By John Mark V. Tuazon
Computerworld Philippines
March 8, 2011

When disaster strikes and cause downtimes in businesses, SMBs are usually the ones hit the most, costing them an average of US$14,500 for every day of downtime, according to a recent study conducted by Applied Research and commissioned by IT security firm Symantec.

The survey, conducted in November 2010, talked with 1,840 respondents from 23 countries around the world—including the Philippines—to measure the impact of disasters to SMBs and gauge their stages of disaster recovery preparedness.

The survey accounted for SMBs as firms having five to 499 employees.

One of the key findings was that at least half of Filipino SMBs do not have disaster preparedness plans, while one third of those surveyed admitted they would lose precious company data when disaster strikes.

“Disasters can happen anytime, anywhere, and without warning,” emphasized Edwin Tiotuyco, manager for channels and territory sales, Symantec Philippines. “The impact [of disasters] to SMBs is critical—they lose money, customers, and even reputation.”

Despite these accepted realities, most SMBs tend to be reactive in approaching disasters. Half of the SMBs surveyed have put up a plan only after they experienced an outage; 38% have only put a plan together in the last six months; and only 39% have actually tested their plans.

It Can’t Happen To Me
Most of the reason why Philippine SMBs—much like the rest of the world—are laggards in disaster preparedness is their “it can’t happen to me mentality,” Tiotuyco said.

According to Symantec, a third of firms do not think computer systems are critical to their business; say disasters have never occurred to them; say disaster preparedness is not among their priorities; and that they lack skills or qualified personnel.

“The last thing SMBs should do is to try to figure out what to do [when they come face-to-face] with disaster,” noted Raymond Goh, systems engineering and customer advisory services for south region, Symantec.

According to Goh, not having a plan puts SMBs at great risks—especially that almost 70% of them conduct offices at areas susceptible to natural disasters.

In the last year alone, SMBs had to contend with a minimum of five outages, caused mainly by power outages, cyber attacks, upgrades, employee errors, on top of natural disasters, Goh said.

“Disaster preparedness is not just about preparing for the big ones; it’s also for those that can occur anytime,” he emphasized.

To get around the lack of manpower, Goh suggests SMBs should get all their employees involved in the process of drafting a disaster preparedness plan, so that everyone would know what to do when it strikes.

“It is also important to review your plan,” he added. “The IT landscape changes frequently. What’s not important last year may be very important to the business this year.”

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By John Mark V. Tuazon
Computerworld Philippines
April 4, 2011

If there is anything the recent financial crisis has brought to the industry, it’s that firms have come to a greater understanding of their risks, a study conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) finds.

The rapid globalization of industries and new forms of regulation are likewise putting risk management practices under more careful scrutiny, the study added.

The study, conducted between June and July 2010, interviewed eight C-level risk and compliance officers in seven industries from five continents around the world.

“The recent financial crisis has caused a shakeup in the way companies think about risk and compliance, not just in the financial services industry,” explained Sudhir Thomas Vadaketh, senior editor at EIU. “It has certainly influenced people’s understanding of risk.

Vadaketh said the development of a lot of new markets around the world and the recent power shift from Western to Eastern markets have likewise affected the risk appetites of businesses.

Enterprise-Wide RM
Given such new market conditions, Vadaketh said there is wisdom in deploying an enterprise-wide approach to risk management. “Individual or siloed approaches only have micro views of risk,” he assessed. “It makes sense to have somebody at the top having a bird’s eye view of the company’s state.”

The EIU senior editor added that an enterprise-wide risk management system eliminates duplication of systems and reduces efficiencies in determining risks.

“The bigger problem is that no one [today] is looking at the bigger picture [of risk],” he lamented.

Vadaketh suggested having a dedicated risk officer and a risk team under him to assess the company’s risk and compliance needs.

He also underscored the importance of having employees themselves break out of the silos. “Companies should encourage employees to get away from their spreadsheets, and help them develop a sense of how they fit into the big picture,” he suggested.

Patrick Wang, business development manager for governance risk, compliance, and identity management at German software firm SAP, meanwhile said having an automated and enterprise-wide risk management system can help companies in the new business environment.

“Non-automated systems are not scalable, and they can be deployed in certain units only,” he stressed. “Therefore, companies cannot gain visibility of all their risks.”

Wang also belabored the passive attitude of companies today, who only start doing risk management practices when they come face to face with mishaps.

“Businesses need to start risk management today, because the survival of companies depend on how [quickly] they can adapt to these [rapid] changes,” he added.

Wang touted SAP’s solutions for the risk management and compliance area, comprised of SAP BusinessObjects Risk Management 3.0 and SAP BusinessObjects Process Control 3.0.

