As the year draws to a close, iN.SG caught up with a number of industry professionals on what they felt were some of the more significant Infocomm events in 2006.
Altiris Inc
Dwain Kinghorn, Chief Technology Officer
"One of the most significant developments in 2006 is the accelerated adoption of virtualisation technology. Virtualisation was built to provide an answer for system provisioning and capacity issues as IT infrastructures become more complex. This emerging technology continues to mature to bring about distinct benefits in efficiency and cost savings.
Virtualisation expanded from commonly known server virtualisation, to application or software virtualisation, data virtualisation, and hardware or processor virtualisation. In 2006, Altiris revolutionised software configuration management with the launch of Altiris Software Virtualisation Solution. Through on-demand application provisioning, IT organisations are able to eliminate application conflicts, provide instantaneous application delivery, instantly repair damaged applications and significantly reduce testing time for application rollouts, making software operations significantly more efficient."
CA Singapore
Philip Chua, General Manager
"One heartening development in 2006 is the sharp rise in the number of firms starting to design their IT systems around their end-users. Acceptance of IT Service Management (ITSM), as well as its enabling set of best practices called the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL), is clearly growing.
It is significant that companies are starting to use ITIL and ITSM to manage the entire infrastructure to deliver user demand driven IT services, instead of tackling individual IT components. The transformation will give them a quantum leap in business agility and customer satisfaction, and help them solve problems faster.
It's a giant step forward for Singapore that enterprises here, especially those in the financial services sector -- have chosen 2006 to start serious exploration of solutions that link people, process, and technology -- the three critical components of ITIL. The fastest firms have already started to create IT policies, processes, and roles that drive performance improvements, maintain financial accountability, and enable IT-business alignment."
CBL Data Recovery Inc.
Bill Margeson, CEO and Co-founder
"2006 saw Singapore celebrating 25 years of Infocomm. The country has come a long way, facing challenges and achieving outstanding results since the initiation of national computerisation in 1981. We also look forward to the myriad of changes that will benefit not only Singaporeans, but also global players and attracting more foreign investments with the launch of iN2015, a ten-year infocomm masterplan this year. With the iN2015, we anticipate Singapore to become an Intelligent Nation and Global City powered by Infocomm."
EMC Singapore
Richard Price, Country Manager
"In 2006, the information age is well and truly upon us. Users today leverage the latest Web 2.0 technologies from blogs, podcast, instant messaging for both work and play. This leaves many companies grappling with issues of how best to create, share, manage and protect their information assets in this complex environment.
A catalytic factor for the local industry is Singapore's island-wide rollout wireless broadband Internet (Wireless@SG) in all public spaces for the first two years. This brings broadband access into every home and improves access for students from poorer families and the elderly. Government departments and even the private sector will now have to look at how they deliver improved services to a larger population of users at the lowest cost possible.
Locally, the standards discussion also took centre stage in 2006 as IDA led the way in the establishing a standard operating environment for the government which served as a catalytic widening of awareness of the importance of standards. Globally, we expect that the standards discussion to continue to dominate headlines, as we move closer to achieve visions of a full information infrastructure and grid computing supported by maturing technologies such as virtualisation."
F5 Networks
Tuan Q Le, Country Manager for Singapore
"Globally, the marketplace is changing. In Singapore and in many developed nations worldwide, we're seeing a wider adoption of wireless technology and 3G. The ability to access information while-on-the-go has become more of an expectation rather than an option. In the enterprise world, we're seeing a convergence of two opposing forces. On one hand, we see the consolidation of data centres and assets, using tools that allow server virtualisation; on the other hand, we see a drive by businesses to streamline and be specialised.
The latest 10-year infocomm masterplan (iN2015) by the government to transform Singapore into an intelligent nation is spot on as organisations are increasingly seeking to partner with others to augment their applications and deliver services to their constituents. The global trend and drive towards specialisation of the functions that individual data centres provide consolidation of data centres had played a big role in increasing the demand to manage and consolidate various specialised services or applications in a highly secure, fast performance and always-on manner."
Hitachi Global Storage Technologies
Robert Chu, Asia Pacific Vice President
"2006 is a great year – we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the hard disk drive and also transitioned to a critical new recording technology – perpendicular magnetic recording – which will enable the hard drive industry to continue growing capacity to meet the increasing demands for digital storage. Based on our interaction with customers and partners over the last 24 months, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies has seen the hard disk drive playing an increasingly prominent role in consumer electronics, creating whole new product categories whilst enabling new levels of functionality.
This year, we've seen the proliferation of consumer electronics that requires high storage capacity in small devices such as digital video recorders, set-top boxes, digital still and video cameras, global positioning devices and PDAs. This phenomenon is driving the highest-growth segment in hard disk drives.
Beside that, we're also seeing an explosion of digital data that's driving the need for higher storage capacities. Information is transitioning at a staggering pace from analog to digital and high-capacity hard drives are required to store all that digital data."
HP Singapore
Tan Yen Yen, Managing Director
"From the infocomm perspective, the announcement of the iN2015 Masterplan was definitely significant. It has the right recipe of People, Process and Technology focus, which makes Singapore an attractive place for MNCs like HP to continue growing here.
The SOE project was also a milestone. It will not only transform the way civil servants work, but it also has the potential to change the way the public uses government e-services. In addition, it will be a showcase for Singapore to other governments in Asia.
