60 years and it demands that companies use new tools to better understand and engage their audiences. This year’s IBM CEO study predicts that social networking will become one of the top ways companies will engage with customers, replacing more traditional methods. Modern marketers are moving

from passive observation to turning insights into action. They need the right technology to do this and Gartner predicts that by 2017, Chief Marketing Officers will spend more on IT than CIOs. This trend is accelerating across the Asia Pacific region. IDC says that today, 52 percent of organisations in APAC operate an enterprise social network for internal communications or social marketing with customers. Forrester recently highlighted that mobile Internet usage is higher in many APAC countries than using desktop computers. From 6.1 percent of web traffic in 2010 across the whole region, mobile devices accounted for nearly 18 percent in 2012.

Salesforce CRM allows companies to be well informed and to implement new social marketing and sales strategies. Mobile devices drive potential micromoments of productivity every minute and are changing how contemporary business happens.

The Salesforce Marketing Cloud has best-in-class email, mobile and web marketing, personalisation technology and unmatched data and analytics capabilities, all of which empower businesses to connect with their customers in creative and productive ways.

CRM Innovation

Forbes magazine recently ranked salesforce.com as the most innovative company in the world for the third year in a row, and many satisfied customers will agree with this evaluation. Singapore’s Changi Airport was crowned the World’s Best Airport at the recent 2013 Skytrax World Airport Awards. The centerpiece of Changi Airport’s success is a solution called OneChangi, which uses technology to transform business practices and apply the highest standards of customer service.

Salesforce.com’s contribution was to provide the organisation that manages Changi Airport - the Changi Airport Group (CAG) - the tools to deliver a first class customer experience to every passenger.

Customer companies like CGU, Open Universities and Vodafone Australia now have a deeper connection with their customers by using Salesforce. They can market on any channel, sell as a team, and service customers everywhere.

The Commonwealth Bank of Australia and Siam Commercial Bank use Salesforce as their growth engine across sales, service, marketing and business innovation.

As in any social environment, users have gone online to comment about Salesforce CRM. They highlight the fast implementation, look and feel, ease of use, reports and dashboards, customisation capabilities, detailed analytics and productivity. Salesforce.com is quick to follow up any comments and suggestions for improvement.

Part of any social marketing environment is the ability to quickly engage and reinforce brand-loyal relationships with users at all levels.

By using a next-generation platform like —Simon Davies, Vice President, Enterprise Salesforce CRM, customer companies are not just connecting with people, they’re connecting with Sales, ASEAN, Greater China & Korea the Internet of Things.

“Around the world, companies of all sizes now recognise that social and mobile technologies give them new opportunities, and more channels, to engage with customers. They understand that they need to transform their companies with social and mobile cloud computing technologies to stay relevant.” ­

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enterprise applications

Customer Relationship Management

Business Intelligence

salesforce.com Salesforce CRM

IBM Singapore Pte Ltd IBM Cognos Business Intelligence

Salesforce CRM is a cloud-based service based on a pay-asyou-go model. Touted by the company as a “CRM software as a service� solution, its key advantages are the absence of up-front software or hardware investment that is both expensive to install and maintain, as well as its faster timeto-implementation. Salesforce CRM helps to unify disparate systems traditionally used by sales, operations, marketing and other customer-facing departments, allowing employees to offer consistent service to customers. In addition, running reports and setting up real-time dashboards using the Salesforce CRM requires just a few clicks, offering executives in every department total customer insight into the business.

Salesforce CRM is available in various editions ranging from Contact Manager at just US$5 per user per month, to the Enterprise and Unlimited editions at US$125 and $250 per user per month, respectively. In addition, the company also offers a 30-day free trial for most of its plans.

IBM Cognos Business Intelligence (BI) software is capable of working with historical business intelligence data, operations data and probabilities in a single place. By providing access to information from multiple angles and perspective, Cognos software helps business users to make informed decisions.

A dashboard facilitates interaction and personalisation to support users in their decisions, and gives access to reports and analysis. Reports help to equip users with the pertinent information they need to make fact-based decisions. Finally, a full spectrum of solutions and capabilities are on hand to allow employees to perform analysis by merging external data with dimensional and relational sources without the help of the IT department. The latest release of Cognos Business Intelligence offers advances that provide interactive visualisation, improved performance and support for big data. Visualisations generated by IBM’s Rapidly Adaptive Visualization Engine (RAVE) within Cognos Active Reports also allows for a superior grasp of patterns in the data.

Data Analytics

Collaboration Platform

SAS Institute SAS Analytics Suite

Microsoft Singapore Pte Ltd Exchange Server 2013

The SAS Analytics Suite provides an integrated environment designed to let businesses explore and exploit corporate data for strategic business advantage. Among others, its capabilities include predictive and descriptive modelling, data mining, text analytics, forecasting, optimisation, simulation, and experimental design. All these features are delivered in a single environment, where the ability of SAS to analyse huge quantities of data allows for complex problems to be solved. There are multiple components that are found in the SAS Analytics suite, ranging from Predictive Analytics and Data Mining for the building of descriptive and predictive models, and Visual Analytics to explore and discover new patterns in data. In addition, Analytics for Microsoft Office delivers SAS Analytics capabilities to the familiar Microsoft Office interface, which serves to promote collaboration and self-service analytics reporting for business users. Finally, the Statistics component uses statistical data analysis to drive fact-based decisions.

When Exchange Server 2010 was released, it brought a large number of capabilities such as support for Direct Attached Storage (DAS) to offer lower-cost mailboxes through the use of less expensive disks, and Database Availability Groups (DAG) for increased mailbox resiliency at the individual database level. In addition, Outlook Web App (OWA) was improved to provide the same experience across all major browsers. The launch of Exchange Server 2013 last year offered a similar infusion of features to the Exchange Server platform. OWA gained offline support, for one, and was also enhanced with additional user interface designs that were specifically designed for mobile and portable devices. Support for up to 8TB disk drives and multiple databases per disk via DAG was also added, and Microsoft also extended the capabilities of DAG by allowing public folders stored in mailbox databases to take advantage of it for replication and high availability.

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Enterprise Content Management

Enterprise Resource Planning

Microsoft Singapore Pte Ltd SharePoint Server 2013

SAP SAP Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)

Envisaged as a multi-purpose tool for collaboration, business intelligence and social networking, Microsoft’s SharePoint Server 2010 offered tight coupling with Office 2010. The enterprise content management software was further enhanced with Service Pack 1 (SP1) of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 to offer improved support for Internet Explorer 9 and support for SQL Server 2012, as well as the ability to restore a site collection or a Web that was deleted. Launched earlier this year, SharePoint Server 2013 came with a substantial number of improvements that makes it a highly compelling upgrade. For one, it works well on popular browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome, while its native use of HTML5 helps to offer an optimised viewing experience across mobile platforms as well. More notably, SharePoint Server 2013 also introduces the ability for an organisation to create and publish a custom app on a private app store.

SAP ERP is designed to streamline business processes across procurement, manufacturing, service, sales, finance, and HR, which the corresponding functions implemented across a number of modules. This range from the SAP ERP Financials, said to help streamline and automate financial operations, as well as ensuring regulatory compliance and giving real-time insight into overall performance, while the SAP ERP Human Capital Management module helps to better manage an organisation’s HR functions. SAP introduced an enhancement package strategy for SAP ERP as means to simplify the management and deployment of new software functionality.

SAP enhancement package (EHP) 6 for SAP ERP 6.0 contains 694 business functions, of which 177 are completely new improvements, while EHP 7 for SAP ERP 6.0 enables most areas of the existing SAP ERP functions for SAP HANA to utilise the in-memory technology. This allows large data volumes to be processed significantly faster, and results in better performing business applications.

