Building bridges across technologies to foster innovation

According to a McKinsey and Company report, the economic value of open data, which is access to public data for analysing trends and patterns or solving complex problems, is estimated at US$3 trillion (Bt98 trillion) to $5 trillion annually. 

This means developers can leverage these sets of publicly available data to create better quality, more affordable products and services that empower citizens. The potential is limitless – from discovering a medical cure to improving transportation and building smart cities.

Openness is fundamental for a thriving IT ecosystem. And with openness comes innovation. As Thailand moves towards the Digital Economy, innovation is key to elevating home-grown technology and talent to the global stage. 

With the right tools and resources as well as business opportunities, developers and technology start-ups will be enabled to drive innovation, collaborate across technologies and flourish under the Digital Economy. 

For example, in partnership with the Microsoft Innovation Centre, aspiring developers can undergo training to better their skillsets at the NSTDA Academy, gain access to computing resources through Microsoft Azure for Research at the National Electronics and Computer Technology Centre and explore opportunities through the prototype for entrepreneurship with Software Park.

As a company, Microsoft has been open in the way we work with and collaborate with our industry peers and partners, and in how we listen to our customers and approach the cloud.

We contribute to and partner with open source communities and promote interoperability so it becomes easier and more cost-effective to develop and manage mixed IT environments. 

In the cloud, Microsoft supports the key standards that provide the building blocks for open, interoperable cloud services, and we support a developer’s choice of a programming language. 

We support data portability and believe that customers own and control their data, no matter where the data reside. 

Microsoft is the first major cloud provider to be independently verified as having adopted ISO/IEC 27018, the world’s first international cloud privacy standard. 

From our firm stand on transparency to the upholding of privacy principles and policies, we take a holistic approach to integrating privacy and security in our technology and platforms to create a trustworthy computing ecosystem.

With Microsoft Azure, we have delivered an open, broad and flexible cloud. And with more than 20 per cent of Azure virtual machines running on Linux, developers can start with skills they already possess and software they are already familiar with. 

In Thailand, Ask-DOM, a promising local technology start up behind DOM – a social media analytics application – is a perfect example of how open source collaboration has driven innovation. 

Formed by four university students, Ask-DOM emerged victorious in the Innovation Competition at Imagine Cup Thailand 2014. Their winning DOM application was developed using open source software on Microsoft Azure. 

Now the aspiring entrepreneurs are supported through the Microsoft BizSpark programme as they work towards commercialising their application. 

All the above said, as openness makes data portable and technology interoperable across platforms, privacy and security on the cloud become increasingly crucial among developers, enterprises and individuals – and especially so as Thailand gears towards the Digital Economy. 

Embracing openness needs to go hand in hand with the firm commitment to privacy and security. 

 

Haresh Khoobchandani is managing director of Microsoft (Thailand).