These types of volatile environments mean it’s imperative that companies have the infrastructure to support an agile business strategy driven by data utilization, digital efficiency, and speed.
For some companies in Japan, for example, revenues are dropping as a result of work reform and negative interest rates. Ryoichi Nomoto, Bloomberg’s Head of Enterprise Solutions Sales in the region, said these conditions call for a “dramatic reconstruction” of firms’ financial infrastructure.
Cloud solutions can deliver that level of change, but companies in Asia are embracing them to limited effect. At a recent event hosted by Bloomberg in Tokyo, featuring speakers from Amazon Web Services Japan K.K. (AWS) and PricewaterhouseCoopers Aarata LLC, only 25% of attendees expected to have 50% or more of their companies’ application suites running in the cloud by 2022.
Creating value
Despite the fragmentation, companies in APAC are no strangers to cloud technology: 65% of the attendees polled in Tokyo reported their firms are using some form of cloud. But “some” is not enough to take the benefits of the cloud beyond cost savings.
Kenski Asanmizu, manager at PricewaterhouseCoopers Aarata LLC, who spoke at the event, believes that realizing meaningful value requires three distinct, concurrent efforts:
These efforts must be supported by a strong governance and monitoring framework to succeed. Leadership also has to champion the changes and articulate the approach, or people won’t understand the direction of the company. In fact, only 25.6% of respondents could say that digital transformation is in progress at their firm and can be explained externally.
Kenski Asanmizu, manager at PricewaterhouseCoopers Aarata LLC
“You have to make things visible and appeal both to the internal and external people,” said Asanmizu.
Driving change
Even though they’re highly visible and well-promoted, transformations can fail without the right strategies and support.
In Tokyo, Bloomberg’s Head of APAC Service Delivery Herman Douglas discussed two harbingers of success for digital transformation and cloud migration efforts:
This translates to the work of technical account managers, developers, content specialists, implementation specialists, and highly trained support engineers. And in the fast-changing APAC landscape in particular, industry experience, local knowledge, and standing relationships make a huge difference in the long-term growth potential for a project.
Having a large group of regional engineers that work closely with account managers, for example, can accelerate the process of understanding the regional nuances of client’s data use and management strategies.
“With that momentum, things are so much easier. We’re able to grow in synergies and create much better innovation over time,” said Douglas.
Faster adoption
The importance of real-time data can’t be overemphasized. It’s the building block of smart innovation, and it’s how companies learn, adapt, and iterate toward successful digitalization of their businesses.
Cloud solutions support this kind of developer-first mindset – making it easy to spin up simulation environments, servers, or databases in seconds – without compromising stability or reliability. And the increasingly low latency, high reliability of cloud technologies is expanding use cases and applications.
“The number of our customers is increasing, and at the same time the scope of systems is expanding,” said Hirohito Hisamatsu, Business Development Manager at Amazon Web Services Japan K.K..“Companies started out putting in-house functions in the cloud, and are now moving out into systems that support the core business.”
For core-business systems that use market data, there’s no significant compromise for leveraging the cloud over on-premise systems.
Solutions like Bloomberg’s Zero Footprint BPIPE deployment also allow for real-time market data around the globe. Cory Albert, Global Head of Cloud Strategy for Bloomberg Enterprise Data, mentioned that the level of agility has front office leaders increasingly considering the cloud for mission critical applications.
Rearchitecting a company’s infrastructure is necessary to reach that kind of digital efficiency and speed, but it will benefit APAC companies in the long run. As these corporations work to construct their own responses to changing markets, cloud transformations can support new strategies that help them remain competitive for the long run.