“SAP’s solutions have a centralized risk catalog and a standardized template for companies to work with,” Wang explained, adding that the risk catalog can be categorized per industry.

He also added that the SAP solutions have connectors for the ERP systems for the application to monitor data coming in from that system.

“SAP’s risk management suite can also perform simulations based on incoming risk information, not just in the supply chain,” he expounded.

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By John Mark V. Tuazon
Computerworld Philippines
April 4, 2011

Dominant telecommunications player Smart Communications unveiled recently its newly revamped enterprise business, which consists of fortified machine-to-machine (M2M) offerings for local enterprises.

Among the solutions Smart is initially rolling out into the market include a smart metering offer, a toll way pass system, and other solutions for the merchandising and logistics industries.

The telco firm said it is taking cue from recent developments in the consumer market—such as the explosion of network bandwidth; multiplicity of platforms, content, applications, and services; introduction of game-changing devices the likes of smartphones and tablets; emergence of Internet-connected devices; and the entrance of the cloud—and bringing it into the enterprise sector.

“The very same factors are combining to make businesses a more fertile ground for next-generation enterprise services,” related Orlando Vea, chief wireless advisor at Smart.

Vea said these new systems have intelligence built into them, and when taken together, do not simply add up as a “convergence” of disparate systems. “The interplay can be described more as a fusion of systems, because it is explosive, and results in exponential impact on profitability,” he added.

The telco giant, in coordination with its parent company PLDT (Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co.), has affiliated with large utility firms likewise owned by the PLDT Group, such as Meralco, Maynilad Water, and the North Luzon Expressway, in developing their initial offerings to the market.

“This places us in a unique position to develop and deploy efficiency-boosting applications in these industries,” Vea claimed.

Smart’s offering for the merchandising and logistics are already available in the market, while the smart meters and the toll way pass systems are to be deployed in the coming months, Vea added.

The telco firm’s smart meter offering, in partnership with Meralco, will help transmit meter info through the wireless network, and remotely monitor and control the electricity usage of subscribers.

Eric Alberto, senior vice president for corporate business group, PLDT, said smart metering is beneficial for Meralco in terms of efficiency of operations. “We send out men to read meters, and it’s a very tedious back-end process,” he noted. “Hopefully, with smart metering, we can do that remotely.”

Alberto said they are also looking into possibilities of offering prepaid metering services.

“With this, we not only become a telco provider, but the overarching aspiration is that we become a trusted ICT partner of our customers,” Vea added.

Smart’s recent move is in response to growing demand for more customer- and solutions-centric enterprise business offerings, instead of its traditional product-centric offerings.

This means shying away from traditional vanilla voice-based services and moving into tailor-fit solutions that address each company’s specific needs, in response to parallel evolutions happening in the consumer and enterprise spaces.

Together, PLDT and Smart holds a commanding 65% of the enterprise market.

Vea said they are determined to push Smart Enterprise into the market, which will leverage heavily on the firm’s fixed and wireless networks, which already covers more than 70% of the Philippine population.

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By John Mark V. Tuazon
Computerworld Philippines
April 4, 2011

In an effort to curb cybercrime in the country, lawmakers from both the House of Representatives and the Senate are actively pushing for the passage of a much-awaited cybercrime law, which has been pending in Congress for several years now.

Speaking at the 2nd International Conference on Cybercrime, Senator Edgardo Angara, chairman of the Senate committee on Science and Technology, said one of the biggest concerns of legislation today is the absence of a well-defined and comprehensive framework for a law on cybercrime.

“Despite the e-Commerce Act’s passage, the Philippines currently does not have a successful framework for defining cybercrimes, and prescribing punishments for such crimes,” he lamented.

Angara said the e-Commerce Act, a law threshed out following the notorious spread of the ILOVEYOU virus in 2000, fails to punish all forms of cybercrime being practiced today, and does not fully address its scope and gravity.

A Symantec report recently stated that at least 87% of Filipinos have fallen prey to cybercriminals, but only a few of them report incidents to authorities due to perceived low conviction rate of cybercrime in the country.

“The economic cost of cybercrime is no petty issue. In the Philippines, the average loss for 28 days of undetected attacks is around P12,203,” he added.

Keeping Up To Speed
Sigfrido Tinga, chairperson of the House committee on Information and Communications Technology, meanwhile lamented the lackluster attempts of the legal infrastructure to keep up with the technical realities of today

“Laws must now respect new realities,” he said, referring to the way technology has changed landscapes in many industries, from music and content down to business dealings and the media.

“Laws today are fast becoming obsolete,” he added. “We have just enacted into law the Cable Signal Pilferage Law, when most cable operators are now operating on digital transmission.”