HP hopes to play an important role in these initiatives. In fact we have made our own announcements in support of them. Examples include the HP-A*Star Shared Services Platform Lab to develop technologies to match IT resources with user requirements on a shared platform; the iN'spire Center, a proof-of-concept center for public sector technologies developed with ST Electronics, Microsoft and Cisco; and the iN'spire Academy, a joint effort with SMU and NYP to provide SOE technologies and best practices training for the public sector."
Hyperion Solutions Asia Pte Ltd
Suganthi Shivkumar, Managing Director, ASEAN & India
"Businesses in ASEAN are gearing up to compete on a global playing field and are looking into business solutions that would keep them abreast of business trends, goal setting, performance tracking, etc. Not only is measuring results and managing performance important, it is crucial that companies are able to analyse the past and put it to good use into the future.
Another business issue that gained significant interest this year is corporate governance. With the spate of several high profile cases of compliance breaches that involved local companies and organisations, companies and the Singapore government are now paying more attention to how these companies or organisations conduct themselves. We believe that this is a key driving force behind companies looking to compliance management solutions."
Juniper Networks Singapore
Beni Sia, Country Manager
"By moving aggressively towards and Next Generation Network (NGN) architecture, Singapore enhances its position as a central hub of Asian business and as an attractive business destination. In media and comms, we're already seeing interest in the digital transmission of films to editing and production facilities, as well as to theaters themselves. Of course, the home market becomes larger too when people's experiences can be that much better with HD IPTV, 5.1 sound, and the like.
Singapore's NGN will provide a great amount of bandwidth locally, and this network will be nicely positioned to deliver Hi Definition IPTV (i.e. broadcast and VoD). I guess once this infrastructure is in place, the next question which existing and new service providers will have to consider is whether there is enough content to fully utilise the network.
In Singapore, IPTV has not been commercially rolled out in a big way yet. But we expect more developments in the next 12 months as more players jump onto the IPTV bandwagon."
Motorola, Inc.
EL Tay, President, Motorola Singapore, Corporate Vice President, Asia Manufacturing Operations Integrated Supply Chain
"Without a doubt, Singapore's Intelligent Nation 2015 (iN2015) master plan was a significant step forward for infocomm in Singapore and will further cement Singapore's reputation as an ICT hub even further.
Singapore also reached an Infocomm milestone in 2006 where mobile penetration became 100.1% in August 2006.
In yet anther milestone, Motorola is working together with Starhub to provision 100Mbps broadband speeds to residential homes in Singapore by the year's end, with plans to enhance the platform to potentially reach up to 1Gbps within the next two to three years.
All this significant steps point to the realisation of seamless mobility in Singapore, which we are looking forward to with anticipation."
Nokia Singapore
Chris Carr, General Manager
"We are seeing increasing mobility in the Singapore society, driven largely by trends of multimedia convergence, growing popularity of mobile applications such as mobile email, and the availability of wider range of mobile devices to suit any lifestyle or corporate requirements. This mobile culture is also accelerated by Singapore's push towards a wireless society under its iN2015 initiative.
Based on our mobility readiness research in July, we are pleased to see that organisations here have a highly mobile environment where most office workers have access to mobile devices, with their IT infrastructure ready for VPN and/or wireless LAN, and relevant security policies in place.
We also note that operators are moving towards High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) to tackle the challenges of providing high speed, quality services with optimised cost of delivery for today's sophisticated mobile users, who demand high quality music downloads, streamed video and faster connectivity to mobile office and the Internet."
Oracle Singapore
Frank Koo, Managing Director
"Oracle was also at the heart of many milestone initiatives that Singapore initiated in 2006. The execution of the Singapore government's iN2015 masterplan – the most recent initiative being the announcement of the free national wireless broadband service – will drive accelerated growth for the local infocomm industry in 2007 and beyond."
RSA
Ross Wilson, Managing Director, South Asia & India
"It's been an eventful year at RSA. Our journey of acquiring other companies to enhance our product offerings saw a fitting end as we ourselves were acquired by EMC in the second half of the year.
Security remained a top priority across industries in Singapore. With phishing attacks headed for banks in Asia, the Monetary Authority of Singapore recommended that banks in Singapore to implement two-factor authentication by the end of year. While underway, two local banks were hit by phishing attacks further fuelling public interest in online banking security and identity management."
Sterling Commerce
Woo Peng Keong, Director, Software Development
"In 2006, we saw bold plans in the Next Generation Infocomm Infrastructure and Wireless@SG initiatives to achieve pervasive connectivity in the country. It is a strategic move that will enhance Singapore's position as a leading ICT nation.
The NGII initiative creates opportunities for businesses, especially Internet related businesses. It will lead to greater utilisation of Infocomm for working, learning, playing, that generates productivity and growth.
The development of both wireless and high speed broadband will generate growth and productivity in the areas of entertainment, education, electronic commerce, among others.
2006 also saw the development of the Games and Interactive Entertainment sector in Singapore."
Symantec
Bill Robbins, Senior Vice President, Asia Pacific and Japan
"2006 saw an explosion of new technologies that changed the way people communicate with friends, family, and colleagues. Online experiences now include more social interaction and collaboration. Businesses are sharing information across their extended enterprises and engaging in more complex e-commerce transactions. These new technologies are creating great opportunities, but also introducing new security risks. Our options for online activities are expanding exponentially, yet paradoxically, in carrying out these transactions our confidence is diminishing.
Symantec sees today's threats as no longer being confined just to the hardware devices that we use – they are now focused on the information being exchanged and the interactions between users. Phishing, identity theft, malicious users and the threat of non-compliance are all risks that the man-in-the-street can fall prey to."