Digitalization to boost growth in PHL, Southeast Asia

THE rapid growth of digitalization in the Philippines and the rest of Southeast Asia will lead to higher economic growth as disruptions lead to drastic changes in their respective economies

In a recent online briefing, Wade Cruse, managing partner for Southeast Asia of Bain and Company, told reporters that companies are leading in introducing changes on how they transact business with their customers. For instance, he said financial technology companies (fintech) are launching several products based on digital technology. In the Philippines, Gcash and Maya are providing services and products that bring convenience to Filipino customers.

“That’s certainly true for new companies that are there to make the disruption happen and take advantage of it. That’s very good for consumers,” Cruse said.

He said the boom of digital technology in the Philippines will attract new investments to the Philippines.

Moreover, Cruse said Covid-19 accelerated digitalization as people in the Philippines and the rest of Southeast Asia engaged in e-commerce activities. “There’s a lot of innovation, there’s a lot of opportunity, because the market is still developing. So our expectation is that Southeast Asia will lead APAC in growth in the next five to 10 years,” he said.

On the local front, Radenta Technologies along with Microsoft Azure recently rolled out its most comprehensive, efficient and cost-effective cloud computing service for all enterprise-level organizations.

According to Michelle Lasam, Radenta’s Microsoft line of business manager, urged business organizations that want to migrate to the cloud to start with pilot projects that align with the common benefits of cloud migration.

To start, Lasam recommended five different ways to utilize Microsoft Azure. She said companies start looking at end-of-support technologies. “This can be an excellent place to start your cloud migration updates, if you have a workload that runs on a product nearing its endof-support,” she said.

Lasam reminded organizations to also identify the applications when the contract of the datacenter will expire. It would be a good starting point for cloud migration.

She said non-mission applications that have few dependencies are also places that can be a starting point. Microsoft Azure’s tools and services that support the assessment and migration will issue the steps toward cloud migration journey, including a cloud migration checklist.

She said the Azure Virtual Desktop can help cloud migration as it combines the scale, security and cost benefits of Azure and Microsoft 365 for a secure remote desktop from virtually anywhere.

Meanwhile, the Azure Virtual Machines or Azure Virtual Devtest Labs provide on-demand and scalable computing resources with usagebased pricing. It helps you achieve efficiency and save cost when you run your dev/test environment.

Digital transformation is possible, that’s what we learned in the last two years. We experienced digital growth worth 10 years packed in those years that we had to be isolated from each other. We should continue embracing cloud technology, maybe not as fast but at a steady pace not just for productivity and efficiency but also for a smarter and greener community.