Performance Management

Supply Chain Management

Red Hat Red Hat CloudForms

SAP SAP Supply Chain Management (SCM)

Red Hat CloudForms is a product for creating and managing IAAS (infrastructure as a service) for both private and hybrid clouds. Generally available since June last year, CloudForms is envisaged to address key problems inherent to first-generation cloud products, ranging from the cost and complexity of virtual server sprawl, to compliance and security concerns. CloudForms makes it possible for businesses to access their specified service catalogs with role-delegated automated provisioning, quota enforcement, and chargeback across virtualisation and cloud platforms from a web-based environment. Resources are automatically and optimally used according to a policybased workload and resource orchestration. This helps to ensure service availability and performance, and also allows for simulated allocation of resources for planning purposes.

Unlike other IAAS solutions, configuration and management of complex multi-tier applications is also built into CloudForms.

Moreover, CloudForms is highly flexible and allows for the deployment, management, and migration of these applications between different clouds, virtualisation environments, and bare-metal servers.

The SAP SCM solution is designed to help companies to manage their manufacturing and service processes. One of five enterprise applications in SAP’s Business Suite, SAP SCM offers a large number of modules to ensure responsive planning, improved collaboration and seamless execution.

When planning the supply chain, SAP SCM allows businesses to perform a variety of tasks such as modeling the existing supply chain, setting goals and forecasts, as well as scheduling timings and materials. Once done, it optimises the entire process to help maximise the return on assets and calculates a profitable match of supply and demand. Other modules handle service parts management, warehouse management and transportation management, ultimately allowing for tighter control over replacement components and manufactured parts. Finally, the Manufacturing and Supply Planning module helps businesses to gain a competitive edge in their industry by providing various stakeholders with real-time visibility into factory production.

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communications

Enterprise Mobile Communication Devices

Enterprise Mobility Management Suite

Samsung Electronics Samsung Galaxy Note and Samsung Galaxy Tab

Symantec Corporation Symantec Mobile Management Suite

The Samsung Galaxy Note and Galaxy Tab are two families of highly popular smartphones and tablets that run on the open source Android operating system. The recently released Galaxy Note 3 is the latest addition to the family, and offers a 5.7-inch 1080p (1920x1080) display and LTE functionality.

The Galaxy Tab series consists of many more devices, and include the 7-inch Galaxy Tab 3 to the 10.1-inch Galaxy Tab 10.1. In a bid to make its devices substantially more secure for the enterprise, Samsung earlier this year released Samsung Knox, a secure platform created by the company for security and device manageability. Implemented using Security-Enhanced Android, Knox offers enhanced security from the hardware up with application and container level security and management. One of its key features would be the segregation of personal data from work-related data on the same hardware. Knox is supported on selected Galaxy devices at the moment.

Symantec Mobile Management Suite is a comprehensive mobile solution designed to allow for the seamless and secure coexistence of personal and work on mobile devices. The solution is offered as three products to address distinct areas of device management, application management, and threat protection. Working either on a standalone basis or as an add-on module to the Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (MSCCM), the Symantec Mobile Management component provides visibility and control over iOS, Android, and Windows Phone devices. It offers capabilities such as Selective Wipe, App Distribution and Enterprise Activation, as well as the implementation of corporate policies on these devices. On its part, the Symantec App Center provides comprehensive distribution and protection for mobile apps and content on iOS and Android devices. Finally, threat protection in the form of anti-malware, anti-theft and Web protection is provided by Symantec Mobile Security for Android and Windows Mobile devices.

Unified Communications Software Suite

Cisco Systems Cisco Unified Communications Manager

Sitting at the core of the Cisco Collaboration portfolio infrastructure, the Cisco Unified Communications Manager is an enterprise-class IP telephony call-processing system that offers traditional telephony features as well as various mobility and conferencing services. Services provided by the Cisco Unified Communications Manager include services such as session management, voice, video, messaging, mobility, and web conferencing. The software-based call-processing system is capable of scaling to support 40,000 users, and extensible to 80,000 users. Announced in June last year, Cisco Unified Communications Manager Version 9.0 brings a number of key advancements such as better bandwidth management, support for additional video endpoints and a new “dial by email” feature. In addition, Cisco Unified Communications Manager Version 9.0 also adds support for third-party endpoints that allows it to work with any third-party phone. Finally native call queuing allows in-bound callers to be automatically put on hold and routed into a queue where custom greetings and announcements may be piped to them.

Unified Communications Hardware Provider

Cisco Systems

A multiple-year winner in this category, the unified communications products offered by Cisco are capable of addressing the needs of small businesses, mid-sized organisations, enterprises or cloud-based service providers.

The product lineup starts from basic offerings like IP telephony to the high-end TelePresence video conferencing solution for delivering high-quality full HD multiparty video conferencing and collaboration. Cisco’s comprehensive array of unified communications solutions come with a high level of security, scalability and quality, and also offers a great amount of flexibility in deployment. Supported deployment scenarios range from an on-premise deployment, as a managed solution, delivered over the cloud, or as a hybrid model. Importantly, Cisco’s years of experience as a market leader in networking and unified communications means that its solution is also interoperable with products from multiple vendors. Businesses running on Cisco are hence able to connect with their suppliers, customers and partners regardless of differences in their system or implementation.

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storage

Enterprise Disk System

Storage Management Software

IBM Singapore Pte Ltd IBM System Storage

EMC Corporation EMC Unisphere Manager

The IBM System Storage enterprise disk system is divided into three distinct families: the DS8000, XIV and SONAS. The flagship System Storage DS8870 is designed to manage a broad scope of storage workloads in today’s data centre. Able to hold over a thousand drives containing up to 2 petabytes of capacity, it can also scale up to 1 terabyte of system cache. Easy Tier features helps to accelerate the most timesensitive applications by optimising access to critical data, and supports a mixture of spinning drives, nearline drives and solid-state drives (SSDs). Finally, performance optimising integration between it and IBM enterprise servers allows for superior performance. On its part, the IBM XIV offers a variety of high-end disk storage systems designed to offer performance, high availability and simple usability, while the IBM SONAS (Scale Out Network Attached Storage) is a largescale storage platform based on GPFS (General Parallel File System) technology.

EMC Unisphere is a next-generation unified storage management platform designed specifically to offer a simple, integrated experience for managing the EMC VNX and VNXe series, as well as the existing EMC CLARiiON, the EMC Celerra storage systems and the EMC Recover Point SE systems. Unisphere delivers unified management interface for file, block, object and replication of data, while Unisphere Remote provides for centralised monitoring of hundreds of VNX and VNXe systems deployed in remote and branch offices. The application-driven approach used by Unisphere to provisioning storage also serves to eliminate complexity, and also offers virtualisation integration to automatically discover all virtual machines managed under VMware vCenter Server to provide storage administrators with end-to-end mapping of the virtual environment. Finally, Unisphere also comes with wizards for best practices provisioning and data protection for Microsoft Hyper-V environments.

WAN Optimisation

Backup System

Blue Coat Systems Blue Coat MACH5

Symantec Corporation Symantec Backup Exec

The Blue Coat MACH5 appliances offer WAN (Wide Area Network) optimisation to accelerate both internal and external applications with specialised optimisation techniques.

Applications such as file access, e-mail, web browsing, storage replication and backup are accelerated using a variety of methods including protocol acceleration, compression, bandwidth management, as well as object and byte caching.

