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Success is more than selling great products or services. According to IBM, achievements in the tech world are a result of being a true partner to enterprises.
In the past year, the company positioned itself as an innovation partner and a technology partner for Hong Kong and will continue to do so. "What we have been doing is provide high-value, end-to-end, and integrated solutions to help enterprise clients innovate and grow their business," said Dominic Tong, general manager, IBM China/Hong Kong.
Tong explained that Big Blue's unique position in the Hong Kong market is a result of its strong business insight and consulting capabilities, leading-edge technology services and solutions, and 50 years of deep client relationships.
Workshops, collaboration and globalization
To further encourage collaborative innovation among clients, partners and local ISVs, IBM opened the IBM Solution Center last October. Nearly 100 workshops have been held at the center for the company's partners and clients since its inception, with an average of three to four per week, he added. IBM has also joined forces with the Hong Kong Productivity Council to set up the Open Source Software Center (OSSC).
As a technology partner for Hong Kong, IBM maintains its number one position in the local server, storage and services markets, Tong quoted various IDC and Gartner reports as saying. "This demonstrates our strong leadership in providing infrastructure solutions that help clients simplify their infrastructures and flexibly address changing business dynamics, such as SOA, information on demand, and open, modular systems," he said.
Another important development of IBM on a global level in the past year is the company's accelerated evolution into a globally integrated enterprise. Tong explained that the development leads to processes which are integrated horizontally and globally to enhance operational efficiency within the organization and services delivery for clients anywhere in the world. "For instance, many of our services are delivered from the global delivery centers in Shenzhen, Shanghai, Dalian, Chengdu and India, while our global procurement is headquartered in Shenzhen."
Successful implementations
In the previous year, IBM Hong Kong also helped clients successfully implement projects that continues to deliver high value. For instance, IBM successfully implemented an Enterprise Asset Management System (EAMS) for the MTR. The system enables the MTR to optimize operational effectiveness and improve asset utilization and performance, which is expected to result in increased value for the system's millions of customers.
IBM's communications and networking expertise is helping AEON Credit, one of Hong Kong's credit services companies, by rolling out a centralized Internet Protocol Contact Center (IPCC) and Internet Protocol Telephony (IPT) system. With more than 350 employees, AEON needed to upgrade its PBX solution to cope with its business growth and enhance its competitiveness in the marketplace. IBM proposed a centralized IPCC Enterprise/IPT solution that can be scaled to support up to 5,000 IPT users and up to 1,500 agents.
The road ahead
Year 2007 is an important milestone for IBM in Hong Kong, as the firm celebrated its 50th anniversary in April. "Our 50th anniversary not only demonstrates past and present IBMers' hard work and achievements, but also reflects Hong Kong clients' long-term partnerships with us, for we feel particularly grateful," said Tong.
In the coming year, Tong said that IBM Hong Kong foresees that enterprise clients will increasingly look for integrated infrastructure solutions that help simplify infrastructures and flexibly address changing business dynamics.
Thus Big Blue will focus on the following infrastructure initiatives that bring together IBM's software, hardware and services capabilities to deliver business value to clients:
SOA:
Tong said IBM takes a business-centric view of SOA. The company aims to help its clients establish an SOA goal first and then take an evolutionary approach to build an SOA. IBM's wide breadth of offerings including middleware, business consulting, IT services, research, and SOA-optimized hardware, he added.
Information on-demand
IBM will continue to help clients drive a host of key on-demand business initiatives such as information integration, business intelligence, business performance management, RFID, master data management, and regulatory compliance. According to Tong, IBM Hong Kong will achieve this by leveraging on its middleware, storage portfolios, consulting expertise, and implementation services.
Energy efficiency initiative:
It is a roadmap that IBM has developed to address the IT energy crisis. By following the roadmap, IBM expects to double the computing capacity of its data centers within existing space and double IT capacity through use of new technologies and detailed planning, including server virtualization.
Governance and risk management initiative:
IBM's approach to helping clients mitigate risk and enable effective IT governance is aimed at starting with a client's most strategic IT initiatives and providing improved business alignment, visibility and control throughout the IT lifecycle. IBM's focus is on improving business performance and resilience by helping to optimize service management, business continuity and security.
Business consulting and systems integration
As clients demand quick and flawless implementation of solutions, GBS focuses on developing different lines of services offerings that address such needs, said Tong. For example, a customer relationship management model specifically designed for local retailers and distributors and a supply chain management framework for manufacturers and distributors in Hong Kong and the mainland.
Tong added the firm will also leverage its Global Business Services (GBS) team to offer 'global delivery' for Hong Kong's MNCs which need help in managing and integrating their operations.
As GBS is at the forefront of IBM's strategy to help enterprises transform and innovate, IBM will continue to enhance employees' skillset including industry knowledge, solutions skills, complex project management, and issue management, said Tong. |
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IBM introduces governance and risk management technologies
IBM in mid-May unveiled new technologies and services to target the growing IT governance and risk management market, which AMR Research estimated will exceed US$30 billion by 2008.
"Successfully implementing IT governance and risk management as a lifecycle is critical as businesses today are facing increasing globalization, staggering regulatory complexity and an ever-evolving security threat landscape," said Alan Ganek, CTO of IBM Governance & Risk Management and IBM Tivoli Software.
