IBM backs 'Creative Thailand' initiative | Bangkok Post: tech

BUSINESS ANALYTICS AND OPTIMISATION

Big Blue is looking to bring technology to support the "Creative Thailand" initiative while leveraging its expertise in business analytics and optimisation to help organisations to become more intelligent enterprises.

FROM LEFT TO RIGHT Apichart Asavatevavith, Country Manager, Managed Business Process Services, Thanwa Laohasiriwong, Country General Manager and Meredith Angwin, Country Manager, Global Business Services, at the business direction 2010 conference.

This year, IBM will seek the possibility and discuss with government agencies to support the "Creative Thailand" campaign which leverages intellectual property in developing the economy by combining culture, knowledge base and creativity, according to Thanwa Laohasiriwong, Country General Manager of IBM Thailand.

The company has expertise and technology solutions that can boost tourism and the culture industry, such as digital documentation of the National Archives of Egypt (NAE), which has created one of the largest digital archives in the world, with over 25 million records.

The project has also created a website, which is equipped with a powerful search engine, designed to be an educational resource for historians and researchers around the world.

In China, IBM collaborated with Beijing's Palace Museum to build the Virtual Forbidden City. Anyone with access to the Internet can visit the Palace Museum, allowing visitors to experience China's heritage and cultural treasures.

Moreover, IBM will continue to focus on its service business, which currently contributes over 50 percent of the company's revenue.

Although its hardware business is still growing, contributing around 20 percent of overall revenue, it is experiencing challenges in price pressure while service businesses, especially high valued-added services, will enable IBM to establish an advantage.

The company has a software and global skill share resource team to offer a new variety of services such as Business Analytics and Optimization (BAO) and Managed Business Process Services (MBPS) to make smarter business decisions by improving and accelerating their business decision-making process.

"In today's environment, data doubles every 11 hours while executives spend 14-15 hours to reply to email and 9.6 hours to analyse data. This shows that information is overwhelming businesses and that does not include social networking data," Thawa noted.

Meredith Angwin, Country Manager, Global Business Services at IBM, added that BAO is beyond business intelligence that focusses on reports, combining advanced analytic capability tools and software to minimise the data gap that helps to predict and push business forward.

BAO will address critical client needs through in key areas such as advanced customer insight that brings intelligent profitable growth, analytic data optimisation to help cost take-out and efficiency, risk and fraud analysis enabling proactive risk management.

The shift towards optimisation creates an opportunity to become a more intelligent enterprises. For example, telecom and finance businesses can focus more on their customer insights to find the right and high value customers.

Apichart Asavatevavith, IBM Thailand's Country Manager, Managed Business Process Services, said in today's business even in backend support systems such as procurement and finance, if a business can find the room to improve, it will help to save costs and increase efficiency including create differentiating from competitors.