By the Computerworld Philippines Staff
January 1, 2008

This year, Computerworld Philippines, became ambitious and decided that its annual CIO Roundtables—which have been put together and moderated by the editorial staff for 14 years—be a monthly gathering. Thus, in January this year, the editorial staff held its first monthly roundtable and since then has hosted 10 lively and engaging luncheon meetings for a total of 43 IT executives who agreed to meet with the editorial staff and discuss IT issues for two hours.

In this issue, we have summarized all the roundtable discussions held this year. Each of the roundtable covered a certain topic, and they are: strategic IT investments; continuous availability; open source in the enterprise; IT in SMEs; state of Philippine IT education; Internet security; IT in government; IT recruitment; measuring the value of IT; and maintaining the privacy of customer data.

A summarized compilation of all roundtable discussions follow.

Strategic IT Investments

At Computerworld’s first roundtable for the year, four CIOs shared their strategic IT investment plans for 2007.

Participants were Byron Guazon, IT director of Don Bosco Technical College; Roger Stone, deputy chairman of Intellectual Property Ventures Group; Erick Suliguin, director for global network services at Convergys; and Elena Van Tooren, information systems and technology director at AC Nielsen Philippines.

To support the business strategies for the year, the companies said they’ll be enhancing their IT security systems this year from threats such as denial-of-service attacks, breaches, and malicious software (malware). Other investment plans divulged by the IT executives during the first roundtable include: IT centralization and consolidation; increasing bandwidth; disaster recovery; thin-clients; dual-core machines; and mobility.

IPVG’s Stone said that this year, the company would be establishing two new businesses. “We’ve got to build up both the hard and soft infrastructure to support these new businesses which are our local businesses; they all stay into the framework of either e-commerce or businesses that use IP, both intellectual property and Internet Protocol.”

Stone divulged that they will be expanding their high-speed pipes into Hong Kong, so by the end of next year, they’ll have roughly two gigabits of bandwidth. “We’re setting up a technical disaster recovery site in the Philippines which we will be offering to the banking community in particular,” said Stone.

Stone further divulged that they are looking at the potential of establishing a second data center outside of the Philippines. “If we do that, it opens up some possibilities for our client base in terms of serious abilities to make redundant networks. Because if you put it up in a third place, one in Manila and one in Hong Kong, it wouldn’t take rocket science to find out where our next site would be, you can establish a ring network for clients.” He said that that they will have a slightly lower investment in 2007 compared with 2006. “2006 was massive. I think we invested well over $2.5 million in 2006.”

For his part, Guazon said that 2007 will be an expensive school year for Don Bosco. He said the investment will be two-fold: one, for the new centralized IT organization and another for (Don Bosco) Mandaluyong.

“An investment area for us is reliability and security. We deploy a lot of applications and these are prone to risks because users are from different age brackets—from prep to college students, faculty, parents, and even priests,” said Guazon. “There are two things we need to secure, our financial data and the grades; the rest we can afford not to enforce so much security.”

In terms of reliability, because an increasing number of users access the Don Bosco system, uptime is important. “Three years ago, when you unplug something nobody would even notice—that used to happen before in our data center when someone’s chair trips on a wire. Now, unplug one wire and in 10 to 15 seconds you get a call that the system is down.”

Don Bosco is also consolidating its servers in Mandaluyong. The school has about 3,500 students and their personal data reside in those servers. “We are not yet looking at blade servers but later on we may have to look closely. We have 22 servers right now,” said Guazon. “In terms of mobility, we have Wi-Fi access in our campuses but we need to add more routers because more and more students are bringing laptops.

At Convergys, Suliguin said they’re looking at thin-client (computers) rather than the regular setup because of certain advantages. “Security is one, second is power consumption. The lesser power you use, the lesser number of servers you use, the lesser the floor space it occupies in your data center.”

In terms of Windows Vista, Suliguin said Convergys will not be an early adopter. “Unless our engineering [team] says Vista will be our standard operating system, we will not be adopting it ahead of the rest of the global Convergys system.”