Protocol optimisation mitigates the penalties that WAN latency imposes on inefficient protocols or applications originally designed for the Local Area Network, while bandwidth management prioritises enterprise-critical data flow over bulk-data or recreational traffic. In addition, the MACH5 cloudcaching engine enable faster SaaS application access with no impact to the cloud infrastructure, while the appliance also supports the optimisation for video delivered through Adobe Flash, Windows Media, Silverlight, HTML5 and video files in general. Taken together, the technologies allow a consolidated IT environments to see a reduction of bandwidth consumption by 50 to 90 percent.

Symantec Backup Exec is an integrated backup software application that offers continuous backup and recovery to file servers, workstations, and enterprise applications such as Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SQL Server. Backup Exec works with both tape and disk, and comes with integrated and customisable deduplication to save time and amount of storage needed. Backup Exec 2012 is offered in four standard editions to fit the need of customers: Backup Exec V-Ray Edition for 100 percent virtualised environments, Backup Exec Small Business Edition for small businesses with limited IT experience, Backup Exec. cloud for customers looking for simple off-premise data protection that is managed and configured through a cloudbased service, and the Backup Exec 3600 appliance for an all-in-one solution for both physical or virtual environments.

The latest Backup Exec 2012 SP1aresolves a list of general fixes, and is also optimised to improve performance in the areas of deduplication and virtual machine backups targeted to the deduplication store.

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Computerworld Singapore

Reader Choice Awards 2013

HP Refreshed and Restyled

Profile

HP

HP banks on “New Style of IT” to help organisations overcome challenges in a rapidly changing IT landscape.

Singapore is once again the top winner in this year’s Computerworld Singapore Readers Choice Awards, with a total of six awards. However, HP is not resting on past achievements, and is continually reinventing itself to retain a clear leadership position.

The venerable company has adopted a new “style” and direction of information technology to better help customers as an enterprise technology player that can bridge the gap between consumers and enterprises, with a particular focus on cloud computing, big data, mobility and security.

“Shifts in the technology market including cloud, big data and mobility, have created new challenges for CIOs to meet stakeholder expectations, while aligning IT with enterprise goals. The sheer amount of computing horsepower required to handle petabytes and exabytes of data have become a huge financial, logistical and environmental burden on organisations,” said Loh Khai Peng, Managing Director, Hewlett-Packard Singapore.

“HP is focused on helping organisations overcome these challenges with a “new style of IT” that offers a deep integration of solutions to achieve simplicity, agility, speed and lower costs.”

“For organisations of all sizes, gaining competitive advantage requires technology to be at the forefront of innovation and growth. To address this, we are seeing a move towards information optimisation, cloud, mobility, security and the software-defined data centre,” said Loh. “Organisations need comprehensive solutions that solve their toughest business problems, not just a set of disparate IT assets.”

Big Data In Asia Pacific and Japan, big data is the largest competitive differentiator for one third of organisations surveyed, according to research by Coleman Parkes Research on “Big Data and Cloud,” commissioned on behalf of HP. HP offers the breadth and depth of its platform, product and services portfolios to assist enterprises with big data. HP HAVEn is a unifying big data analytics platform that combines technologies from HP Autonomy, HP Vertica, HP ArcSight and HP Operations Management, as well as key industry initiatives such as Hadoop.

Fresh Thinking Loh acknowledged that a constantly evolving IT environment requires a nextgeneration of computing architecture and a fresh approach.

“Solving complex problems demands fresh thinking and diverse perspectives.

Our strategy is to bring together experts from across borders, industries and institutions, to explore the root causes of these challenges and to pioneer solutions that can be scaled globally,” said Loh. This new approach is based on innovative solutions that HP is developing at its R&D facilities in the Asia Pacific and Japan region. An example is HP’s Moonshot Servers. Built through 10 years of research from HP Labs, HP Moonshot Servers have moved from general-purpose processors to task-specific, system-on-chip ecosystems, enabling organisations to achieve quantum leaps in computing performance and power efficiency.

As customers’ IT needs evolve, HP believes the support experience should move in tandem with these changes. HP’s Always-On Support Services, the industry’s first support service built for converged, virtualised and cloud environments, transforms the customers’ support experience, making it more personal, proactive and simplified.

It integrates the intelligent technologies built into the HP Converged Infrastructure, providing “direct-to-expert” communication with support services that proactively address problems before they occur.

A critical part of HP’s success is its channel partners. HP continues to invest in and collaborate with channel partners to provide customers with the right solutions. These partnerships are critical to reaching out to market segments, verticals as well as geographies, and they are fundamental to HP’s success.

In July, HP announced new enhancements to its ServiceOne program to help channel partners in Asia-Pacific and Japan grow their revenue by expanding into the high-growth services market. The expanded program includes marketing support, sales tools, and a simplified structure that offers a predictable and profitable compensation model.

Tackling New Trends To help organisations be more agile and productive as they navigate the rapidly changing IT landscape, HP has identified several key areas under this new style of IT that can make the greatest differences. These include: big data, cloud computing, mobility and security.

Loh Khai Peng, Managing Director, Hewlett-Packard Singapore.

Computerworld Singapore

Profile HP

Reader Choice Awards 2013

The platform enables clients and partners to avoid vendor lock-in with an open architecture, as well as support for multiple virtualisation technologies, and optimised hardware solutions.

Singapore-based NEC Asia Pacific, a leading infocomm technology provider and systems integrator, is one of 120 value added resellers, service providers and systems integrators that have adopted the HP HAVEn platform to deliver innovative big data solutions. As a result, NEC Asia Pacific is able to gain the business advantage of helping customers to increase valuable business insights and grow revenue potential.

Cloud Computing Cloud computing is another important area of focus. The delivery and consumption of cloud computing, as well as the business model for technology, are all being redefined. Cloud computing will eventually replace or complement on-premise, proprietary computing resources.

To deliver the new style of IT, said Loh, enterprises need control over their data, including flexibility in service levels and delivery models. “Only HP has the portfolio and expertise that combines the innovative power of open systems with enterprise-grade manageability and security,” he said.

HP recently announced new innovations to its Converged Cloud portfolio, delivering improved agility, greater innovation and reduced costs for hybrid cloud environments. HP also delivered the next phase of a common OpenStack-based architecture for HP’s private, managed and public cloud offerings in addition to new software and services.

Mobility A third area of focus is mobility. With the proliferation of tablets and

smartphones, enterprises cannot afford to ignore the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) environment driven by employees. In April this year, HP introduced HP Enterprise Cloud Services - Mobility, offering a unique combination of consulting services, operations, applications and security, to help clients minimise the risk and cost of enabling enterprise mobility.

Security Security is another area of focus. Cloud, mobility and big data initiatives are helping organisations solve pressing challenges. However, these initiatives can introduce security gaps. HP believes that security professionals need to collaborate more efficiently to respond to imminent threats effectively.

HP advocates an integrated approach to security, one that starts with a single, comprehensive view of risk across the extended enterprise, and that is driven by enterprise priorities and goals.

Ultimately, it boils down to helping customers succeed in this competitive environment. Loh notes that every five to seven years a technology comes along that “totally, irreversibly, changes the game.”

“For IT, those changes have historically come from the emergence of the Internet: first virtualisation, then cloud and now mobility and big data. These changes have created a new style of IT that promises lower costs, simplicity and speed for enterprises and consumers, but that also puts pressures on businesses.”

Given this complex interplay and overlap between these trends, “HP is the only company that can provide the foundation and deliver comprehensive solutions from the enterprise to the consumer,” said Loh. “HP’s end-to-end strategy across its portfolio provides customers with the confidence to rely on HP to navigate IT challenges and solve their toughest business problems.”

HP Wins with Customers M1 M1, Singapore’s leading full-service provider of mobile and fixed communications services, provides both telecom and hosting services to businesses based in Singapore. The company recently decided to undertake an IT refresh to migrate its customers to a virtualised cloud platform with a more resilient, simple and costeffective infrastructure.