Tinga said lawmakers need a new perspective on the situation, and do a lot of reinventing in order to address rising concerns with technology.

In the same vein that it has made commerce easier, Tinga belabored the fact that it has also made commission of crimes practically within reach of anybody.

“Technology has made online ordering [of products] easier, but it has also made phishing (the deceiving manner of gathering personal information through fake Websites) so much easier,” he stressed.

Tinga pointed out that in this new environment, “laws and law enforcers should have enough skill sets and arsenals to handle cybercrime.”

Implementation
Angara echoed Tinga’s sentiments, saying “it is equally critical that we properly train our law enforcers in identifying and acquiring intangible evidence of its commission.”

Angara said the key ingredient in solving cybercrime cases is cooperation, specifically from the private sector. “Private input is essential to ensure that in the process of safeguarding freedoms, we do not end up curtailing them,” he expounded.

All things being equal, Angara said the impetus for enacting a cybercrime law goes beyond financial considerations. “It has become one of the trickiest challenges to our modern society,” he purported.

Tinga said, for one, that the passage of the bill can boost investments in the BPO industry, a booming sector that relies heavily on foreign investors.

“Recent waves of crime have also given urgency to the necessity of a cybercrime law,” he added. “With the ephemeral nature of electronic evidence, we must act now, because we have a lot of catching up to do.”

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By John Mark V. Tuazon
Computerworld Philippines
April 4, 2011

The former top executive at Yahoo! Philippines has recently called it quits to move to another Internet company, this time to erstwhile social networking site Multiply Philippines, itself in a process of transformation and evolution.

Jack Madrid, previously the general manager of Yahoo! Philippines, in a briefing with the IT press announced his eventual transfer to Multiply Philippines, which has recently established offices in the country.

Madrid, practically a veteran in the industry, has been well-known for helming famous companies such as Dell and MTV Networks, and bringing them to their respective primes.

As the new country general manager of Multiply Philippines, Madrid will be tasked to oversee the metamorphosis of the social networking site into an e-Commerce platform for Filipino businesses, following its acquisition by investment firm Naspers, who also bought out popular Filipino classifieds Website Sulit.com.ph.

“Right now, all transactions of sellers in the Philippines happen outside the Multiply network,” he shared. “We want to protect both the sellers and the buyers by giving them tools that can make every transaction simpler and safer.”

Multiply shot to fame in recent years for being the go-to site for small-time entrepreneurs who want to sell their products online.

Multiply’s user-friendly and business-oriented user interface earned it a spot on small businesses’ strategic plans. To date, there are at least 70,000 online stores in Multiply, mostly peddling women’s apparel, gadgets, and miscellaneous pre-loved items.

Madrid said they will implement buyer protection measures soon by way of awarding “verified seller” status to multiply business users who can submit documents regarding their enterprises.

By April 2011, he added, Multiply will integrate product listings, shopping carts, and payment gateways into the Multiply platform, to better serve both sellers and buyers.

Rapidly emerging discount sites may become partners of Multiply in its e-Commerce push, as it aims to compete with long-time auction site eBay in the e-Commerce field, Madrid shared.

“It was a hard decision to transfer from Yahoo! to Multiply,” Madrid disclosed. “I had barely 18 months with Yahoo, but we were able to make Yahoo! Philippines News what it is today. It was tough, but we more than doubled our revenue in that period.”

Madrid said that with Multiply, he grabbed the opportunity to create something with the Philippines as the forefront, so it was too good to miss. “I’m running out of years to try and turn something into a global phenomenon. The Philippines will never be a market for Yahoo! But Multiply [already] is, even without trying,” he pointed out.

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By John Mark V. Tuazon
Computerworld Philippines
April 4, 2011

Local telecommunications giant PLDT (Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co.) recently unveiled its revitalized offerings for SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises), in an effort to capture more of the captive market.

Two of the Negosyo Boost packages—Launch and Connect—are already existing PLDT SME Nation offerings, while two new additions—Branch Link and Internet Anywhere—form part of the new Negosyo Boost packages.

Negosyo Boost Launch offers a PLDT business landline, a PLDT myDSL biz broadband connection of up to 1Mbps, and XPad netbook, and a 3-in-1 printer targeted at small-time business startups such as bakeshops, salons, spas and other small offices.

Connect, meanwhile, offers a business landline and a 2Mbps broadband connection, suited for expanding offices, retail shops, auto shops and cafes.

The Negosyo Boost communications solutions are ideal for start-up and expanding SMEs as it provides businesses with a fast and reliable Internet connection and necessary business tools, the company said.

