IoT, 4G to lead digital revolution

THE INTERNET OF THING (IoT) and 4G will be the key technologies that will Thailand's digital transformation through 2016. Also, ubiquitous connectivity will push its way to the forefront of people's lives this year and cloud and big data will continue to see growth with much greater adoption in Thailand this year.

 

Internet of Things leads digitisation

Cisco Systems believes that in 2016 digitisation should be a priority, as technology strategies will play a critical role. Vatsun Thirapatarapong, managing director for Thailand and Indochina at Cisco Systems, said Internet of Everything (IoE) and digitisation will be the top technology trends for 2016. 

He said total IoT connections were estimated to reach 50 billion by 2020 and around 1.6 billion connected things will be used by smart cities in 2016. 

Vatsun believes that in 2016, organisations must also address the "digital vortex" of disruption, the inevitable movement of industries toward a "digital centre" in which business models, offerings, and value chains are digitised. 

"Digitisation should also be at the top of the corporate agenda because if the country is moving towards digitisation speedily, our businesses will be move faster and become more dynamic to realise the full potential of this opportunity," said Vatsun.

The explosion of IoE and digitisation is driven by the development of IP-enabled devices, the increase in global broadband availability and the advent of IPv6. 

"With digitisation, every aspect of day-to-day business will change. We will see more companies will embrace IoE and become digitised regardless of device and platform in 2016," said Vatsun.

However, Vatsun said, the mega-trends in technology that will influence businesses across industries in 2016, which are rising quickly and will come together, are digitisation, mobility, cloud, IoT, big data and data analytics. 

These technologies will force organisations to dis

rupt the way they do business, provide services to citizens and improve the quality of life, including safety and security. These disruptors offer differentiated products and services and better value than incumbents, also creating a hyper-competitive landscape driven by digital disruption, where lines between industries are blurring and markets are changing exponentially.

Ryan Goh, vice president and general manager of Zebra Technologies Asia Pacific, agreed that enterprise mobility, cloud, and the Internet of Things (IoT) will be the key technology trends for 2016. 

The enterprise mobility market has grown rapidly over the last few years, as the Asia Pacific workforce increasingly works on-the-go and from mobile devices.

Meanwhile, the ubiquity of cloud and IoT has continued to impact every aspect of IT and how users access applications, information and business services. All these developments have triggered a greater demand for mobility solutions and smart interconnected devices, which provide visibility to assets, people and transactions, and the ability to turn intelligence into information that businesses can act upon for enhanced customer experience, better marketing strategies, or greater operational efficiency. 

"IoT is truly taking off and we anticipate further growth around IoT in the year ahead, as businesses across all sectors are looking to be more informed with enterprise mobility and invest further in IoT technologies," said Goh.

 

4G leads full digital transformation

Stephane Cudennec, customer business executive, Amdocs, APAC, said that digital transformation and mobile money will be the biggest influencers in 2016. With the arrival of 4G, everything will become digital. Digital transformation that supports the growing digital lifestyle will impact consumers across all industries, from banking to telecom to healthcare to services to shopping. Social networks, social media, mobile apps, online commerce, and mobile financial services will be the key enablers. 

Sooner or later, all business will have to adopt digital channels for marketing, selling, and servicing their clients, and customer experience driven by digital lifestyle will be the biggest differentiator. Consumers are increasingly looking for personalised and contextualised experiences, which will see more adoption of big data analytics across the business landscape. 

"Similarly, we see a growing trend of tight integration of online commerce and payments, which will drive adoption of mobile money and digital wallets," said Cudennec. 

The growing adoption of a digital lifestyle, faster Internet speed, and adoption of digital money will disrupt the paradigm of customer experience. Consumer expectations would change dramatically, impacting business models across industries. People will look for a consistent experience across all online and offline channels, regardless of their location, devices, or physical outlets. 

New customer experiences will be driven by the increasing uptake of social media, mobile, online commerce and mobile financial services. There will be a continued buildout of digital channels and ecosystems. Operational and network efficiency is vital to compete with a shift to faster data networks (4G and to fibre) to enable higher bandwidth and streaming services.

Cisco Systems' Vatsun also agrees that 4G will be pervasive in Thailand this year and mobility is still prevalent in the workplace in 2016. 

According to International Data Corporation, in 2016, smartphone growth will be at 29 per cent while 40 million Thais will have their own smartphones by end of this year. This will be a key driver to increase productivity of the nation of every sector. It will allow more innovation in terms of citizen services, employee productivity, business creativity, as well as enable digital disruption through the mobile broadband.

