SINGAPORE – The still pervasive traditional thinking in the world of information and communications technology (ICT) continues to hamper the adoption of cloud for many in the Philippines, according to Ernest Cu, CEO of telecommunications giant Globe Telecom.
Globe Telecom’s Ernest Cu noted that cloud adoption continues to be “an uphill climb” in the Philippines. As such, he said that “a new way of thinking” needs to be introduced, with businesses needing to change their approaches.
In an exclusive interview with Upgrade Magazine during the AWS Summit in Singapore, Cu noted that “a lot of (business) executives still measure their power by – among others – the number of servers that they have, or the number of people that they manage.” As such, cloud adoption continues to be “an uphill climb.”
For instance, many people continue to believe that Internet is not secure, “so they assume that cloud is not secure, too.” There is therefore that assumption that putting up their own infrastructure rids businesses of the vulnerability. “This is simply not true,” said Cu, adding that “even when you put your own infrastructure, you will still have the same vulnerability.”
As such, Cu said that “a new way of thinking” needs to be introduced, with businesses needing to change their approaches.
“It’s innovate or die,” Cu said.
For Cu, ascertaining businesses approaches should depend on “how robust (they are); on how many transactions (these approaches deliver to a company); on how resilient the approaches are,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if you have zero servers so long as what you use grow your business.”
Part of innovation, said Cu, is recognizing the benefits of cloud.
In the case of Globe Telecom, part of growth comes from its partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS), with this partnership formed in 2011 “eventually scaling from then”.
Launched in 2006, AWS has more than 40 services to support any cloud workload today, from enterprise applications, platform services, administration and security, infrastructure, technology and business support, and core services (computing, storage, databases and networking). With data center locations in the US, Brazil, Germany, Japan, and Ireland, it now has over one million customers, from startups, large enterprises, and government agencies across 190 countries. In Asia and the Pacific, and Oceania regions, it has data center locations in Australia, China and Singapore.
“A lot of services today are available at low cost of entry available in cloud,” Cu said. “There were capabilities that used to be off-limits to small businesses in the past because of costs; but these are now readily available to all. The beauty of the cloud is you can scale (so there is) rooms for experimentations and trials; there are no commitment to high cost.”
Globe Telecom – which currently serves over 49 million customers, has 6,182 employees, and has 967,000 business partners – the use of cloud has been helpful in: 1) the company’s online selling efforts; 2) Globe’s device registration engine; 3) ensuring Gen 3 retail experience; and 4) in the company’s data platforms.
The benefits for Globe Telecom of cloud adoption include: cost efficiency (with cuts in expenses for both capital expenditures and operating expenditures), cost optimization, enterprise scalability, business agility, and – most important for Cu – the ability of cloud to allow companies to focus on invention and experimentation.
Cu said that the growing use of cloud for Globe Telecom is inevitable. “It is just going to keep (growing),” he said. “We are serious in adopting cloud.”
As one of the major telecommunications companies in the Philippines, Globe Telecom’s postpaid customer base reached 2.3 million in 2014. Revenues from mobile postpaid business also rose by 11%, from 27.1 billion in 2013 to P29.9 billion generated last year. The revenues represented 38% of the company’s total mobile revenues.
For more information about Globe Telecom, visit www.globe.com.ph/.
For more information about AWS, visit http://aws.amazon.com.