“The Negosyo Boost packages are designed to help SMEs in any level of growth,” Eric Alberto, senior vice president of PLDT, added.

Negosyo Boost Branch Link is ideal for businesses with multiple sites spread across geographies, as it offers a 1Mbps DSL connection bundled with one static IP address, ideal for access to IP cameras and POS machines.

Internet Anywhere, meanwhile, is targeted toward SMEs in the countryside and other far-flung areas, as it comes with a 3.6Mbps wireless Internet connection bundled with a wireless 3G router, so resorts, port areas and transport companies can enable their business with Internet connection.

To date, PLDT has around 60,000 SME customers under its wings, with another 5,000 to 7,000 to be added this year, executives said.

With the new Negosyo Boost packages, PLDT hopes to increase its footprint in the market dominated by more than 100,000 SMEs, believed to be the pillar and cornerstone of the Philippine economy.

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By John Mark V. Tuazon
Computerworld Philippines
March 8, 2011

SINGAPORE – Global IT giant IBM is pioneering a unique traceability system which hopes to keep counterfeit drugs—among other such goods prone to being faked—off the market, executives announced here recently.

According to Paul Chang, global business strategy lead for emerging technologies, IBM Software Group, having such a system will enable companies and regulators to “take two steps ahead of counterfeiters.”

“Counterfeit drugs, for example, are a growing global problem,” Chang said. “Conversely, food safety is a very big industry. At least 42% of consumers today buy different brands than years ago, mainly because of safety concerns. 47% of consumers are also more concerned of food safety than two years ago.”

The tracking system advocates the use of instrumentation—such as barcodes and RFID tags—in order to track products such as drugs from the time it was produced to the time it is brought to the market for mass consumption, or from “farm to folk,” as Chang put it.

Governments would be one of the main beneficiaries of such a traceability system, Chang said, “so that they can be sure that products from [a certain] region are of high quality.”

In addition to food safety, having a traceability system within a business can also become a competitive advantage, as in the case of Bin-On, a seafood producer in Vietnam. “They have information which can pinpoint from which shrimp farm the produce came from, which feeds they have been given, and the types of chemicals used to grow them,” Chang related.

By having such a system, consumers preferred Bin-On as a source of their seafood produce, since they are more informed about their origins, and are assured of their safety.

Businesses can also use the traceability system to ensure that perishable items are kept at a temperature that doesn’t compromise its freshness. “The system can [intelligently] measure, for example, the time a product is out of refrigeration. If, for example, the product stays out of the freezer for longer than it should, somebody will get an SMS alert reminder,” Chang shared.

With the system, Chang said there is now a higher level of transparency as to what manufacturers do with the products. “There is now accountability at every step of the [supply chain]. And visibility provides availability of products,” he added.

Instrumentation is one of the three major concepts with which IBM’s Smarter Planet initiative is anchored upon, aside from a more interconnected and intelligent world.

IBM, now a hundred-year-old IT organization, predicts the future built using smarter systems that take into account real-time processing of information in order to deliver results.

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By John Mark V. Tuazon
Computerworld Philippines
March 8, 2011

SINGAPORE – In the fiercely competitive local market, telecommunications firms do anything to stand out amongst the dense pack of consumers.

For some, this meant offering unique products that attract consumer pesos; others, meanwhile, heavily promote freebies to lure customers in.

For Globe Telecom, one of the three major telco players in the Philippines, getting to know their customers better was the key to unlocking new—and grossly uncharted—revenue streams in one of the most saturated mobile markets in the world.

“The first thing our current CEO said when he joined the company was that telcos are now a commodity,” related Cyril Lopez-Uriarte, head of capability build at Globe Telecom. “He said we had to compete against two other telcos vying for the same ARPU of the subscriber.”

To achieve this, Uriarte said the company either had to sell products really cheap, be fiercely innovative, or have a stellar customer experience.

To address this three-pronged goal, the company decided to venture on an architecture overhaul. “Two years ago, we embarked on an enterprise architectural vision,” Uriarte said, adding that the vision hinged on the common problem of lagging time-to-market delivery of their products.

This architectural overhaul involved deploying a Service Delivery Platform (SDP) from global IT solutions provider IBM, which addressed most of their time-to-market issues.

“Our biggest pain point is that it took us about 35 weeks to create a product or service,” Uriarte related. “By the time we are finished [creating the product], the landscape has changed, the market’s needs have changed, and we essentially created a product that the market doesn’t need anymore.”

If push comes to shove, Uriarte added, the competitor will have created a better product and deployed it to market at a much faster time.

