As Cloudify.Asia starts its journey to reach out to regional partners, we are awed in our trip to Singapore. Changi airport has recently just unveiled its brand-new Terminal 4. The terminal allows its passengers to go through the entire process without any human interaction. It is fully automated, secured, simple and friendly. Singapore has now become the first country in the world to do so and continue to embrace digital transformation quickly in policies and processes that they do. Thus, it is not shocking when they have to grab top position in Digital Competitiveness.
These are happening in SouthEast Asia and this is not something we can easily ignore. What does this mean to us, esp as IT infrastructure and software player? Firstly, we need to start to provide and not resell. Our customers, ranging from SMB to large enterprises are looking for finished complete business solutions, which they can easily evaluate and adopted in their transformation journey. As these (digital initiatives) are new to them, they have no idea on what is their actual requirement (which is needed for reselling process). Thus, they are exploring what is the latest and greatest to be adopted.
Start selling business outcomes and not mere solutions. At IT, we are often proud when we able to sell complex IT solutions instead of products but those days are vanishing slowly. For example, selling cloud infrastructure is not enough and should be complemented by platform, services and software. Just like Changi Terminal 4, face recognition can simply be matched prior onboarding with the database. Therefore, the database should able to support such outcome instead of forcing application to use a certain database.
Thirdly, go and experiment it yourself. What could be a better testimony that your own’s? Allow your own organization to adopt digital and try new things. Basic examples would be allowing car sharing services to be part of company’s process and change that old access card door system to wireless based. Then, how about adding ChatBot AI in your web portal for faster interaction with customers (instead of traditional email/forum). Cloud services even allow the ChatBot to be integrated with your backend to retrieve customers’ record for automated, personalized response.
A common area in Terminal 4 in what appears to be fixed wall’s decoration, they even able to transform the windows into a short clip video of traditional. This is a seamless integration between physical and digital interaction. No matter how much we transform, human still needs personal touch. Hybrid integration is a key for your differentiation compare with the rest. Thus, at Cloudify.Asia, we constantly asking the team to explore new digital possibilities for internal process and external productization.