In terms of hardware, Convergys planned to look at dual-core and multi-core systems complimented with hyperthreading, again, because of lower power consumption.

On the networking side, Convergys has one of the biggest IP traffic. “Our calls from the US are all routed here via VoIP. All our PBX systems and dialers are in the US. Agent traffic is being backhauled to the US, that’s why our international links are very, very critical. The vision for that is centralized.”

At AC Nielsen Philippines, real-time access to data is important. That’s why this year the company continued to provide laptops to all employees that need to be mobile.

“A lot of the employees also have offline data in their notebooks because it is a lot of data, but it’s necessary that they can connect online,” said Van Tooren.

Continuous Availability

The continuous availability of IT systems is increasingly becoming important in most local companies today, especially when disasters—such as an earthquake—could potentially cost them millions of pesos in lost revenues.

At Computerworld Philippines’ second CIO Roundtable for the year, four CIOs discussed the importance of the IT disaster recovery component in their respective companies’ business continuity planning. The IT experts talked about their disaster recovery strategies and shared their opinions on the key challenges local companies face in enforcing appropriate disaster recovery plans. They also recounted how they dealt with the Internet outage caused by the earthquake in Taiwan early this year.

Participants at the roundtable were Noel Adalia Dimasacat, IT director for production support services at the PeopleSupport Center in Manila; Abrigo M. Merin, chief information officer of the information technology division at Bayan Telecommunications Inc.; Jason Jan Ngo, management information systems manager of Philippine Seven Corp.; and Huntley See Uy, senior vice president for information technology at Chinatrust (Phils.) Commercial Bank Corp.

“In terms of infrastructure, we built our infrastructure where it’s redundant. In our case, we have one in Cebu, we have one in Diliman, and one in Roosevelt, all of those are part of the triangle setup that we have put in place to make sure our infrastructure is redundant,” said Merin. “If something goes down, we can always switch to another facility—similar to the call centers where they have many facilities across the country where they can shift whatever resources are needed for that kind of eventuality.”

Merin said that since he joined the company, they’ve been aggressively consolidating BayanTel’s entire infrastructure. “It’s simpler. In the past, we talked about hundreds of servers. Today, in our case, I just need two big servers for a Unix environment, for my Intel environment, and for my System i5 environment.” He said that even Bayantel’s storage system is redundant. “Managing the infrastructure is very easy when you have that kind of a very simple, very responsive type of infrastructure.”

At Philippine Seven Corp., they’ve been moving away from tape drives for backup and moving to hard disk-based storage. In terms of speed, reliability and cost, the company has found hard disks cheaper and easier to handle than tape drives. “The more difficult aspects of disaster recovery are the documentation and the discipline of doing what was planned. It is one thing to have a disaster recovery manual and another to actually follow it,” said Ngo.

Meanwhile, PeopleSupport puts more emphasis on projects relating to putting up more redundant lines and is exploring other technologies aside from those ground-laid cables. “We’re also looking into other forms of technologies that could help us, say for example, satellite communications,” said Dimasacat.

At Chinatrust, the disaster recovery site is in one of the bank’s branches. “It’s costly to maintain your own disaster recovery site because you have to invest on the infrastructure which houses your disaster recovery equipment—UPS, air conditioner, the data center,” said Uy. That was something Uy inherited when he joined the bank. This year, his initiative is to move the disaster recovery site to a service provider.

For Uy, disaster recovery is highly recommendatory. “I leave the decision to the business. I will introduce a technology, for example I will tell them that right now EMC has a mirroring technology, but if you want to mirror, you need a big pipe, so how much will this cost us? So I’ll give them the cost of the gigabit leased line, cost of the hardware rental, and then they decide. That’s how we work in Chinatrust, in actually all aspects of our IT investments.” Uy lets the business make the decision on how much they want to spend. But the technology and what to use is his decision.

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• Philippine BPO industry hails Senate’s passage of cybercrime bill
• The Pros and Cons of ERP Systems

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