Interfacing Systems
Uriarte said another compounding issue within the company is the high development cost for products. Throughout its decades of existence in the telco industry, the company has amassed new assets and systems that expanded the reach of the business.

The problem is that these systems do not interface with each other, Uriarte said. “To enable us to work together with these systems, we constantly had to request changes from the vendor. That was costly and time consuming,” she lamented.

With IBM’s SDP in place, which acts as a translator that interfaces between numerous systems with different communication languages, Globe was able to segment their customers based on usage behaviors, a surefire way of up-selling their products.

Since prepaid SIM cards do not require registration before being used in the Philippines, Globe had no way of crafting targeted marketing promotions for customers. “We were noticing that the shotgun approach wasn’t working; all subscribers are offered, it’s a one-size-fits-all approach,” Uriarte stressed.

Using the SDP, Globe was able to do micro-segmentation of their base subscribers, depending on their usage behaviors. A user, for example, who uses his phone to call another user for 10 minutes, can immediately be offered a “reward” of free five-minute calls.

This gives Globe an edge in a market plagued with bucket promotions and unlimited services, which tend to deplete revenues across the board.

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By John Mark V. Tuazon
Computerworld Philippines
February 4, 2011

IT solutions vendor Hewlett-Packard recently inked a deal with a long-time local 3Com partner to distribute its networking portfolio in the Philippine market, following its recent acquisition of the network solutions giant.

Micro-D International (MDi), a local systems integrator whose partnership with 3Com has spanned decades until its recent acquisition by HP, will now provide the local market with HP networking products and services.

Ryan Guadalquiver, managing director and general manager for enterprise business, HP Philippines, said MDi’s strong history of serving the government industry can be leveraged by HP to grow further into that industry. “[But] it’s not just with HP networking, we plan on going towards other products [in that segment] as well,” he emphasized.

With 3Com under HP’s networking portfolio, executives said the industry can expect HP to be at the forefront of open technologies, in contrast with the immediate competitor whose proprietary focus has been a solid mark over the years.

“The major effect on the competition has been very positive,” remarked Anthony Agustin, enterprise, server and storage manager, technology solutions group, HP Philippines. “Their prices have dropped, and a lot of customers are calling us about our new solutions.”

Agustin said the merger is a very big milestone in the company, as it married “two big powerhouses in IT.”

The HP networking business today integrates 3Com’s network switching, routing, and security solutions with its existing HP ProCurve solutions, creating a comprehensive portfolio for customers.

Combined with HP’s global reach, the expanded portfolio solidifies HP’s Converged Infrastructure strategy, which is built on the integration of servers, storage, networking, management, facilities, and services.

With this integration, customers are now able to simplify their networks, deploy an edge-to-core network fabric for the enterprise, and improve IT service delivery capabilities, the vendor added.

“The industry hasn’t seen a major alternative in the networking space,” Agustin claimed. “There are better alternatives now for customers. MDi will carry our full line of networking products.”

MDi’s value proposition is its people’s competence to integrate best-of-breed products, according to Mark Tioseco, president and CEO, MDi. “MDi would also like to co-invest in the country, and work on key areas of government such as power, health, and general delivery of public services.”

Aside from this, Tioseco said MDi is also very keen in supporting the enterprise sector, particularly in the manufacturing, media, and telecoms spaces.

The partnership with HP puts MDi in a more strategic market position in network and security, due to the more complete product portfolio, the company said.

As HP’s Gold Partner, MDi will be a key system integrator for its networking lineup, with HP storage and server solutions currently in the pipeline.

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By John Mark V. Tuazon
Computerworld Philippines
February 4, 2011

In the face of a growing mobile industry, a Japanese two-way radio manufacturer has recently announced its expansion in the Philippine market, hoping to tap into unchartered groundswell of use cases for their devices in the 21st century, executives said recently.

Two-way radios make sense in environments requiring a one-to-many communications device, making mobile phone tariffs a bit too costly and impractical, said Stephen Ritchie, director of distribution for Asia Pacific, Vertex Standard.

“In certain applications, such as in manufacturing and security, two-way radios are more practical, [because] they enable employees to talk to people simultaneously,” he pointed out.

Ritchie shared that since they have expanded their Manila office—and appointed a country channel manager in February 2010—they have had several clients already, ranging from security agencies to taxi companies.

“We [have] set up several repeater sites for one local taxi company, located somewhere very high to make signaling broader,” he related, adding that they also have customers in the hospitality and government industries.

Jasmine So, the 55-year-old company’s country channel manager, explained that two-way radios, aside from being a practical replacement for mobile phones, are cheaper and more cost-effective. “A radio unit can cost anywhere around P4,000 to P15,000,” she said. “Plus you only pay an annual license fee with the NTC (National Telecommunications Commission) to use the airwave.”