Previously, customers running their systems on a physical server with no hardware redundancy faced a risk of device failure, with the system going offline until it was replaced.

M1 selected HP CloudSystem to build a virtualised Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform so customers can enjoy flexibility and scalability with minimum disruption.

Since migrating to the HP solution, M1 customers not only enjoyed a service level guarantee of more than 99.99 percent, but were also able to upgrade to a more robust and diverse platform at no extra cost.

With the deployment of HP’s Converged Cloud platform, the company was able to

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free up rack space, translating into increased revenue from the sale of other services.

Chong Hua Hospital In 2008, Chong Hua Hospital, the Philippines’ largest health charity decided to digitise all its patient data records for medical specialists to make fast, informed decisions.

The first step was to digitise radiology images by deploying a Picture and Archive Communications System (PACS). However, the huge volume of rich media generated by PACS was consuming storage capacity too rapidly.

As a result, the hospital database servers were slowing down by mid-2011.

After evaluating storage solutions from other vendors, Chong Hua Hospital chose a HP Converged Storage solution based on HP 3PAR StoreServ Storage and HP StoreAll Storage technologies to improve patient care by accelerating medical record delivery.

EastWest Bank EastWest Bank, one of the fastest growing

banks in the Philippines, realised its legacy IT infrastructure was hindering the productivity of its business.

After evaluating solutions from several vendors, the bank selected HP’s Converged Infrastructure to streamline IT operations, reduce costs and scale its IT infrastructure in response to increasing numbers of customer transactions.

The upgraded infrastructure includes the HP 3PAR StoreServ T400 Storage System, for scalable, flexible and cost-efficient storage.

EastWest Bank also deployed HP ProLiant DL360 Servers to optimise performance per watt and square foot, while maximising power efficiency with shared power supplies.

The modern, flexible and agile foundation of the HP Converged Infrastructure has enabled the bank to keep pace with business demands and transition to a private cloud. Additionally, technology upgrades to support new client services, which include a new automation program, have been instrumental to the bank’s success.

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hardware

Mobile Computers

Entry-Level Servers

Lenovo ThinkPad series

Hewlett-Packard Singapore HP ProLiant Servers

The Lenovo ThinkPad is well known for its durable design, business-centric capabilities, manageability and other practical features that benefit its use in business. For example, roll-cage technology found in many models helps to add extra strength and rigidity, while many notebook models come with a rubber isolator and metal cage to protect the storage drive.

Select models also offer Trusted Platform Module 1.2 and an integrated fingerprint reader for a seamlessly integrated security package, as well as the ability to disable input/output ports at the BIOS level. A new model released last year is the Lenovo X1 Carbon, a 14-inch notebook that weights 1.35kg and measures just 18.8mm thick. The notebook comes with a large multi-touch capable glass touchpad and a comfortable backlit keyboard that has a 30 percent larger surface area.

On its part, the Thinkpad X230t convertible comes with a reversible 12.5-inch multi-touch screen and up to 18 hours battery life with an optional external slice battery.

The HP ProLiant DL100 series of rack servers are low cost storage optimised server designed for a variety of rack deployment and applications. The servers cater to IT environments running single applications, Web or edge- of-network applications, as well as small compute spaces where space is at a premium.

Support for a range of options ensures that it can be configured to meet various application demands and budget constraints.

The DL100 series is available in processor configurations of up to 16 cores, and is based on industry-standard components with easy-access chassis and internal component labels. Up to 24 DDR3 DIMM slots allows for up to 768GB of memory expansion space, while a dual port 1Gb NIC (Network interface card) offers advanced networking features. Finally, 1U or 2U form factors allow for fast deployment and supports growth by making it easy to deploy a largescale cluster solution.

Mid-Range Servers

High-End Enterprise Servers

Hewlett-Packard Singapore HP ProLiant Servers

IBM Singapore Pte Ltd IBM System x

The HP ProLiant DL300 series of rack servers takes over from the tower servers in the ML series to deliver enterprise class features and performance. Currently in its Gen8 iteration, the DL300 range supports ample expansion slots and as much as 768GB of RAM per server. New HP Common Slot Power Supplies provides 96 percent server power efficiency, and support for 277VAC and 380VDC input voltages deliver new infrastructure power efficiencies. Under the hood, a 3D array of temperature sensors helps to more precisely control server fans and reduce unnecessary fan power, while embedded remote console and virtual KVM allows for servers to be managed over the network. Overall, the DL300 series of servers are well suited for a wide array of deployment scenarios ranging from high density performance computing, memory intensive applications, scale-out grid computing, as well as applications with dense storage applications.

The IBM System x x86 servers are designed to support Microsoft Windows, Linux and virtualisation platforms, offering scalability of up to 8-sockets (64 cores). Available in entrylevel tower servers to rack-optimised servers, the System x series differentiates itself in the crowded x86 marketplace by offering a blend of high value servers that incorporates leading technology. To combat spiraling cost and inherent inefficiencies caused by under utilisation of x86 servers, the latest eX5 redefines x86 servers by focusing on the three design goals of maximising memory, minimising cost, and simplifying server deployment. And unlike competing servers, IBM’s System x servers comes with the unique ability for memory to be expanded independently of the processor.

Applications that require huge quantities of memory can hence benefit from deploying the external MAX5 memory expansion appliance with IBM eX5 systems to add up to 1024GB of DDR3 RAM per chassis.

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Power Management

Enterprise Routers and Switches

APC by Schneider Electric APC Smart-UPS

Cisco Systems Cisco Catalyst 3K switches

The Smart-UPS family uninterruptible power supply (UPS) by APC is designed to supply clean and reliable network-grade power to servers, storage and networks devices. Available in various power capacities, Smart-UPS products are available in a wide variety of form factors ranging from rack mount, tower, and rack/tower convertible. The former allows them to be deployed in racks for powering Blade or density optimised servers, while the tower form factor is ideal for stand-alone deployments in small office or branch offices. Most UPS appliances in the Smart-UPS family comes with at least one Smart Slot, which is an expansion slot that accepts an optional interface card for addition capabilities ranging from network connectivity to environment (temperature, humidity) monitoring. As Smart Slot devices remain powered by the battery even after the UPS has been switched off, it is hence possible to remotely cold-start the UPS in a power loss situation.

The Cisco Catalyst 3K series of enterprise-class network switches offer a variety of next-generation, energy-efficient capabilities.

Consuming less power than their predecessors, they are ideal for various deployment scenarios at the enterprise, retail and branch-office environments. The Cisco Catalyst 3750-X and 3560-X families of switches are a family of stackable and standalone switches that deliver high availability, scalability, security and ease of operation. They offer a variety of security measures are offered, including Flexible NetFlow to protect against malicious behaviour, TrustSec for identity-based access control, and MACsec Layer 2 encryption for data confidentiality.

In addition, they also come with Cisco StackPower, which is an industry first for sharing power among stack members, and Cisco StackWise Plus technology that delivers ease of use and resiliency with 64Gbps of throughput. These new switch models also offer backward compatibility with all other models of the Cisco Catalyst 3750 Series switches.

services Physical Infrastructure – Networks

Consulting and Integration

Citrix Citrix NetScaler

Hewlett-Packard Singapore HP Technology Services

Citrix NetScaler is an all-in-one web application delivery controller that enables the data centre network to serve as an end-to-end service delivery fabric to optimise the delivery of web applications, cloud-based services, virtual desktops, enterprise business apps and mobile services. Deployed either on purpose-built MPX-series hardware appliances or a virtual appliance (NetScaler VPX) using Citrix XenServer technology, NetScaler delivers performance and availability regardless of location and access technology. The result is that applications run five times better over the network, are highly available, and allow for optimised user experience even as it lowers web application ownership costs. NetScaler works by implementing using a variety of techniques, including application acceleration such as HTTP compression and caching, application availability through a L4-7 load balancer, application security with an integrated AppFirewall, and server offloading to reduce cost and consolidate servers.