The new governance and risk management capabilities that IBM introduced included:
* The Business of IT Dashboard: a suite of asset-based services designed to help clients assess their current strengths and weaknesses in critical areas of IT governance and risk management, and synchronize IT performance with the performance of the business;
*IT Lifecycle Management and Governance Services for Tivoli service desk: helping clients quickly and seamlessly deploy comprehensive service desk solutions that are designed to unify support processes, create a single point of contact for IT issues, make business reporting more accessible, and establish key performance indicators.
* The new Tivoli Business Service Manager software: enabling effective decision making by providing business and operations staff with real-time visibility into the health and performance of critical business services;
* The IBM Tivoli Security Operations Manager v4.1: a security event management platform that provides a real-time dashboard designed to help organizations keep their computer networks and systems up and running despite security threats from malicious outsiders, employees or contractors; and
* IBM Rational Portfolio Manager v.7.1: an enterprise project management solution that can be used by everyone including CIO, project managers, business analysts, and developers in an organization to balance IT investments and identify service priorities.
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MTR maximizes assets and business performance
MTR has successfully completed the first phase of its long-term enterprise asset management strategy and vision, thanks to IBM China/Hong Kong's Global Business Services (GBS) team.
Since January, MTR's new enterprise asset management system (EAMS) has been live and operational. MTR first engaged IBM in 2004 to consult on its EAM initiative. Following a series of rigorous reviews and assessments, IBM worked with the company to establish an EAM Solution Roadmap and completed a study which validated the foundation for the company's EAM best practice framework.
Rapid, effective implementation
The project implementation was jointly carried out by IBM Global Business Services who partnered with MTR to drive on time delivery of the project against plan, within budget and with minimal customization.
"Our user testing has yielded very positive results and the project was delivered on time and within budget. This is an outstanding achievement for a software project of this scale," said Andrew McCusker, operations director, MTR who led the EAMS initiative.
"IBM's well defined project management approach and commitment to quality execution played an important role in helping us deliver on our business objectives for service excellence and operational performance," he added.
Solution
Based on recommendations from IBM's consultancy study, MTR installed Oracle Enterprise Asset Management (eAM) for Maintenance Management; Purchasing & iProcurement Modules for Procurement Management; Inventory Management for Stores Management; and also completed an upgrade on Oracle Financials and Activity Based Management.
The system exceeds the requirements of the Publicly Available Specification 55-1 (PAS 55-1) standards developed by the British Standards Institution in conjunction with a broad group of industries relying on strong asset management systems to achieve business success.
As part of the consulting engagement, IBM provided 3,120 hours of training to MTR, staff to facilitate the implementation and will continue to offer support to help the company build skills internally to ensure its future success.
"IBM was able to offer us best-of-breed EAMS consulting and implementation services that leveraged their global expertise," said Daniel Lai, head of IT at MTR. "As a partner, IBM's commitment to quality and service excellence is first in class."
Gains to both MTR and customers
The EAMS actively manages assets such as railway equipment, infrastructure and networks - that often account for a large proportion of operational overhead - throughout their lifecycle to minimize their cost, maximize their worth, and reduce their risk to the business.
The new system will also enable MTR to optimize operational effectiveness and improve asset utilization and performance. According to the company, these benefits will be translated into more value for its millions of customers.
Next steps
MTR plans to continue to work with IBM to extend roll-out to other parts of the company, and to ensure compliance with PAS 55-1 standards for Asset Management for the new entity.
"MTR's EAMS vision, leadership and risk management framework serve as a best practice example for other organizations in Asia Pacific of how a lifecycle approach to asset management reduces and optimizes operating costs," said Gautam Bardoloi, partner, IBM Global Business Services. "We are pleased to be MTR's partner in driving business process innovation and look forward to continued collaboration."
Industry opportunities
From its traditional customer base of most of the top 100 firms in Hong Kong, Check Point is looking to broaden its reach with these firms by looking to provide more protection to these companies right down to the user device level.
In addition, there are key vertical sectors that Check Point hopes to gain more traction in for the coming year. Its strengths have been in finance and banking, manufacturing, trading, retail, some government and logistics verticals.
"This will continue but we hope to get more traction into the telecoms space which is an area we could do better in," admitted Chan. Government was another target market that the firm is aiming to get greater presence in.
Product diversity
In terms of the UTM-1 hardware product, the focus for Check Point is clearly the smaller firms it has now targeted and smaller firms which demand an integrated product as well as simplified deployment and management.
Chan noted that its channel partners are also working hard in adding more value to its customers by offering greater functionality on top of existing firewall offerings.
Again he stressed that Check Point is more than just a firewall provider. "Check Point is now a firm that is focused on data security from the network right down to the end point devices in the enterprise," Chan said.
He added the recent acquisitions have greatly enhanced the company's overall product lines and helped it deliver on client needs as they go through a process of consolidation, management and compliance.
All companies are going through each of these stages and face specific security issues and challenge. "As they go through each phase there are critical security issues that must be addressed and we feel Check Point is in a position to help firms rework their security architecture as they go through the management and organizational changes," said Chan.
The compliance issues aren't quite as immediate here in Asia as they are in US and Europe, he noted. "But firms will be impacted here in time and management of networks and devices are becoming a top priority as staff becomes more mobile and the network is extended beyond the company walls."
He summed up the company's mission by saying: "We will help try to simply the security management challenges and deliver lower TCO by providing integrated platforms and being more tightly aligned with businesses' compliance needs."
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