So wasn’t able to disclose the cost of the annual fee for airwave use, as it varies across different use cases.

In its local expansion, the company is bringing to the market its compact portable and mobile radio portfolios, including the VX-160, VX-231, VX-350, VX280, VX4100, and VX4200.

“The expansion of Vertex Standard in the region and into the Philippine market has always been in our business strategy, and it is especially timely as economies in the region are improving,” Ritchie said. “[We] aim to make a difference for our customers by providing well-designed and reliable two-way radios to deliver expanded features to provided businesses a greater return on their investments.

The units come with a die-cast chassis, making it solid and rugged for every day communication required by commercial and industrial users.

The radios’ channel capacity ranges from 16 channels to 501 channels, with a number of features including individual or group paging ability, with built-in DTMF ANI for selective paging requirements, supported by high-speed scanning capability.

The units are also equipped with what the vendor calls an Auto-Range Transpond System (ARTS), a smart feature to keep workers coordinated when they are out of communication range. Basically, it alerts the user if the radio is in or out of communication range by other units.

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By John Mark V. Tuazon
Computerworld Philippines
February 3, 2011

Despite globally declining demand for netbooks—and rumors that it will soon abandon its netbook business in favor of tablets—consumer PC vendor Acer released recently a slew of ultraportable notebooks featuring the latest AMD Fusion chips.

The new notebooks—Acer Aspire One 522 and eMachines eMD644—are capable of viewing high-definition (HD) content, thanks to a combination of chipset, processor and graphics card power from AMD.

The move to a visually high-powered processor in Acer’s new notebooks is part of the growing trend of HD video ubiquity, according to Sonny Sy, country sales manager, AMD Philippines.

“Today, 60% of videos uploaded on YouTube are high-definition, providing theater-like resolution as supported by YouTube. [HD] is in every pocket of everyone,” Sy shared.

Sy added that most of systems and software being developed today are geared towards visual computing. “Windows 7, for example, is optimized for high-resolution screens and HD gaming,” he stressed.

The AMD executive shared a recent study conducted by research firm IDC, which listed the most common tasks done by users with their computers: social networking sites, online videos, online games, video editing, photo editing, and locally installed games.

“This reinforces the fact that [most applications today] have something to do with visual content. We are now in the age of visual computing,” he claimed.

AMD’s APUs (Accelerated Processing Units) combing the powers of x86 processor cores with Radeon Graphics to achieve stunning visual displays even on the netbooks form factor. It utilizes an “out-of-order” architecture, which makes multi-tasking faster compared with “in-order” architectures.

Sy also pointed out that the APUs are capable of running DirectX 11, compared with Intel’s Atom plus Nvidia’s Ion, which can only run DirectX 9 or 10.

The AMD APUs are present in both of Acer’s new notebook lineups. The Aspire One 522 netbook is powered by AMD’s dual-core C50 processor. The eMachines eMD644 laptop, meanwhile is fitted with AMD’s E350 chip. Both APUs are assisted by the AMD A50M Fusion Controller Hub chipset.

With an AMD Radeon HD 6310 graphics card, the eMD644 supports a slew of graphics technologies such as Unified Video Decoder, OpenCL 1.1, OpenGL 3.1, Open EXR High Dynamic Range Technology, ShaderModel 5.0 and Microsoft DirectX 11, among others.

The Aspire One 522, meanwhile, is powered by an AMD Radeon HD 6250 graphics card, which complements the 10.1-inch 1280 x 720 (WXGA) high-resolution, high-brightness, LED-backlit TFT LCD screen display, making it perfect for movie viewing and gaming.

The Acer Aspire One 522 retails for about P18,000, while the eMachines eMD644 can be had at around P20,000 locally.

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By John Mark V. Tuazon
Computerworld Philippines
January 28, 2011

International consulting and outsourcing firm Accenture is poised to become the world’s first “4th-generation BPO,” a new step in the BPO evolutionary process which focuses on analyzing trends in outsourced transactions, a visiting executive remarked recently.

Being a 4th-generation BPO entails a combination of applying technology to analyze the transactions BPOs are processing, and coaching their people to analyze trends within these transactions, explained, Michael Salvino, group chief executive – business process outsourcing, Accenture, during his recent visit to the newly opened Accenture site in Eastwood City, Libis.

“[This new trend] requires industry knowledge to be able to coach clients with the trends from their transactions, so they would know what these trends mean and for them to be able to do more of what they’re [currently] doing,” Salvino said.

