The appetite for innovation in Singapore is high, but balancing cost and business value will be key.
Following almost 3 years of enabling remote working, securing business operations and enhancing productivity levels, forward-thinking Singaporean CIOs are stepping up to spearhead transformation agendas.
The State of the CIO 2023 survey supports this with 90% of global CIOs saying that their role is becoming more digital, and innovation focused.
Yet such ambitions come with a caveat as CIOs build a foundation for innovation in Singapore amid an environment of legacy systems, outdated mindsets, talent shortages and rising threat levels.
“Enterprises are having to manage innovation through the acceleration of digital transformation efforts, moving to the cloud faster, and empowering employees to use more digital tools, but also to defend the business by optimizing cost, modernizing infrastructure and operating in a zero-trust environment.” said Paul Simos, VMware Vice President and General Manager, Southeast Asia and Korea, “and Cloud is key to this.”
Innovating in a Multi-Cloud Environment
Recent research by VMware expects that 81% of companies to be using 2 or more public clouds by 2024 with the advantages being increased resiliency and agility to managing data sovereignty. But also, the opportunity to take advantage of each cloud provider’s specific capabilities and services.
“A multi cloud environment enables many benefits. From our discussions with customers, we see that those who embrace multi-cloud see a 42% faster time to release applications, 41% fewer hours spent on infrastructure and a 35% improvement in business productivity.” said Simos.
Balancing the Spend
The shift to digital also sped up decision making across enterprises with decisions being made in days instead of months. This has led to a “taking stock” activity, where past purchases are being examined to ensure value is being derived.
Looking forward, amidst levels of current operating environment uncertainty, there is a mixed approach to new technology investment with technology budgets are also growing with the State of the CIO survey (APAC) 2023 seeing that 58% of APAC CIOs expect their budgets to increase in 2023, with another 32% saying that it will remain the same as the previous year.
“Its optimizing the spend on technology, so that you get the biggest impact” said Simos. emphasizing “when it comes to your cloud providers, look at each cloud, and the services they provide, and link that to the business impact.” and continues “Its about optimizing cost to give the highest business impact”.
Innovation and Modernization: What is the Appetite?
New digital revenue models are also on the rise, with more organizations “white labelling” their platforms and licensing their usage to other companies. This has also allowed Singapore companies to expand to other geographies.
“A good example of this is Informatics Academy, whom we [VMWare] have worked with to modernize their IT infrastructure to better connect, secure, and coordinate operations across its global campuses in Singapore and the UK.” said Simos.
Generative AI is the innovative technology that is exciting to many organizations, with many proof of concept projects already started, exploring its use. However, concerns remain with its use, especially around security and ethics. But the potential power of the tool is one that has most organizations excited.
