“With the rise of digital technologies, companies could risk being left behind if they do not adopt a digital transformation,” H3C’s President of International Business and Senior Vice President, Gary Huang says. He refers to the circumstances that led to Kodak filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2012 as an example.
Kodak’s lack of proactive efforts to transform their camera technology had led them down a road which forced them to sell their assets in coming years.
“We should understand that seamless digital transformation is a continuous process. Education and the hospitality sector now face the challenge to justify their migration of ICT infrastructure,” Huang says.
He tells BusinessToday that in the education sector, the focus is on Smart Education as it is necessary to fully converge teaching, research and management with new network technology to promote creativity, improvement and breakthrough.
“The Smart Campus solution is born to consummate it.”
And as for the hospitality sector, Huang highlights that digital transformation seems the best way to reduce their cost of operation, offering innovative ways to recruit customers by means of social media and other online platforms.
As such, H3C believes digital transformation will have to be adopted by all industries to meet their own industry challenges. While it will be different for each industry, Huang foresees the government, telco, ISP, FSI and retail are among the industries that will focus and execute steps to digitally transform themselves as soon as possible.
“The ultimate objective for industries to digitally transform themselves is so they can provide the best service. Currently, most of the online services are based on Cloud. Other than that, Internet Gaming, online shopping, E-Learning platforms, Government applications, Internet Banking, Electronic currency organisations are building their applications on top of Public Cloud, Private Cloud or Hybrid Cloud type of technology,” Huang tells BusinessToday.
Cloud infrastructure provides high resilience characteristics and offers 24 hours 7 days a week service with 99.999 percent reliability, he adds.
Key findings from the International Data Corporation report, Digital Transformation in Malaysia 2020, reveal 93 percent of corporations in Malaysia having implemented cloud but have not been able to reap the benefits of doing so due to migration struggles and a lack of talent and knowledge of cloud services.
Understanding the digital transformation architecture
“There are two parts to it. Application and ICT infrastructure. Application and ICT Infrastructure. Application is industry specific; it has to be innovative and meets the user expectations. Application rides on top of ICT infrastructure.
“Technologies that we can apply in the ICT infrastructure, as a pool of resources for Application to use such as AI, Big Data, Cloud Computing, 5G, IoT, HPC, and Networks,” he says.
In order to support the continued digital transformation process, H3C believes there are few important aspects, which includes deploying the right technology with good technology partners. The company has urged organisations to think hard about the return on invest in this process and at the same time to keep in mind that digital transformation is critical to survive and compete.
Huang is also urging businesses to consider the transformation from a security concerns point of view. “This is a very important part when considering security. Public cloud deployment is simple, and cost is low for short term deployment, but organisations need to consider their corporation requirements on Data Security and Integrity,” he says.
Huang further says that the pandemic has triggered a sense of exploration among companies towards the digital transformation process as it offers a more flexible and agile infrastructure to meet unprecedented business challenges.
From application development to service access in the system, this would require a comprehensive ICT infrastructure to support.
“H3C has a long history of helping companies around the world undergo digital transformation. We were a networking company when founded and have now transformed to be a Digital Solutions provider covering different R&D of all kind of ICT infrastructure technology, with digital platform that includes cloud computing, big data, artificial intelligence (AI), intelligent connectivity, 5G, information security, new safety, Internet of Things (IoT), and edge computing, as well as end-to-end technical services.
“As such we expect the growth of the ICT market in 2021 to support the area of company digital transformation,” Huang concludes.