The Accenture executive shared that first-generation BPOs typically go to clients, handle some of their tasks so they can generate savings; second-generation BPOs, on the other hand, take tasks from companies and offshore it to less expensive destinations around the world; and third-generation BPOs are those who not only help clients save money, but process their transactions as well.

“While many BPO firms in the Philippines are moving away from just taking calls and into this fourth-generation BPO, we are already there,” Salvino claimed.

The 4th-generation BPO trend is just one of the industry highlights Salvino shared with the local press that will eventually see increased occurrences in 2011.

Among these trends include the move from processing typical non-core back-office transactions and into more core functions being outsourced. “Now, we’re doing a lot of core [activities], too,” Salvino reiterated.

Manish Sharma, lead, service delivery operations for APAC, BPO growth platform, Accenture, said this shift is due to their clean track record, and the fact that clients are seeing how effectively it works.

One such example of a core function outsourced to Accenture, Sharma related, is the case of a pharmaceutical firm who was able to bring a certain drug to market faster, and save about 70,000 lives in the process.

The process involved shortening the time of packaging reports, inquisitions, and other materials for submission to the Food and Drug Administration for evaluation from the normal two-year period to just 18 months.

“Crossing from non-core to core transactions is the mark of a mature outsourcing provider,” Sharma added.

Technology, on the other hand, has played a key role in enabling BPO firms around the world to be flexible with their offerings, also part of the recent tends Salvino has shared with the media.

“Because of technology, we now have the ability to be a lot more flexible, like offering services for months or weeks instead of the normal five-year deals,” he pointed out.

Technology has also enabled them to offer a more varied kind of service, such as in the case of KPOs and managed services.

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By John Mark V. Tuazon
Computerworld Philippines
January 21, 2010

It may not solve all the problems hounding the Philippine education today, but the use of ICT in reinforcing education in the country’s public school system may very well be the key to finding solutions to problems, the secretary of the education department remarked recently.

Speaking at the launch of the Global Filipino Schools (GFS) program, an ICT integration for education program by Globe Telecom in partnership with Microsoft, Armin Luistro, secretary, Departmend of Education (DepEd), said IT can fill up the shortages brought about by neglect of the education sector over the years.

“DepEd dreams to fill up our basic shortages within a two-year period, that is the marching order from the President,” Luistro shared. “But we can’t just keep doing the same; unless we do something radically different, we will not be able to reach that dream.”

Luistro is talking about the patent lack of chairs, textbooks, teachers, and toilets in most public schools nationwide, a problem that has hounded several governments over the past decades.

“If we want to address these real needs, we can’t just be playing catch-up with decades of neglect,” Luistro stressed, adding that these needs can be addressed if we looked at IT as a part of the solution.

IT-Education Tie-Ups
Luistro highlighted several public-private sector partnerships that have involved the use of ICT in education over the past years, including RotaReader, the Intel Classmate PC, and the recent deployment of XO laptops in Lubang, Occidental Mindoro, as part of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project.

“At least 100 XO laptops via the OLPC project are now in use in a high school in Lubang, all through the leadership of their Mayor—NCC (National Computer Center) founding chairman Juan Sanchez—who felt this was the way to go,” Lusitro shared.

Despite these landmarks in IT-Education integration, Luistro cautioned against short-term stop-gap measures and initiatives that do not progress beyond the pilot testing phases. “While pilot tests are good … they are not good enough. If we cannot scale this up, I tell our partners, we [would] have to fold up,” he stressed.

Part of DepEd’s dreams, he added, is to have every public high school in the country to be IT-ready by June 2011, a feat which has already been achieved halfway through the efforts of programs such as Ayala Foundation’s GILAS (Gearing up Internet Literacy and Access for Students), and Globe’s GFS program.

GFS, according to the telco player, is a competency-building initiative that utilizes ICT to help students, teachers, and school heads in select public high schools nationwide, using a multi-faceted approach that allows them to realize the full potential of ICT in education through skills improvement, mentoring, and community building.

The program has three phases, consisting of: equipping schools with relevant ICT infrastructure; training of teachers and school heads on online collaboration, authentic assessment, and project-based learning; and the creation of sustainable ICT-based projects, which aims to become a wellspring of information technology for the enabled province.

The project has chosen Palo National High School in Eastern Visayas and Bilar National High School in Central Visayas as its pilot schools.

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By John Mark V. Tuazon
Computerworld Philippines
January 21, 2011

As a nod to the impending shift towards cloud computing, Russian-based IT security firm Kaspersky Lab released recently a hosted service that will take mail and content security to the cloud, in an effort to better protect firms from harm-inflicting malware, executives announced recently.

Part of the Kaspersky Hosted Security Service (KHSS) offering, the “security in the cloud” service essentially protects enterprises from two most common points of attack: e-mail and the Web.