HP’s Technology Services offers a range of technology consulting services ranging from big data, networking and storage services. This includes vendor-centric services such as those pertaining to Microsoft technologies, ranging from Microsoft Windows Server, SQL Server, SharePoint and Exchange Server, among others. The business unit has invested heavily in its technology consulting capabilities, including hiring some of the industry’s best consultants, which gives HP a depth of expertise that help differentiates the company in the areas of enterprise IT, converged infrastructure and education consulting fronts. In addition, HP’s consulting expertise helps bridges the gap between business and IT strategy, and includes the ability to provide a full range of cloud services under its Cloud Consulting Services. All these are supported by the company’s Education Services, which deliver technical training, education consulting and collaboration tools to ensure a smooth handoff to operations.

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services

Support and Maintenance

Data Centre and Hosting

Hewlett-Packard Singapore HP Technology Services

SingTel SingTel EXPAN Managed Hosting Services

Hewlett-Packard (HP) offers a blend of technology-specific reactive support services under its HP Foundation Care Services, including remote and onsite problem diagnosis, customisable support coverage window and response-time SLAs. Moreover, HP Automation provides 24x7 coverage, proactive problem prevention, problem diagnosis and fast problem resolution, as well as interactive support portals and tools. This is included as a cost-free and integral part of a HP support relationship. More complex IT environments will benefit from additional proactive component services in HP Proactive Care Services that include reactive support, consultation and a two times a year platform review and analysis. In addition, HP Technology Services also offers unified communications and collaboration services, as well as consultation and design work on building energy-efficient data centres. Finally, the unit also provides event-based consulting and support, which ranges from strategy, design, deployment and operations, and training services.

SingTel offers a suite of high-grade managed hosting solutions that comes with end-to-end monitoring and management to meet the requirements of today’s fast-changing business environment. A 24x7 network operations centre is managed by a team of dedicated professionals committed to endto-end monitoring and management for the best system availability. EXPAN data centres are backed by SingTel’s own fibre, cable networks and satellite infrastructure, allowing it to deliver a consistent level of service at all locations. Moreover, servers at branch offices and other locations can also be remotely accessed and monitored through its network. SingTel has one of the most extensive regional points of presence with its EXPAN data centre facilities located in places such as Australia, Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore. Moreover, EXPAN has a reach that extends beyond Asia, too, due to the establishment of marketing alliances not just in the Asia Pacific but also in Europe and the US. Customers are hence able to deploy servers at multiple sites without the hassle of managing multiple relationships.

Managed Connectivity

SingTel SingTel Managed Connectivity and Managed Services By offering new technologies, SingTel’s suite of managed services can help businesses enhance their productivity and save costs. For instance, organisations can also take advantage of SingTel’s Electronic Bandwidth On-Demand to increase bandwidth for ad-hoc deployments, or tap into the company’s PowerON Compute, an end-to-end suite of cloud-based services housed in a state-of-the-art Tier 4 data centre. Moreover, SingTel’s Managed Application Performance Services helps organisations optimise their wide area network and accelerate productivity and efficiency of applications, while its Managed Network Services provides the provision, acquisition and maintenance of network equipment for seamless operability with SingTel’s WAN solutions. On its part, Managed Converged Services delivers a convergence of voice and video communications with access to a fully managed Unified Communications platform, HD Video Conferencing and Managed IP PBX. Finally, Managed Security Services offers a suite of network security solutions that provide uninterrupted security protection of critical information.

Managed Print Services

Fuji Xerox

Fuji Xerox’s Managed Print Services is envisaged to help businesses achieve significant cost savings and improve their process efficiency. To help businesses concentrate on their core operations, the service will take care of managing all printing devices in the office, including printers, copiers, scanners and fax machines—regardless of manufacturer or model. Services include designing and implementing an optimal document output environment and process, as well as offering a single point of management for all office printing equipment and consumables. Preemptive support serves to anticipate trouble areas and diagnose them quickly when problem arises, while a helpdesk support helps to troubleshoot and identify causes of problems. There are multiple benefits that results from this, as businesses are able to free up cash by keeping new asset off the balance sheet. Finally, office printing needs are also reduced, printer uptime increased and employee involvement lowered.

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virtualisation

Desktop Virtualisation Provider

Server Virtualisation Provider

Citrix

VMware

Citrix XenDesktop is a desktop virtualisation solution that allows virtual desktop sessions to be run within a central server and delivered to a secure endpoint device. This allows for centralised provisioning of desktops, and makes them far easier to be monitored, and updated and patched.

XenDesktop delivers virtual apps and desktops on a single unified platform, providing self-service access for users and simplified management for IT. In addition, an app store can be setup where users can select apps from an easy to use menu from secure access from a variety of BYOD devices such as tablets, smartphones, traditional PC and Mac desktops, and thin clients. XenDesktop 7 simplifies desktop delivery and access, and is also designed to help businesses mobilise their Windows app. Finally, XenDesktop 7 can even be delivered from Microsoft Azure for businesses looking for a cloud deployment.

VMware’s vSphere virtualisation platform helps businesses reduce capital expenses and operational costs by consolidating servers into virtualised instances. Higher hardware utilisation translates into fewer physical servers that need to be acquired, managed, powered, and stored. Indeed, large businesses and SMBs alike can leverage vSphere for record-breaking performance for resource-intensive workloads that is also easy-to-manage. The former translates into cost-efficient virtualisation that also gives vSphere the lowest TCO (total cost of ownership). With vSphere 5.1, businesses can configure even larger virtual machines with up to 64 virtual CPUs each and 1TB of virtual RAM. The new vMotion continues to offers zero-downtime migration, but without the need for shared storage configurations and applies to the entire network. On its part, the latest vSphere 5.5 allows businesses to work with larger virtual machines than before, with support for VMDKs (Virtual machine disks) of up to 62TB. Single Sign On (SSO) has also been re-architected and substantially improved.

cloud Storage Virtualisation Provider

Hewlett-Packard Singapore

The Hewlett-Packard StoreVirtual Storage4000 is a scale-out storage platform that is easy to manage, scalable and highly available.

Compatible with Windows, Linux, OS X and all major operating systems and hypervisors, the StoreVirtual Storage appliance allows for the creation of a virtual SAN for small and mid-sized businesses, enterprise remote offices or private cloud deployments. Scaling storage is as simple as adding nodes to the cluster, allowing businesses to grow their storage in a non-disruptive manner as their storage needs increase. The HP StoreVirtual VSA software offers industry-leading software-defined storage that is available as a virtual storage appliance. It transforms a server’s internal or direct-attached storage into fully featured shared storage array to greatly increase storage utilisation, and eliminates the costs and complexity associated with dedicated external storage. Again, the unique scale-out architecture offers the ability to add storage capacity on the fly without compromising performance.

Cloud Services Provider

Hewlett-Packard Singapore

HP’s Data Center Services offers a large range of distinctive services that is suited for hybrid or private cloud deployments, while being scalable to meet the needs of both SMBs (small to medium-sized businesses) and the largest enterprises. A number of cloud services are available as an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (laaS) offering from HP. On its part, the Continuity service is a cost-effective recovery-as-a-service for traditional IT environments, or can be also be setup as a backup cloud service for most other enterprise cloud services.