 

Cloud and big data continue growing

Thanachart Numnonda , president of the Association of Thai ICT Industry (ATCI), said that cloud and big data will lead enterprises to go on cloud, and probably more than 55 per cent of them will use cloud solutions, and in particular software as a service (SaaS) will become common. 

Large enterprises will seriously invest on private cloud, while small and medium enterprises may go for public cloud.

"Big data will go mainstream in 2016, especially in telecom, financial-security-insurance [FSI] and retails industries. They need to compete using big data to analyse customers, find new potential customers, and product offerings so that they can be competitive. Now many banks and telecoms are starting to invest on this," said Thanachart. 

Manoo Ordeedolchest, a member of the government's Digital Economy Committee, said the foundation technology is networks. He said it is in the middle of connecting worlds, from human interaction, machine-to-machine (M2M), and man-to-machine interaction and collaboration, to create common value. These technologies will help disruptive business models and designs.

Vatsun said that this year, it will see more cloud-service providers entering this business seriously in Thailand. This will ensure organisations and companies in Thailand start piloting some of the applications on cloud service. It will ignite some organisations and businesses to start deploying private cloud, followed by hybrid cloud and cloud orchestration finally. 

Moreover, cloud and appliances will drive the next wave of big data, according to Ovum's latest report. We expect to see skyrocketing growth of cloud and big-data adoption in Thailand in coming years. 

Meanwhile, Lenovo Thailand's general manager, Jeerawut Wongpimonporn, believes the key features of this year will include growth of the mobile-first mindset as more people migrate to smartphones; and cloud technology and big data will be better understood and increasingly adopted as essential business tools. 

He said this should have some impact on IT spending, as businesses upgrade to ensure they have secure systems as well as up-to-date hardware. Large corporates will try to prolong their change until they can see a clearer impact from the new business models, although some have started to run these in parallel with their current way of doing business. New start-ups will occur rapidly across industry, while consumers will be able to find a shorter route to suppliers which will bring down costs and most likely facilitate quicker delivery. 

Overall, the digital economy will drive the entire supply chain and market significantly. The government's digital economy will lead the impact on business practices across all industries in 2016. For example, the digital economy's impact on the supply-chain system include that at the back end raw material suppliers will be able to reach more customers at lower cost and shorter lead times; at the middle, there will be more and more middle men involved in online businesses, as it will become easier and faster to grow with minimal investment; and at the front end, it will allow consumers to reach the original suppliers, leading to lower prices and faster delivery. 

 

Ubiquitous connectivity

Ubiquitous connectivity will push its way to the forefront of people's lives in 2016. The personalisation of the computing experience through sight, sound, and touch is another key trend that is set to crystallise. 

Sontiya Nujeenseng, country manager for Intel Microelectronics (Thailand), said that Intel will witness the push towards smaller form factors that blend connectivity and portability with massively improved performance such as Intel's Next Unit of Computing and Compute Stick. Moreover, Intel RealSense cameras embedded in devices that respond to human gesture control, virtual reality headsets with Intel's latest Core processors, or voice-activated smart watches and smartphones, natural interfaces are inevitable consequences of ubiquitous connectivity. Additional applications will emerge as the technology percolates among developers. 

"In Thailand, Intel has been involved in embedded technology for a period of time. This year, we will deepen our partnership with government agencies, private enterprises, telecom providers, and system integrators to scale out of the blueprint and pilot phase towards live deployments such as the smart-fleet management of the "All Thai Taxi". This year we will scale out to other industries. We will put continuous efforts so that Thailand is well-positioned to consolidate smart devices through Internet of Things (IoT) technologies," said Sontiya.

Similarly Microsoft Thailand general manager Orapong Thien-Ngern believes that the convergence of connectivity, cloud and mobility technologies will drive the Internet of Things (IoT) to grow rapidly. 

He said that the connected technologies undeniably offer exciting new ways to live and work; they simultaneously also raise the risk of exposure to security and privacy threats. Thai enterprises will place even greater emphasis on cloud security and take critical steps to safeguard their customers' personal data and sensitive data crucial to their businesses. 

Thai enterprises will increasingly leverage data as a new form of currency to innovate, harness and analyse the data from today's connected devices, and make these insights mission-critical to their businesses. 

Small and medium businesses in Thailand will lead the rapid adoption of cloud technologies, as they seek out innovations that will reduce cost, differentiate their competitive advantage in the new AEC region, and improve customer service delivery. 

Consumers and individuals will connect even more devices and demand for seamless transitions of their work and personal data between devices of different screen sizes and platforms.