Kaspersky’s hosted e-mail security service filters all the incoming messages outside the network, basically putting up an outside perimeter security fence that shields the corporate network from external attacks.

The hosted Web security service functions the same way, but filters Web content depending on the policies set in place by administrators. It comes with a similar pre-scanning functionality outside of the network perimeter so malware couldn’t even reach the company’s premises.

Bernie Bengler, director for cloud services and SAAS, Kaspersky Lab Asia Pacific, said hosted security services can help address issues of availability, latency, costs, resources, and complexity, which often derail business operations today.

“Now, IT security professionals from the enterprise sector can add another layer of security to their arsenal by filtering out threats and unwanted content in the cloud, away from the corporate network,” Bengler pointed out.

The hosted model that Kaspersky Lab pushes can dramatically lower TCO and reduce the burden of having to maintain security systems on their own, Bengler said. “The subscription model makes costs predictable, eradicating hidden maintenance charges and unexpected upgrade costs,” the company added.

As with any other cloud service, KHSS adopts a subscription model, which enforces a per-user charging method. “Each person using the service is charged [annually], but there is no limit as to how many e-mail addresses [he chooses to use with the service],” added Bryan Sat, business development manager, Southeast Asia region, Kaspersky Lab.

Sat explained that by filtering unwanted mail and prohibited content even before it reaches the company’s network, security is not only controlled, but the burden on network bandwidth is reduced as well.

He emphasized, however, that the security company doesn’t store anything in its two Southeast Asian data centers used for the service—one in Hong Kong and one in Singapore. “There are only two things that we store: mails marked for quarantine, and undelivered mail messages that are accumulated when the company’s mail server is down,” he related.

Kaspersky has launched KHSS as an answer to the growing clamor for more cloud services in the region, which the company expects to be a popular vehicle for Web and e-mail security solutions.

The executives, in fact, stated that the messaging security market is forecasted to grow from US$555 million in 2009 to $1.8 billion in 2013; the Web content filtering market, on the other hand, will boom from being a $76 million market in 2009 to $513 million by 2013.

Kaspersky earlier re-launched a whole suite of security products for the corporate market in 2011, under which KHSS is a particular offering.

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By John Mark V. Tuazon
Computerworld Philippines
January 20, 2011

An Indian-based software development firm has partnered with a local start-up to bring an open-source business intelligence alternative to Philippine businesses, executives from both companies announced recently.

Gray Matter, a software solution developer and provider, has chosen Orange & Bronze, a 100% Filipino software development company, to introduce the Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition solution to the local market.

Pentaho’s open source BI alternative boasts of a solid community-backed package which has seen strong implementations around the world, giving firms an option to dramatically lower their total cost of ownership of BI platforms, the executives said.

“Pentaho is a commercial open source BI software which has a community and enterprise edition,” explained Lokesh Narishma, director, Gray Matter. “It only requires a small subscription fee for support to the implementation, comprising only 17% of what huge BI vendors would usually charge.”

The BI software, a java-based, hardware-agnostic platform which is supported on a lot of operating systems, is likewise capable of connecting to applications running on different platforms through adapters, and can integrate with different backend systems, Narishma said.

The main differentiator of the BI offering, according to Narishma, is its community version. “The community edition [lets users] try out features by themselves while getting very good support and SLAs, almost close to the commercial version, through the community,” he related.

The whole BI suite offering is completely built from the ground up, and doesn’t come with a per-user license. “That it is open source means the entire source code is available for more additional functionalities,” Narishma added.

Narishma invites would-be users of the suite to try the community version first, in order to get a feel of the system. “Try it out,” he chides, “but once you want to go into production, a lot of best practices needs to be done.”

Calen Legaspi, CEO of Orange & Bronze, said they will provide marketing and sales initiatives to spread the word about Pentaho in the country. “We’ll also provide on-site support for users, as well as e-mail and phone support,” he added.

Legaspi emphasized that the need to partner up with a local firm is inherent with BI implementations, since “BI is not just buying a product—it involves designing the data warehouse, implementing the project, producing reports, and integrating peripheral systems.”

These are capabilities which Orange & Bronze are capable of providing, Narishma said, adding that “the common thread with open source [development] of Orange & Bronze drove the mutual agreement [between the two companies].”

A proponent of open source technologies, Orange & Bronze enjoys the reputation of being the top Filipino development team in enterprise Java development projects, a pioneer in the country in the use of the Spring and Hibernate frameworks and Groovy language for the Java platform.

Orange & Bronze started out as a two-man consulting firm five and a half-years ago, and now employs more than 90 people, most of which are software developers.

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