For businesses interested in building their own private cloud, HP can also help to design, build and manage a complete (laaS) that it can host. Finally, the Virtual Private Cloud option is a multi-tenant platform that is designed and built for the enterprise, allowing applications such as SAP and Oracle to be deployed in a secure cloud environment without the cost of owning or managing expensive IT equipment.

30

computerworld Singapore

readers choice awards 2013

www.computerworld.com.sg/rca_2013

Elected to Power: Celebrating the Leaders of the Year At an exclusive private party at Raffles Hotel Singapore on 4 October 2013, we at Computerworld Singapore recognised the select few vendors and technology providers who have become the winners of the 18th Readers Choice Awards (RCA).

computerworld Singapore

www.computerworld.com.sg/rca_2013

readers choice awards 2013

Why the theme “Elected to Power”? A leader’s role is not just to lead, but to inspire, and nurture those around them to greater heights. And as winners of the various RCA categories, they have important roles to play in transforming Singapore into a real world-class nation that is powered by technology.

It takes more than just innovative products and services, or robust infrastructure. It takes people who are passionate in leading Singapore to become an intelligent global city state.

The RCA winners have established themselves as technology thought leaders who can provide the right products and services for organisations in Singapore to transform their businesses and operations.

Turn the page to see the recipients who officially accepted this year’s trophies on behalf of their companies, and which product categories they won in style.

31

32

computerworld Singapore

readers choice awards 2013

www.computerworld.com.sg/rca_2013

These awards were handed out by Executive Networks Media CEO Mark Hobson.

platform & tools

System Management Software

Application Servers Software

Database Management System

Citrix Citrix XenApp 6.5 Feature Pack 2

Microsoft Singapore Pte Ltd Windows Server 2012

Microsoft Singapore Pte Ltd SQL Server 2012

trophy recipient: Mark Micallef Area Vice President ASEAN

trophy recipient: Joyce Loh Product Marketing Manager - Core Infrastructure Server & Tools Business Group Marketing & Operations

trophy recipient: Harish Aitharaju Server & Tools Business Group Lead Marketing & Operations

Enterprise Firewall and VPN

Intrusion Detection/ Prevention System

security

Information Security Suite

Symantec Corporation Symantec Endpoint Protection trophy recipient: Chng Tien San Regional Business Manager - ASEAN IIP - Identity & Information Protection

Check Point Software Technologies Check Point Firewall Software Blade

Fortinet FortiGate Series

trophy recipient: Jeffrey Cheong Regional Sales Manager Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam

trophy recipient: Dennis Aloysius Tan Country Manager Singapore

33

computerworld Singapore

www.computerworld.com.sg/rca_2013

readers choice awards 2013

IT Asset Management System

Symantec Corporation Symantec Altiris Asset Management Suite

trophy recipient: Chng Tien San Regional Business Manager - ASEAN IIP - Identity & Information Protection

enterprise applications

Unified Threat Management

Fortinet FortiGate Series

trophy recipient: Dennis Aloysius Tan Country Manager Singapore

Customer Relationship Management

salesforce.com Salesforce CRM

Trophy Recipient: Simon Davies Vice President ASEAN, Greater China & Korea

Business Intelligence

IBM Singapore Pte Ltd IBM Cognos Business Intelligence trophy recipient: Wang Yoke Choo Country Leader Business Analytics IBM Software Group

34

computerworld Singapore

readers choice awards 2013

www.computerworld.com.sg/rca_2013

enterprise applications

Data Analytics

Collaboration Platform

SAS Institute SAS Analytics Suite

Microsoft Singapore Pte Ltd Exchange Server 2013

Trophy Recipient: Francis Fong Managing Director

Trophy Recipient: Alan Dias Senior Product Marketing Manager Office Division Marketing & Operations

Enterprise Resource Planning

SAP SAP Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Trophy Recipient: Terrence Yong Director, Head of Business Operations South East Asia

Performance Management

Enterprise Content Management

Microsoft Singapore Pte Ltd Sharepoint Server 2013 Trophy Recipient: Alan Dias Senior Product Marketing Manager Office Division Marketing & Operations

Supply Chain Management

Red Hat Red Hat CloudForms

SAP SAP Supply Chain Management (SCM)

Trophy Recipient: Richard Koh Country Manager Singapore

Trophy Recipient: Alicia Chua Head of Presales Singapore

Computerworld Singapore

Reader Choice Awards 2013

Profile

Fortinet

35

Defending Against Advanced Threats

Fortinet stands vigilant against today’s sophisticated online threats with broad, integrated and high-performance protection.

S

etting its sights firmly on providing comprehensive protection against evolving network threats has stood Fortinet in good stead as a security provider. The FortiGate® Series has won the Computerworld Readers Choice Awards for the Unified Threat Management (UTM) and Intrusion Detection/Prevention System categories for 2013, and for the past several years.

The key, according to George Chang, Fortinet’s VP for Southeast Asia and Hong Kong, is to keep up with the evolution of security threats. These threats have transformed from being connection-based to content-based in recent years.

“Traditional security technologies have not kept up with this evolution and cannot tell the difference between malicious and legitimate content,” said Chang.

Chang explained that Fortinet delivers network security platforms and specialised security solutions that block today’s sophisticated threats.

“Our consolidated architecture enables enterprises to deploy fully integrated security technologies in a single device, delivering unmatched protection and lowering ownership costs. Purpose-built hardware and software provide the high performance and complete content protection that today’s enterprises need,” he said.

“These two award wins show that security functions integrated on a single platform does not mean lower performance. In fact, our FortiGate appliances’ performance have been confirmed by independent testing agencies like NSS Labs and BreakingPoint to be higher than many point products. The FortiGate security platform is a true enterprise class offering.”

Fortinet’s holistic approach has allowed the vendor to grow its market share in the security appliance space, from 5.8 percent in Q2 2012 to 6.2 percent in Q2 2013, according to IDC’s latest worldwide security appliance tracker. This increase also elevates Fortinet to become the 3rd largest security appliance vendor globally by factory revenue. IDC also named Fortinet the no. 1 vendor for Unified Threat Management (UTM) in Asia Pacific, with a market share of 19.6 percent in the first half of 2013.

To date, Fortinet has shipped more than 1.25 million appliances to over 160,000 customers worldwide − a list that includes more than half of the 2012 Fortune Global 100. These achievements have not gone unnoticed. This year, Fortinet won the Asia Pacific Network Security Vendor of the Year award from Frost & Sullivan, as well as the Computerworld Malaysia and Singapore Customer Care Awards, and Best UTM Award from Computerworld Hong Kong.

Strong Technology Core At the core of Fortinet’s continued success is technological innovation. The company has been awarded more than 100 patents, with 115 patents pending, and has more product certifications than any other security appliance company.

In addition, Fortinet’s FortiGuard Labs’ global team of over 175 threat researchers constantly keep their pulse on the evolving threat landscape.

Fortinet’s regional tech support and R&D team based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, provides important post-sales support to customers.

Not forgetting its partners, Fortinet has announced a series of channel initiatives in April 2012, and expanded on its Partner Program for the Asia-Pacific (APAC) and Europe, Middle East and

Africa (EMEA) regions in July 2013.

Fortinet now has over 10,000 Reseller Partners across these two key regions, with over 300 signed every quarter.

Besides working with partners, Fortinet engages its customers through newsletters, one-on-one meetings, as well as its annual Security 361o series of end-user conferences that run in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong – on issues like Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), data centre security, managed services and cloud.

“We have increased our efforts to directly connect with resellers and George Chang, Fortinet’s VP for Southeast Asia and Hong Kong end customers. By getting closer to resellers and end customers, we understand their challenges and needs better, and are able to communicate with them and support them more effectively. Internally, we have also restructured our account servicing teams by verticals, and beefed up our channel management team,” said Chang.

