Singapore Sling
So it’s a wrap on our Asia Pacific InTouch Business forum, held last week in Singapore. Emceed by the always entertaining Tony Poulos and attended by over 150 customers from the region, this was a really great event.
Dov Baharav, our CEO, kicked off proceedings with a presentation: ‘Thriving in the Connected World’. He introduced it using the first 70 seconds of the social media refresh video . Particularly fitting given that over half the APAC online population is socially networked and in Singapore there are more visits to social networking sites than to search engines.
He also talked about how in APAC service providers often deal with a duality: they need to support high growth of low ARPU subscribers whilst in metropolitan areas they also need to support tech-savvy consumers looking for high bandwidth and digital services. So from a systems point of view service providers need scalability, efficiency and low-cost as well as the ability to monetize data traffic, create new services and support fast innovation cycles.
(If you are in any doubt as to the growth potential in this region read this interview with Syed Safawi, CEO Reliance Mobile, in April of this year where he anticipates the “next 100 million customers in 1,000 days. This can be met at current growth rates.” ……wow!)
When it comes to new services the need and implications were eloquently expressed by Mr. Bunjert Thungvarathum from True Thailand. His team manages and operates a suite of Customer Care and Billing systems. The systems consist of over 40 critical applications that serve 20+ million subscribers and 4,000 internal users across all business lines. Bunjert is a talented speaker, and during one of the most entertaining (and yes, laugh-out-loud funny) presentations I have seen at a conference in a while he talked about the challenges of convergence. How it spans well beyond IT – to marketing and business – and how the entire organization must transform.
Bunjert’s was just one of many excellent customer presentations that really made the event. Check out the full agenda here.
And no visit to Singapore would be complete without a visit to a fantastic restaurant. I recommend the Wagyu beef BBQ at Gyu-Kaku. Three of us went but decided to help the local economy by ordering for six…
APAC is a diverse and remarkable region. A region where mobile internet can be truly life changing and new services are constantly innovated. Being in Singapore, with industry leaders from across the region, the energy, the vibrancy, and the excitement were palpable. It really felt like whatever the challenges, anything is possible.
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