The cloud – solving different pain points for different sectors

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The cloud – solving different pain points for different sectors

By Asina Pornwasin 
THE NATION WEEKEND

 

Chawapol Jariyawiroj

 

AS THAILAND transforms into a digital country, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is dedicated to help by offering cloud solutions to meet the different challenges facing customers.

 

It aims continue to grow along with the market by focusing on those challenges. According to IDC, the global cloud market’s compound annual growth rate from 2016 to 2021 is expected to reach 21.9 per cent.

 

Chawapol Jariyawiroj, country manager of AWS Thailand, said the company’s role as a platform and enabler will help businesses throughout the entire ecosystem to build their competitive capacity in the era of digital disruption.

 

Cloud platforms can help democratise digital access and competitive advantage. 

 

The cloud is having an impact on this country, as it is being widely adopted by businesses of all sizes, as well as by digital and startup businesses and the public sector, especially government and education. 

 

Chawapol said that this year the company is focusing on five business segments – large enterprises, emerging enterprises, digital native businesses, integrated solution vendors, and territory businesses. 

 

The large enterprise customers are made up of large traditional businesses  across vertical industries, including banking, insurance, telecom, retail, real estate and construction. These businesses are being disrupted. Their challenges are to create new revenue streams, create end-user experiences and to reduce the cost of business operations.

 

“This group invests in cloud solutions to increase competitiveness,” said Chawapol. “They need to undergo transformation, so we have a dedicated team to provide consulting, as well as solution architecture customised for each customer.” 

 

The emerging enterprise customers are also traditional businesses, but have a medium-sized organisational structure and a workload that is not as complex.Their challenge is similar to that of large corporates, but they are more flexible. They are looking to invest in transformation while increasing competitive performance – and cloud is the answer. 

 

Digital native businesses –mainly tech startups – are another focus area for AWS Thailand this year. They are found across industries, including financial technology, online businesses, tech firms, property tech, insurance tech, healthcare and retail. 

 

“For them, technology is the key factor driving the business. Most of their business is based on the cloud platform. They are born in the cloud. Their nature is to move fast, experiment quickly, be highly agile, and quickly create user experience,” said Chawapol.

 

Integrated solution vendors (ISV) are similar to business-to-business service providers such as payment gateway service providers. It is a new business segment and is a focus for ASW this year.

 

“Many large successful startups are using ASW’s cloud platform, such as aCommerce, 2C2P, WiseSlight, Wongnai, Sunday Insurance, and even the Stock Exchange of Thailand [SET],” said Chawapol. 

 

Meanwhile, “territory businesses” are small and medium-size traditional businesses, as well as small digital and startup businesses. With this market segment AWS Thailand will work with business partners to provide support for customers, while it takes the lead with the other four market segments. 

 

For the past three years, large corporates – especially banks, telcos, retail, and real estate – have shifted to the cloud platform to meet the innovation challenge. 

 

The key technology solutions include artificial intelligence, machine learning, internet of things, and blockchain. With a jump in corporates seeing the advantages of migrating to the cloud, AWS Thailand is providing professional services including system design, platform and security, architecture, security policy and landing zone.

 

“We have been here in the Thai market for four years and now the norm is ‘Why not cloud?’ or ‘Cloud first’. The cloud platform has rapidly grown over the past few years and will continue growing quickly for many years in the future,” said Chawapol.

 

Early adoption stage

 

AWS has led the global cloud market share, with 51.8 per cent in 2018, growing from 47 per cent in 2017. Still, when cloud penetration is compared to the whole of technology spending, it remains in the early-adoption stage, providing lots of room for global and local growth.

 

Globally, ASW has 20 regional sites and 61 availability zones. Each regional site has two to three availability zones, while each availability zone has around two to three data centres. Among the 20 regional sites, six are in Asia Pacific – Singapore, Japan, Korea, India, Hong Kong and China.

 

“We have our own submarine cable linking all 20 regional sites. That allows customers to use their own virtual private network over our platform. This is to help reduce the total cost of ownership when compared to the traditional technology approach. For example, DoHome PLC, the large retail for construction products, reduced costs by 30 per cent after it moved to the cloud,” said Chawapol.

 

The benefit of going to the cloud go beyond reducing the total cost of ownership, he said. It includes the agility, scalability, security, and speed capability to deliver and to launch new services, as well as data analytic capability. These are inestimable benefits, said Chawapol. 

 

“Now with everyone going to omni-channel, they have both online and office customer/user touch points. Cloud is really to address their online part, to collect and analyse data for their offline part of the business,” said Chawapol.

 

Thailand is an important market for ASW, he said, and so the company has devoted a lot of resources to increase the office, team and other resources in the Thai market. The new office, at 1,300 square metres, will be opened in April. It will house a training room, workshop lab, as well as host fireside chats and customer experience-sharing across industries. 

 

It will also recruit a lot more talent in security, analytics, artificial intelligent, machine learning and customer support teams. 

 

“This year is the big move for ASW Thailand, since cloud is the new normal while cloud adoption in Thailand is in its early stage the same as in the other countries around the world. There are many jobs to be done,” said Chawapol.

 

Source: http://www.nationmultimedia.com/detail/Startup_and_IT/30365917

 

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