Security Trends

Moving forward, Fortinet expects the adoption of network security platforms to increase globally. The other trend is the shift towards delivering security as a managed service. “Service providers are using Fortinet’s solutions as the platform to deliver cloud and customer-based security services. We are proud to count many world-leading telecommunication companies − including SingTel and VADS, the managed ICT services arm of Telekom Malaysia − as our customers,” said Chang.

A top priority for Fortinet in the coming months will be to drive the adoption of Web application firewalls − which protect enterprises’ Web-based applications and Internet-facing data from attack and data loss.

“With so many consumers today adopting mobile devices and social networking tools, Web assets have become a critical revenue channel for many businesses. Our advanced FortiWeb Fortinet had launched the following solutions in the last 12 months: platforms help firms prevent identity • FortiOS 5.0, Fortinet’s proprietary security-hardened, purpose-built theft, financial fraud and denial of service, operating system that is the foundation for all Fortinet FortiGate keeping their businesses online 24/7,” integrated security platforms, has been updated with over 150 said Chang.

To ensure that its customers’ networks features and enhancements.

• FortiWeb 5 OS, Fortinet’s newest version of its Web application continue to be safeguarded against any firewall operating system. Security advancements include the new security threats, Fortinet is not resting on its laurels. The vendor will continue to ability to accurately identify the origin of Web application traffic to proactively distinguish between legitimate and malicious sources, and increase the speed and performance of its to spot and track bot traffic trends. products, extend its end-to-end security • FortiGate-3700D is the world’s fastest data centre firewall portfolio, and recruit R&D, sales and appliance, capable of achieving up to 160 Gbps firewall throughput. marketing talent to drive its penetration This is made possible by Fortinet’s custom NP6 ASIC, which will also into enterprises worldwide.

Said Chang: “I am proud that endgo into our new generation of network security platforms.

• New cloud-based sandboxing and IP reputation services that are users recognise Fortinet as the industry designed to help protect against advanced persistent threats (APTs). leader but am even more heartened that • The FortiADC-300E is a high-performance Application Delivery enterprises see the value of security, Controller (ADC) for mid-sized enterprises that combines traditional are adopting risk management best Load Balancing with advanced features that route traffic at the practices, and are continuing to invest application level and offload secure HTTPS transactions from servers. even during challenging times.”

New Products in 2013

36

computerworld Singapore

readers choice awards 2013

www.computerworld.com.sg/rca_2013

These awards were handed out by CIO Asia Editor T.C. Seow and Computerworld Singapore Editor Jack Loo.

communications

Enterprise Mobile Communication Devices

Samsung Electronics Samsung Galaxy Note and Samsung Galaxy Tab

trophy recipient: Winston Goh Head, Mobile Communications Enterprise & SMB

Enterprise Mobility Management Suite

Symantec Corporation Symantec Mobile Management Suite

trophy recipient: Chng Tien San Regional Business Manager - ASEAN llP - Identity & Information Protection

Unified Communications Software Suite

Cisco Systems Cisco Unified Communications Manager

trophy recipient: Angeline Ong HEAD of ASEAN

hardware

Mobile Computers

Lenovo ThinkPad series

trophy recipient: Terence Loh Marketing Manager

Enterprise Routers and Switches

Entry-Level Servers

Hewlett-Packard Singapore HP ProLiant Servers

trophy recipient: Danny Tay Business Development Manager Industry Standard Servers Enterprise Group

Cisco Systems Cisco Catalyst 3K switches (Catalyst 3560/3560-E/3560-X and 3570/3570-E/3750-X Series Switches)

trophy recipient: Shankar Subramanian Sales Director – Asia Enterprise Networking

Mid-Range Servers

Hewlett-Packard Singapore HP ProLiant Servers

trophy recipient: Lam Hoon Kwong Sales Director Industry Standard Servers Enterprise Group

Physical Infrastructure – Networks

Citrix Citrix NetScaler

trophy recipient: Mark Micallef Area Vice President ASEAN

37

computerworld Singapore

www.computerworld.com.sg/rca_2013

readers choice awards 2013

storage

Unified Communications Hardware Provider

Cisco Systems

trophy recipient: Kenneth Chong Sales Manager Collaboration Sales Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines

WAN Optimisation

Blue Coat Systems Blue Coat MACH5

trophy recipient: No recipient

Enterprise Disk System

IBM Singapore Pte Ltd IBM System Storage

trophy recipient: Wang Yoke Choo Country Leader Business Analytics IBM Software Group

Storage Management Software

High-End Enterprise Servers

IBM Singapore Pte Ltd IBM System x

trophy recipient: Wang Yoke Choo Country Leader Business Analytics IBM Software Group

Power Management

APC by Schneider Electric APC Smart-UPS

trophy recipient: Benedict Soh Business Vice President - Singapore & Brunei IT Business

EMC Corporation EMC Unisphere Manager

trophy recipient: Patrick Lim Mid-Tier Business Director South East Asia

Backup System

Symantec Corporation Symantec Backup Exec

trophy recipient: Vic Ciencia Manager, Systems Engineering Presales

38

computerworld Singapore

readers choice awards 2013

services

Consulting and Integration

Hewlett-Packard Singapore HP Technology Services

trophy recipient: Sanjay Vig Director & General Manager Technology Services, Singapore Enterprise Group

Data Centre and Hosting

SingTel SingTel EXPAN Managed Hosting Services

trophy recipient: Gelina Goh Director Business Marketing Communications

www.computerworld.com.sg/rca_2013

virtualisation

Support and Maintenance

Desktop Virtualisation Provider

trophy recipient: Peter Ding Director Global Support Delivery South-East Asia Technology Services, Enterprise Group

trophy recipient: James Chia Enterprise Sales Director ASEAN

Managed Connectivity

Server Virtualisation Provider

Hewlett-Packard Singapore HP Technology Services

SingTel SingTel Managed Connectivity and Managed Services

trophy recipient: Gelina Goh Director Business Marketing Communications

Citrix

VMware

trophy recipient: No recipient

cloud

Storage Virtualisation Provider

Managed Print Services

Fuji Xerox

trophy recipient: Paul Han Associate Director Fuji Xerox Global Services

Cloud Services Provider

Hewlett-Packard Singapore

trophy recipient: Sanjay Vig Director & General Manager Technology Services, Singapore Enterprise Group

Hewlett-Packard Singapore

trophy recipient: Ken Tan Sales Director Business Critical Systems & Hewlett-Packard Storage Division Enterprise Group

Computerworld Singapore

Reader Choice Awards 2013

Profile

Red Hat

39

Red Hat CloudForms allows customers to manage and integrate enterprise cloud

T

he traditional model for enterprise IT, based task orchestration and automation, user self-service portals on conventional data centre infrastructure, is and central operations management allow for resources and diminishing to be being replaced by hybrid IT. VM lifecycles to be used to their fullest potential.

Red Hat and its partners, a powerful group of Red Hat products and services are honed to meet global ICT vendors, are playing a leading role in customer requirements based on the company’s developing hybrid IT. relationships with the vast and expanding Open Source Hybrid IT balances several elements. Nearly all Movement, and on its global partnership with ICT vendors. enterprises retain some traditional on-premise IT with Red Hat recently held its very popular annual Red Hat Asia Pacific Partner Conference, at which a variety of physical servers and infrastructure, but private cloud infrastructure has allowed for a rapid expansion of IT world-class open source products and services were services. Many IT departments now broker services from demonstrated, including many available on the Red Hat one or more public clouds and increasingly consume public cloud infrastructure.

Red Hat’s channel partners are critical to the cloud services such as infrastructure, platform and storage “as-a-service.” brand’s ability to deliver enterprise-ready, reliable, open For enterprises, the key is how IT services as a whole source solutions to its ASEAN customers. Red Hat cloud Damien Wong, General Manager, can be managed to provide a cost-effective, reliable and infrastructure is supported by major vendors’ products ASEAN, Red Hat including Amazon Web Services’ EC2 and OpenStack cloud seamless service driving the migration towards public infrastructure; virtual infrastructure from VMware and cloud. “Cloud has already moved into the mainstream Microsoft; and NetApp’s storage infrastructure. CloudForms incorporates many lexicon - we have moved beyond talking hypothetically about what cloud is aspects of service integration and management, supported by products from HP, and its benefits, to a more practical nuts-and-bolts view of how to achieve ServiceNow, CA, BMC Software and other technology specialists. this cloud vision,” said Damien Wong, General Manager, ASEAN, Red Hat. “Red Hat understands challenges faced by enterprises and organisations, and our comprehensive open source solutions are designed to help them Red Hat’s customer support services build scalable, interoperable private and hybrid clouds to overcome these Red Hat’s core business is a subscription model that supports a close customer challenges, making their IT efficient and business agile.” relationship in which feedback is used to generate innovation and market opportunities. A key collaborative tool is Red Hat’s Customer Portal, accessed continually by enterprise users worldwide. In June 2013, the Red Hat Customer Red Hat defines the Linux market Red Hat is increasingly defining Portal was recognised by the the Linux market, accounting Association of Support Professionals’ RED HAT CLOUDFORMS (Open hybrid cloud management) for 74.7% of the Linux operating Ten Best Web Support Sites Automation Self-Service Provisioning Monitoring system revenue on a worldwide Competition for the third year in basis, according to IDC: Worldwide succession.

In August 2013, Red Hat introduced Linux Client and Server Operating TRADITIONAL ENTERPRISE CLOUD the Certificate of Expertise in Environments 2013-2017 Forecast, and WORKLOADS WORKLOADS MIXED Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) for 2012 Vendor shares.

WORKLOAD • Systems of engagement • Systems of record • Stateless, disposable, modular • Stateful, persistent, monolithic experienced IT professionals who can Red Hat has been positioned by deploy and manage OpenStack. The Gartner in the leaders’ quadrant of class will cover essential OpenStack the Magic Quadrant for On-Premises RED HAT ENTERPRISE VIRTUALIZATION RED HAT ENTERPRISE LINUX OPENSTACK PLATFORM Application Platforms, for solutions skills, including installing and including Red Hat JBoss Middleware configuring a Red Hat Enterprise and OpenShift, which is Red Hat’s Linux OpenStack Platform Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering. deployment; configuring and managing images; and managing storage using Object Storage (Swift) Red Hat is the technology PHYSICAL INFRASTRUCTURE PHYSICAL INFRASTRUCTURE leader for open hybrid and Block Storage (Cinder).

Red Hat aims to be the platform clouds Red Hat CloudForms is an Open of choice for developing and Hybrid cloud management system for delivering hybrid cloud management mixed enterprise workloads. Red Hat best practices collaboratively. “A specific Enterprise Virtualization addresses goal is to deliver out-of-the-box, large • 1Bestarinet collaborated with YTL Communications to deliver a virtual learning infrastructure for 10,000 schools in Malaysia with Red Hat traditional enterprise workloads, while scale, hybrid cloud management, Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack based on CloudForms,” said Wong. “Our Platform addresses cloud workloads. This • True Corporation, a leading Thai telecommunications conglomerate, technology enhances the enterprise’s turned to Red Hat JBoss Middleware to break away from vendor lock-in management platform allows users to ability to automate complex hybrid cloud management workflows. The Open gain control of their virtual environment by proprietary middleware vendors.

Source Community is a vital part of the IT while running multiple guests to build a • Coca-Cola Amatil Indonesia leveraged Red Hat Enterprise Linux to ecosystem, and Red Hat envisages that hybrid or private cloud. Features such as improve sales and efficiency CloudForms will, in time, be released to open source in its entirety.”

Recent customer successes

#11015597_V2_0713 DOC139117

40

LOGGING OFF

November – December 2013

www.computerworld.com.sg Editorial EDITOR Jack Loo

Transforming Singapore

I

SUB-EDITOR Subatra Suppiah ONLINE EDITOR Zafar Hasan Anjum Reporter Nurdianah Md Nur Contributor Paul Mah Correspondent AvantiKumar (Malaysia)

n the not too distant past when LTE services were about to be rolled out in Singapore, I received an invitation to interview a vendor spokesperson for a story on the mentioned technology.

But why talk about LTE when the 3G coverage then was so weak? Could our flagging

infrastructure cope with something that is new and faster? I wondered. Thankfully though, the authorities and providers involved have since managed to improve on the service levels.

Fast forward to today. Over the past two-month period, cable television outages and a major fire at fibre optic facility caused major disruptions to both consumers and businesses in Singapore.

The Infocomm Development Authority’s Intelligent Nation 2015 (iN2015) strategic vision called for Singapore to be an intelligent global city state that is powered by infocomm technologies by the year 2015. For that to happen, Singapore needs to be not just connected, but stay connected.

Of course, we need to realise that infrastructure outages can and will happen. The trick is to keep such incidents at a minimum and when things go awry, processes (and people) must be in place to make sure things go back on track as soon as possible. Otherwise, iN2015 would become another GOAL 2010, the failed vision that had Singapore taking part in the 2010 World Cup. During these situations, communications to the customers need to be delicately handled. A carelessly crafted statement might be perceived as complacent behaviour. A lack of situation updates might be seen as professional incompetence.

This is where the winners of the Readers Choice Awards (RCA) come in as exemplary. Being voted to be the leaders in the various RCA categories, they can not only offer products and services, but also experience and knowledge as well to Singapore organisations.

Designer Yasin

Advertising/MArketing/Reprints regional Sales Director

Glen Myles Tel: +65 6395 8018 Regional Account Director

Ng Yi-lin Tel: +65 6395 8045 Regional account Director

Francesca Lee Tel: +65 6395 8041 senior account MANAGER

Catherine Loh Tel: +603 7804 3692 Regional MARKETING MANAGER

Tissie Adhistia Tel: +65 6395 8012 conference director

Chris White Tel: +65 6395 8037 circulation & PRODUCTION Circulation and production specialist

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@execnetworks.com Address: 152 Beach Road, #11-06/08 Gateway East, Singapore 189721 executive networks media

How can preventive measures be carried out? What can be done or said during a crisis? How to rebuild damaged reputations after incidents? These are practices that can be shared among Singapore organisations. That is if they are willing to ask, and learn.

On a brighter note, the year ahead-issue of Computerworld Singapore is coming up. This is a regular feature where I would try to predict where technology in Singapore is heading in the coming year.

My plan is to gather this year’s Readers Choice Awards winners and industry figures to share their experiences on how they are driving Singapore towards 2015.

Get in touch with me, and update our readers on how you can transform Singapore.

chief executive officer Mark Hobson finance manager Allan Chee operations manager Alison Lim

about executive networks media

Executive Networks Media is the publisher of the region’s leading media brands dedicated to covering and supporting the information and communications industry (MIS Asia, CIO Asia, Computerworld Singapore and Computerworld Malaysia), the producer of events devoted to the communities they represent, and the owner of a research consultancy dedicated to studying technology industry developments as well as technology deployment trends across Asia.

Subscriber services & Updates Please contact Josephine Goh Email: subs-cws@execnetworks.com Subscription rates for one year Singapore — S$20.00 Countries within Asia — US$28.00 Countries outside Asia — US$38.00

jloo@execnetworks.com

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